When Consent Is a Lie: The Hidden Rape of Coercive Control

He was hunting where I was healing – at an AA recovery event, a veritable predator buffet. With the help of a little minion who knew me, he put a plan in motion: charm, mirror, over-disclose, locate my soft spots, normalize boundary-tests, then accelerate. Warmth and humility in public; escalating demands, derision, and isolation in private. He praised my recovery while he harvested it. He used his profession to breach my personal space, his flattery to disarm me, his “vulnerability” to catalogue my wounds. By the time sex, my money, and marriage arrived, the groundwork had already been laid.

Consent manipulated or manufactured by force is not consent. Consent is not a word said in a moment. Consent is a condition – the product of freedom: freedom of mind, freedom from fear, freedom from deception and constant pressure. When a partner engineers your reality – gaslighting, shaming, isolating, monetarily extracting, weaponizing your empathy, and deregulating your nervous system – they have not created a field in which you can freely say yes. They have manufactured a prison in which refusal is dulled, doubt is enforced, and compliance becomes survival.

This is not poetic hyperbole.

The rape of coercive control is not only of body — it is the theft of will, the occupation of mind.

Coercive control – the steady pattern of behaviours meant to dominate, isolate, frighten, and deprive someone of autonomy – is increasingly recognized by researchers and some legal systems as distinct and devastating. When sex is the payoff at the end of a long campaign of manipulation, treating those sexual acts as “consensual” is an analytical failure and a moral outrage.

Why This Matters for Sexual Violence

The cultural and legal imagination still often pictures rape as a single, violent physical attack. But sexual violence inside intimate relationships is frequently contextual: it is the product of strategies and patterns that destroy autonomy long before a specific sexual act occurs. Sexual acts that happen inside a system of control are not merely “sex between consenting adults” – they are the logical outcome of coercion. Someone who has systematically broken down your autonomy cannot plausibly be said to have earned informed, enthusiastic consent.

Legal Reform: Law Is Starting to Catch Up

Some jurisdictions are making progress, but enforcement lags.

New South Wales: The Crimes Legislation Amendment (Coercive Control) Act 2022 criminalises coercive control in intimate relationships. Since its start on 1 July 2024, only nine charges have been laid from 297 reports, with one conviction resulting in a non-custodial sentence.

Queensland: “Hannah’s Law” (2024) criminalises coercive control with a maximum penalty of 14 years. Reforms also touch domestic violence protection, evidence collection, and bail.

The gap between legislation and real-world enforcement shows how far we have to go.

What Must Change: Law, Education, Practice

• Legal Reform: Explicit recognition that consent can be vitiated by coercive control; statutes that treat long-term coercive patterns as standalone or aggravating offences.

• Training and Practice: Mandatory trauma-informed training for police, prosecutors, judges, and medical professionals; pattern evidence collection, witness statements, and trauma-informed interviews.

• Education Overhaul: Consent curricula must teach power, manipulation, grooming, nervous-system responses, shame, trauma bonds, and the ways these dynamics vitiate real choice. “No means no” alone will not protect those whose “yes” was manufactured.

• Survivor Supports: Public-health approaches, workplace policies, economic protections, and civil remedies to help survivors leave without financial ruin.

A Wider, Darker Pattern; Who Builds the Laws That Hurt Us?

Systemic power concentrated in minds addicted to control produces structural abuse. Institutions, policy, and culture shaped by manipulators naturally preserve levers of control. Economic, legal, and social precarity is baked into systems—abuse is maintained. Reform must be technical and political. It must be spiritual.

Women are rising. Leaving. Refusing. Exposing predators who depend on pity, performance, and reputation. That rising is moral, spiritual, and social reclamation. Call it Magdalene energy. Call it justice. Whatever the words, it is long overdue.

A Final Personal Truth

No sympathy for the devil. I will not apologize for telling the truth I lived. My marriage was the engineered endpoint of a strategy built to harvest my trust, body, money, and ministry. The sexual life that flowed from that strategy was not consensual in any meaningful sense.

If we refuse to see coercive control for what it is—criminal, sexual, spiritual violence—we will continue producing survivors who spend years translating slow coercion into shame, doubt, and silence when they finally name the abuse. That must stop. Now.

TL;DR: Coercive Control and the Illusion of Consent

In relationships marked by manipulation and coercive control, genuine consent is impossible. Laws and culture often fail to recognise it. Women are rising, exposing predators, and demanding reform. Personal experience shows how charm, deceit, and emotional abuse engineer compliance; none of it is true consent.

#CoerciveControl #ConsentMatters #EndDomesticViolence #SurvivorVoices #LegalReform #SexualAutonomy #MagdaleneRising #CriminalJusticeReform