Family courts are failing to recognise intimate image abuse as coercive control, research finds

The family justice system is systematically misrecognising intimate image abuse within coercively controlling relationships, new research warns.

Research by Dr Charlotte Bishop shows that family courts often treat intimate images as neutral pieces of evidence, rather than recognising their use as a form of abuse in itself.

Reforms are needed to improve safety for domestic abuse victims and their children and prevent intimate images being used in ways that retraumatise victims, distort credibility assessments, and enable further coercive control through the legal process itself.

Change is needed to better align legal decision-making with the lived reality of coercive control, particularly in how courts assess and interpret intimate images.

The existence and intended use of intimate images should be treated as part of the abuse itself, as direct evidence of coercive control.

The research explains that problems arise because the family justice system treats coercive control and sexual abuse as competing “types” of domestic abuse. Instead, Dr Bishop argues that coercive control should be understood as the framework through which different abusive tactics – including sexual violence and intimate image abuse – are carried out.

Intimate images are currently treated as items of evidence, even though their creation, retention, or use in court may itself constitute intimate image abuse, including where images were originally created consensually.

Dr Bishop recommends courts should consider whether the image was created or shared consensually, or under conditions of surveillance, threat, or coercion; whether its existence reflects a pattern of coercive control, and whether its submission in court forms part of a continued effort to coercively control or discredit the victim.

Her analysis shows how the fragmented definition of abuse under the Domestic Abuse Act 2021 and a continuing reliance on incident-based analysis obscure the strategic, cumulative nature of coercive control and its impact on victims and children.

The 2022 case of Re M marked the first attempt to regulate the evidential use of intimate images in private family law proceedings and is now a key authority on the procedural handling of intimate images in child arrangements proceedings. Dr Bishop says these guidelines risk reinforcing legal misunderstandings of coercive control and intimate image abuse because they do not adequately address its potential use as a strategy of coercive control. This is due to the systemic limitations in the family justice system’s response to domestic abuse.

While welcoming the guidance in Re M as an important procedural step, the research warns that it risks reinforcing deeper misunderstandings of coercive control. By treating intimate images as an evidential management issue, the judgment fails to engage with how such material can be used strategically to silence, discredit, or control victims during and after separation, or with how sexual abuse may operate as a core mechanism of coercive control.

Dr Bishop outlines how the existence of intimate images may inadvertently deter victims from leaving unsafe relationships or disclosing abuse during child arrangements proceedings, particularly where such images could damage their reputation or credibility in court.

Dr Bishop said: “Legal frameworks must move away from treating intimate image abuse as confined to the relationship’s timeline or as a self-contained evidentiary issue. Instead, courts should assess how such images function strategically over time, as instruments of domination capable of shaping behaviour, manipulating testimony, and undermining participation in justice processes.

“Intimate image abuse – in all its forms – must be recognised as both a form of sexual abuse and as a core strategy of coercive control.”

The research recommends that judges, solicitors, Cafcass officers, and mediators should have to complete mandatory training about patterns of coercive control, gendered assumptions about consent and credibility; the dynamics and harms of chronic sexual violation and image-based abuse and how trauma affects memory and presentation in court. Victims must also be supported to recognise intimate image abuse as domestic abuse.

Victims and litigants-in-person involved in family proceedings also need accessible guidance on how to safely disclose domestic abuse, especially where it is perpetrated through the abuse of intimate images.

Dr Bishop said: “Only with these reforms can the courts engage meaningfully with the substantive harms of intimate image abuse and its strategic role within domestic abuse, delivering safer and fairer outcomes and ensuring meaningful access to justice for those who have experienced abuse.”