In Control: Dangerous relationships and how they end in murder By Jane Monckton Smith - Review

Drawing on a memory of one of her first weeks on parole duty, Jane Monckton Smith remembers asking her sergeant Why won’t she get in the ambulance? after a woman who had been hit with the hammer by her partner would not allow the police to take her to the hospital. Since then, Monckton has worked as a policewoman, a professor of public protection, and studied intimate homicide in depth, she sees coercive control, and the relationships and consequences it creates, as a pattern “So, instead of asking why won’t she get in the ambulance? I would instead ask why was it in her best interests to not get in the ambulance?”

In Control explores this pattern, and explains the possible and real-life answers to the questions that surround domestic homicide: Why didn’t she just leave?... If it was that bad surely, she’d have gone?... Didn’t she care about her children?... Why wouldn’t she support a prosecution? All variations of the ambulance question. Using “medical records, investigation files, diaries, text messages, social media, letters from killers…telephone recordings of the voices of deceased women (and) CCTV footage of killers before and after their crimes” Monckton Smith uses her own painstakingly researched and evidential 8 Stages of Domestic Homicide Timeline to help a reader understand coercive control in relationships.

This timeline is a consistent pattern: 1) A history of control or stalking 2) A commitment whirlwind in the early relationship 3) Relationship dominated by control 4) Trigger event to challenge control 5) Escalation of control 6) A change of focus 7) Planning a homicide 8) Homicide and/or suicide. Monckton tells the stories of the victims and the perpetrators of coercive control through all stages of the timeline and uses it as a way to bring in conversations with families, victims, and killers. She painstakingly recounts and explores these stories as part of a pattern, and an epidemic of femicide, rather than isolated events. As she told in an interview in the Guardian “‘Domestic abuse isn't a row. It's when one person has become a threat to another.”

She also examines a society that allows, in many subtle ways, this violence to continue. “The ways we justify homicide, in particular, can encourage rather than deter” – we allow killers or people with convictions to walk free, we victim blame, we disbelieve women, and we minimize violence to a result of bad fights, or a ‘crime of passion’ bought on by an affair. All of these are untrue and dissected by Monckton.

Her book arms a reader with informative material on and information to understand, coercive behaviour and domestic homicide through a legal, sociological, and psychological perspective, and equally as importantly, sympathy and human understanding of experiencing the events on the timeline.

This book, accounts from families, friends, and victims, and the work they do with various organizations and charities encourage this misunderstood crime to not be bound up with its false and stereotyped associations. It arms a reader to be able to answer the ambulance question for themselves and develop a sympathy and understanding – as well as cautionary knowledge – of coercive control and abusive relationships.