It's like "psychological warfare".
It begins slowly and subtly – not always in sight, but never out of mind.
"Police deal with evidence – coercive control isn't evidence-based, it's emotion-based," Michelle* says quietly.
"You've got nothing to show except what's happening inside and how things make you feel."
For more than a decade, Michelle* (not her real name) has been subject to the insidious form of abuse, defined as a pattern of behaviour that can include isolation, intimidation, sexual coercion and cyberstalking.
In the wake of the horrific deaths of Hannah Clarke and her three children in 2020 – a catalysing moment that sent shock waves across the nation – Queensland parliament passed laws that will see it become a criminal offence from next year.
But while it's been hailed as a victory, some survivors have questioned whether police are equipped to respond to a problem that can be difficult to identify in the first place.
"Over the last few years I have witnessed the good, the bad and the ugly of the police and the judicial system," Michelle says.
"When I first made an initial complaint, I'd given them my evidence and the police said 'there's no threat here, there's nothing we can do'."
'They just didn't want to go there'
A scathing commission of inquiry 16 months ago found shortfalls in the Queensland Police Service, including evidence of a racist and sexist culture that inhibited the policing of domestic violence.
For Michelle, who says her ex-husband would threaten her, monitor her movements through her phone, and isolate her from her family and friends, the abuse was difficult to quantify.
"When our youngest child was born, he threatened me that if I ever left, he would make sure that I had nothing and I'd never see our children again," she says.
"For ten years that played on my mind constantly.
"He would favour one child over the other and would play manipulation games between us."
Carrying a maximum penalty of 14 years in jail, Queensland's new laws will criminalise controlling and coercive behaviour in a relationship that occurs more than once and is harmful to another person.
But policing and prosecuting it will face the same hurdles as existing domestic violence laws, with the added challenge of trying to identify behaviours that often fly under the radar.
"I would keep going down to the police, and I would keep presenting them with evidence … text messages or emails or voicemails and they didn't know how to deal with it," Michelle says.
"If I became heightened because it made me feel quite anxious or scared, it made it even worse to get my point across because they just didn't want to go there.
"I put it down to the fact it's not that they didn't want to help, it's that they didn't want to deal with your emotional state, and that's the big thing about coercive control."
Nature of offending is 'escalating'
Queensland police dealt with a record 171,806 domestic violence call outs in 2022-23 – and this year it is already on track to be worse.
Between June 2023 and March 2024 alone, more than 144,319 incidents were recorded.
To understand the extent of the problem, the ABC spent time with a specialist unit in Logan that deals with high-risk domestic violence cases.
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"Definitely the nature of the offending, we feel, is escalating," says Sergeant Lisa Hillary.
"Tech abuse, that's a big thing now … there's more surveillance, that's something that has been on the increase."
The Domestic and Family Violence and Vulnerable Persons Unit at Beenleigh police station consists of police officers, detectives, an intelligence officer, a high-risk team and community service groups.
Sergeant Hillary leads the engagement and support team, where officers deal with between 80 to 100 high risk cases at any one time.
With almost two decades experience under her belt, she "can't remember any week of policing" where she hasn't been to a domestic violence situation.
"We're central to really feeding a lot of information in and out and it just depends on how we develop that relationship with our victim-survivors," she says.
"In a sense that's what we try to do every day, is achieve that rapport so we can assist them."
A 'holistic' approach
Queensland police will be rolling out updated coercive control training this year to prepare for the laws coming into effect, with 18,000 staff already undertaking training in the past few years.
Assistant Commissioner for the Domestic and Family Violence and Vulnerable persons command, Christopher Jory, says it will cover the nuances of coercive control.
"We'll see that rolled out to our first responders so our general duties police who respond on a daily basis, and then also specialist investigators, district duty officers and teams across the state," he says.
"We will make sure that police responding to domestic and family violence incidents are looking at each incident from a holistic lens rather than an individual incident-based response."
While unable to detail all of the methods police will use to identify perpetrators, Assistant Commissioner Jory says they will "rely very heavily on what an aggrieved in those situations would have to share with us".
"Often family and friends are aware of what's happening in relationships and we would be seeking the assistance of those witnesses as well," he says.
"There's other means of gathering evidence — I want to be careful though that I'm not pre-arming those who may commit domestic and family violence, so I don't really want to go into methodology."
Since the 2022 review into Queensland's police culture, 28 of 59 recommendations have been implemented.
Acting Police Commissioner Steve Gollschewski says the service is on the path to reform, acknowledging mistakes have been made.
"We know that many of our police do a fantastic job every day and that should be celebrated," he says.
"But we also know that sometimes when we get it wrong there can be catastrophic outcomes."
For Michelle, who continues to carry the trauma of coercive control, she hopes the reforms will help police better identify the signs.
"How it happened to me is going to be completely different to how it happened to someone else," she says.
"But the underlying intimidation, isolation, control, power all remains the same."
*Name changed for privacy reasons.
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