Warning: This article contains sensitive and potentially distressing discussion (including examples) of emotional abuse and domestic violence.

In 2013, the Home Office defined “domestic abuse” as “any incident or pattern of incidents of controlling, coercive, threatening behaviour, violence or abuse between those aged 16 or over who are, or have been, intimate partners or family members regardless of gender or sexuality. The abuse can encompass, but is not limited to: psychological, physical, sexual, financial and emotional.”

Despite this recognition of emotional abuse as a form of domestic abuse, it is not covered under domestic violence law. Now Theresa May is proposing a change in the law, a major step forward for victims of emotional abuse who are frightened to report their experiences or cannot obtain legal support. In ‘Legislating private relationships’, Nick Mutch argues, “This law is a way for the government to appear that it has victims’ best interests on side while continuing to deprive them of things that genuinely could help them improve their lives.” But he completely fails to grasp the true extent of the damage that emotional abuse can cause. This new law would be a significant step forward in protecting and empowering victims. Home Office statistics show that two women are killed every week in England and Wales through domestic abuse. Domestic violence often stems from, and goes hand in hand with, emotional abuse, which many victims – male and female – do not even recognise at the time. Emotional abuse can include destructive criticism, lying, humiliation, isolating someone from friends or family, monitoring their phone calls/emails/texts/letters, controlling their finances, stealing from them, withholding basic necessities, not allowing them to work or sabotaging their job, blaming and shaming, threats, and intimidation. The impact of emotional abuse can be even more devastating than physical assault, and can have much longer term effects.

Take this case study for example: one woman at a refuge in Bolton had a husband who would not allow her to have her hair cut and would monitor her whenever she left the house. If he felt she had been somewhere other than where he had approved, he would constantly question her during all hours of the night, preventing her from sleeping before work the next day. He tried to isolate her from her children, which caused constant arguments, in the course of which he would become violent. Until the physical abuse started, this woman had seen her husband’s controlling behaviour as “normal and acceptable”. She had only ever been in a relationship with him and so had nothing to compare it with.

Another woman at the refuge had escaped a partner who had not allowed her to nurture her severely autistic seven year old son. She was never allowed to show love to him, which she said was “breaking her heart”. In the refuge, she finally began to get to know her son, saying, “He makes me smile all the time.” Both these examples show the very real and extreme impact of emotional abuse. It’s rather difficult, then, to take Mutch seriously when he suggests that the occasional minor row such as the one he had with his then girlfriend could be classed as emotional abuse. In doing so he diminishes the real and frightening experiences of emotional abuse survivors.

According to the Home Office, types of behaviour that could be covered by the new law include threatening a partner with violence, cutting them off from friends or family or refusing them access to money in order to limit their freedom. (Under the current law, nonviolent coercive/controlling behaviour is covered by stalking and harassment legislation, but it does not apply to intimate relationships.) This type of behaviour far exceeds the occasional minor row Mutch describes. Mutch’s comparison of legislation designed to protect people from these forms of abuse with “the criminalization of homosexuality, or extraordinarily harsh penalties for women who commit adultery” is bizarre at best, and rather sinister at worst. Mutch also claims that, because emotional abuse is “virtually impossible to prove”, criminalising it would “lower public respect for the Justice system.” By that logic, surely we should also legalise rape, given the sub-10% attrition rate in the UK? He should also remember that anti-domestic violence law gives survivors of emotional abuse access to legal protections, even when it doesn’t result in a conviction.

Moreover, there are numerous things that we can do to help raise conviction rates, such as giving domestic abuse survivors the emotional and psychological support that they need or fighting victim-blaming tropes. Even without these other factors, a potentially low conviction rate is not an argument for keeping abuse legal. Another of Mutch’s claims deserving redress is his suggestion that, because the law could be abused, it would not be valuable. Perpetuating myths that false claims are rife or that people accused of abuse are automatically hung out to dry by the legal system is extremely damaging and not true. Mutch’s assertion that the new law “would become a tool in the abuser’s arsenal of psychological control and torment” goes against the judgement of experts who have worked with victims of emotional and physical abuse for years. This proposed law is heavily backed by numerous anti-domestic violence charities. Polly Neate, Chief Executive of Women’s Aid, said that treating emotional abuse as a crime could give victims greater confidence to speak out sooner as well as potentially boosting the conviction rate.

Neate said, “Prosecutions and convictions as a proportion of recorded domestic crime are falling. And over the last four years over 10,000 perpetrators of domestic violence have been handed only community resolutions, with many simply being asked to apologise to their victim.”

The justice system is currently heavily skewed in favour of abusers; thousands of victims suffer in silence each year. It is extraordinary that emotional abuse, a form of domestic abuse that frequently goes hand in hand with violence, has not yet been criminalised. Theresa May is right: it’s time to give victims the long-overdue legal protection and empowerment that they deserve. It’s a small start, but a start all the same.

“I knew this shit was coming, but tonight? Really?” So begins Eminem’s live-on-stage Ice Bucket Challenge during a concert in Detroit. After some more joking and screaming from 45,000 fans, hype man Mr. Porter adds, almost as an afterthought, “Listen, before we do it, you can go to alsa.org to find out more about what we’re doing.” This prompts only a muted reaction from a crowd clearly waiting to see Eminem covered in ice on stage. Rihanna then comes on stage with the ice, eliciting a much noisier response from the screaming fans.

Meanwhile, South Carolina’s Governor, Nikki Haley, starts her video with, “Stephen, along with some other amazing people, comes to visit me at the State House every year to talk about this terrible disease, but today is a great day in South Carolina for an ice bucket challenge”. That’s right Nikki, you have really got the importance of the challenge encapsulated there. It is a great day for throwing ice on your head, and having your kids do it to remind us of how important your family is to you, as a politician, in the months before your next election.

What do these two videos have in common here besides a desire to appeal to their fans? Nikki Haley manages to use 10 seconds of her 90-second video to remind viewers of the purpose the challenge, which at first glance does not sound particularly long. But, when compared to the 6 seconds Eminem devotes in his 80-second video, the 6 seconds George Bush includes in his video, and the complete lack of reference to ALS at all in videos by Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga, it seems like Haley has done quite a good job. Perhaps the worst example of this neglect of ALS itself in the ice bucket challenge comes unsurprisingly from the Daily Mail, which described Poppy Delevigne’s ice bucket challenge as follows: “Poppy Delevingne shows off washboard abs in green bandeau bikini as she performs ALS ice bucket challenge.” It also used the same article as an opportunity to promote the sales of the same bikini to women across Britain in its super-useful ‘Now get one like it for less’ section.

The Ice Bucket Challenge has its beneficial effects, of course. The ALS Association in the USA has, over the course of the past month, raised more than double what it raised in all of the previous year. Awareness of the illness has no doubt increased, but I suspect that many people who have been exposed to it on Facebook and Youtube could still not say what ALS actually stands for (Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), let alone begin to comprehend its symptoms and devastating effects on those who suffer from it and their family and friends.

The Ice Bucket Challenge is not the kind of thing I would typically take umbrage with, certainly not to the extent of writing against it. Like most people, I would see it as just the latest social media craze, albeit for a better cause than usual. However, for me, neurodegenerative disease is not an abstract concept on the internet, but a living reality, having watched the body, and then mind, of my grandmother be ravaged by a similar disease, Multiple Sclerosis (MS), for the first 17 years of my life. It makes me sad and angry to see ALS trivialised in this way. Neurodegenerative diseases are not pleasant in any way; they are the opposite, leaving many of those they affect in a living hell where they gradually lose all motor skills and much cognitive function – unable to walk, and confined to a bed in a hospice or care home, they lose the ability to speak, hear, use their limbs, swallow, and even breathe. The median survival time from ALS diagnosis is 39 months. The daily experience and life of those who have these diseases, and the people around them, is a far cry from videos of people smiling with ice on their heads and a wet t-shirt. It is a cruel yet inescapable fact that the challenge involves completing an action which is physically impossible for many with the disease: raising a bucket over your head and tipping it over yourself.

I am not accusing anyone who has participated in the challenge of bad intentions, and I am sure that they too care about raising awareness and money to fight against it. But this is the precise problem: while the people who participate have mainly done so for good reasons (and with good effects), the overall phenomenon is incredibly trivialising. Because we have now reached an era previously thought impossible – an era where a deadly, horrific disease that leaves very little hope of survival for those it afflicts is portrayed in social media merely as something that can be used for likes, shares and comments, screams from fans at a rap concert, and votes in South Carolinian gubernatorial elections. It is telling the world that ALS is something to be considered briefly with a modicum of solemnity after an oh-so-funny-and-original twist on the theme of throwing ice over your head, and then forgotten as just another post on your wall on Facebook. It also bears a striking similarity with the neknominate in both its form (do something, video it, and then nominate 3 friends to do it within 24 hours) and medium (predominantly social media).

Don’t even get me started on the turf war that has erupted in the UK over which charity will be the beneficiary of British donations, pitting Macmillan Cancer Care against the Motor Neurone Disease Association. William Foxton in The Telegraph summarises it brilliantly: “When I put my money into one of their tins, I expect it to be spent on cancer research, not pushing another charity down the search engine rankings.” There are also concerns in the charities community about the Challenge crowding out other charitable donations that would otherwise have gone to equally-deserving and needy organisations.

Let’s be honest, the focus of the ice-bucket challenge has never really been on ALS. The challenge itself wasn’t even about ALS originally, it was just another viral phenomenon in the vein of neknominate. Indeed, for many people, as we have seen, it is rather a method of self-promotion for B-list celebrities and former Presidents trying to stay relevant.

Some time ago, I was planning to have lunch with an ex-girlfriend. My then-girlfriend found out about this, got upset and tried to stop me going. I told her that she was being childish and to stop being stupid. We had a minor row. Then we got over it, forgot about it and moved on like adults. I’m sure anyone who has ever been in an intimate relationship can recognize an incident like the above.

Under Theresa May’s recent proposals to extend domestic violence to emotional abuse that is ‘cruel and controlling’ or ‘humiliating’, minor rows like that could become a criminal offense. Specifically, May mentioned attempting to prevent people from maintaining relationships with friends and family. In the situation I mention above, my language could easily have been construed as humiliating and cruel. Under no circumstances would either of us have considered this to have been an example of genuine abuse, and the idea that we, or couples like us should be criminally culpable for behaviour that is at worst immature is ridiculous, yet it could be construed as abuse punishable by law under these proposals.

It is easy to charge that I am being facetious. This law is not intended to criminalize petty rows, rather ongoing, serious cases of abuse that cause long term damage to people’s lives. But the test of good law is not just whether it would help solve a social ill, but whether it would be able to be easily definable, easily enforceable and be difficult to abuse. In all three categories, proposals to criminalize emotional abuse fail this definition.

There will be no way to craft a law against emotional abuse without it being broad enough to catch almost every intimate relationship, because human interactions are so complex and so dependent on context that what is genuinely abusive and hurtful in one context is a minor act of pettiness in another. If emotional cruelty or humiliation is made illegal, insulting someone’s appearance, such as telling them they look overweight or bad in particular clothing, cheating on a partner, shouting at someone or could be construed as criminal acts. These are of course, cruel acts that we should discourage as part of a healthy relationship. But relationships are where people demonstrate their best and their worst attributes, and every relationship in the world will include, however small, actions from both partners that are simply immoral or unkind actions. But this does not make these relationships by definition abusive; not does it mean that the state should have the sanction to decide which relationships are abusive and which are not.

Before allowing the state to interfere in our intimate relationships, we should look at the history of the state determining what is moral or not in our private lives. In it we see some of the most shameful and oppressive legislation in our history such the criminalization of homosexuality, or extraordinarily harsh penalties for women who commit adultery.

This leads to another major problem with the proposals, which is their terrifying potential for abuse. The exact kind of person who is emotionally abusive in relationships is going to be the exact kind of person who will abuse these laws for their own ends. Most emotionally abusive partners themselves either think or pretend they are the victims of emotional abuse. Think of what an abusive partner could do, if they had the ability to use the threat of prosecution against their partner for their own ‘suffering.’ One common tactic that abusers will use is to convince the person they are abusing that THEY are the one who is crazy, who is at fault, who is screwing the kids up, who makes the relationship a living hell. Now imagine if they had the ability, as many charming psychopaths do, to construct a case for themselves being abused that was on the face of it compelling, even though it was based on nothing but air? This law would become a tool in the abusers arsenal of psychological control and torment.

Similarly, it gives anyone who is upset at the breakdown of a relationship a way to get revenge on a partner by making a complaint of emotional abuse. These complaints may not even be malicious, as the distress caused by the breakdown of a relationship could make people believe that someone genuinely has been abusive. That does not mean they will not be incredibly damaging all the same. And while the law is intended primarily to protect women, all genders will be able to exploit this to their own ends.

Because ultimately, the biggest problem with this law is that it will be virtually impossible to prove. Police will (and should be) obliged to investigate any allegation of domestic abuse, and by its very nature, in the vast majority of cases it will come down to a single persons word against another’s, unless we go down the extremely morally dubious route of requiring children to testify against their own parents. This means that either there will be a vanishingly small number of convictions, which lowers public respect for the Justice system, or the burden of proof will have to be lowered making a worrying potential for miscarriages of justice and abuse of judicial process.

If you support these proposals, you must be prepared to look people in the eye and say, “I support the state being able to come into my personal intimate relationships and decide what is right and what is wrong.” This is a time when resources that those who are abused genuinely need – such as funding for women’s refuge, mental health support and legal aid – are being viciously cut. As such, this law is a way for the government to appear that it has victims best interests on side while continuing to deprive them of things that genuinely could help them improve their lives.

RIGHT TO REPLY:Would you like to respond to this piece? Email [email protected]