Coercive Control and Self-Defense: When Abused Women Kill Their Abusers

Korea has yet to begin legally adopting the concept of coercive control, which poses a significant obstacle to the advancement of legal discourse on domestic violence. Carefully examining the trial and error experienced in England, Wales, and Scotland, and introducing the offense of coercive control into our legal system in a stable manner, is an urgent task not only for addressing the issue of abused women killing their husbands, but also for protecting domestic violence victims more broadly. Against this backdrop, this paper seeks to introduce how normative assessments of abused wives’ killings of abusive husbands are evolving in the UK, focusing on the concept of coercive control, and to explore ways to incorporate these developments harmoniously into the Korean criminal law system. In the UK, coercive control is legally defined as a form of domestic violence and is punishable as a criminal offense. Nevertheless, there has not yet been a case in which an abused woman who killed her abuser has been acquitted on grounds of self-defense. Rather, where coercive control victimization is acknowledged, it is treated as a statutory mitigating factor that reduces murder to manslaughter. In response, the academic community and women’s rights movements have increasingly argued that such cases should be recognized as self-defense. Viewed in this light, the situation may seem similar to that of Korea, where such matters are resolved primarily through sentencing mitigation. However, the Korean legal system’s failure to adopt the concept of coercive control means that situations which would be recognized as serious abuse in the UK or Australia may be misinterpreted as non-abusive. This is because the very definition of domestic violence (abuse) changes qualitatively depending on whether the coercive control paradigm is adopted. Thus, the legal adoption of the coercive control paradigm is necessary. However, because the concept has been developed in common law jurisdictions such as the UK, Australia, the United States, and Canada, there may be concerns about conflicts with Korea’s civil law tradition. Accordingly, an important task will be to harmoniously incorporate the coercive control paradigm—developed in common law jurisdictions—into Korean criminal law system. Addressing the issue in full breadth would be too vast for the present work, so this paper narrows its focus to the problem of abused women’s killings of abusive husbands and the legal doctrine of self-defense. In this regard, the paper revisits the 2016 work of Lee Yong-sik, who explored the possibility of recognizing such killings as self-defense by reinterpreting domestic violence through the lens of the concept of a continuing offense, and examines it in relation to coercive control theory to seek a breakthrough. Augmented by the coercive control paradigm, Lee’s continuing offense framework could be advanced with a stronger theoretical foundation, and could serve as an important doctrinal bridge in the process of integrating the concept of coercive control into the Korean legal system—not only in relation to the issue of abused women’s killings of abusive husbands, but also more broadly.