Technology-Facilitated Coercive Control and the Continuum of Gender-Based Violence

Domestic violence law has historically been organised around the discrete incident. Evan Stark's theory of coercive control and Liz Kelly's continuum of sexual violence together displaced this model, showing that the harm of intimate-partner abuse lies less in any single act than in a cumulative pattern of domination, isolation, surveillance, and restriction of autonomy. Digital technology has since become a principal instrument through which that pattern is sustained, allowing partners and ex-partners to monitor location, finances, and communication long after physical proximity and even physical separation would once have ended the abuse. This paper argues that legal systems continue to conceptualise technologically facilitated abuse through the vocabulary of isolated offences a captured image, a threatening message, an act of impersonation – even where the technology sustains a continuing relationship of control. Examining India's constitutional, criminal, cyber, and domestic violence statutes alongside the United Kingdom's offence of controlling or coercive behaviour and the international standards set by CEDAW, UN Women, and the Council of Europe's 2026 Recommendation on technology-facilitated violence, the paper contends that the deeper legal problem is not the absence of law but its fragmentation: one continuing experience of digital coercive control is split across criminal law, cyber law, and family law, forcing survivors to translate a single relationship of domination into several unconnected legal claims.