Associate Professor Carrie Leonetti
speaker
49 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 14 Jul
Associate Professor Carrie Leonetti’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
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I have mixed feelings about this.
In and of itself, it's probably a good policy, but it does sit in a really odd context.
Because Aotearoa New Zealand, unlike a lot of other countries, has never criminalized coercive control.
We don't have a coercive control offense in our Crimes Act.
So as far as I can tell, they're criminalizing coercive controlling animal abuse, but not criminalizing any other form of coercive control.
So, you know, I'm not sure if this is motivated from an animal welfare place, but it seems odd to me to have such a narrow coercive control offense.
Our Family Violence Act authorizes the issuance of protection orders in the context of all kinds of coercive control, but we don't have a crime of coercive control like, say, for example, the UK or a lot of Australian states do.
It would fit into the Family Violence Act.
I mean, if someone were the victim of any coercive controlling behavior, including a threat to harm an animal, you could get a protection order.
But that's not a crime.
No form of coercive control is a crime in and of itself in New Zealand.
So this, as I understand it, would create a crime of coercive controlling animal abuse.
or really it's coercive control involving a threat to an animal, a companion animal.
It would make sense if we had a coercive control offense and there were data that suggested that animal abuse wasn't being recognized to expand or make more explicit our definition of coercive control, but we don't have a coercive control crime.
There's actually, you know, I have really mixed feelings even about criminalizing coercive control because there was a big move globally maybe six, seven, eight years ago.
You saw a bunch of countries starting to criminalize coercive control.
And the preliminary data suggests it's actually been bad for domestic abuse victims.
I mean, in particular in the UK, there are data that suggests that the police are arresting the victims for coercive control more often than they're arresting the perpetrators.
Because the fundamental problem we have globally is that police and other justice systems actors don't understand coercive control.
They don't understand the dynamics of domestic abuse.
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