A Silent Violence

From the outside, it looked like Karen and George Gosbee lived the perfect Calgary life for most of their 23-year marriage.

The couple stood cheek-to-cheek and smiling in photos that ran in the society pages of the Calgary Herald. Karen was a tall, blonde philanthropist who volunteered for local institutions like the Edge School and the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra; George built two successful investment firms and co-owned the now-inactive NHL team, the Arizona Coyotes. The family’s three children excelled at school, hockey and ballet.

In 2017, a different picture emerged about what life had been like inside the Gosbee home. George died by suicide that November. He had kept his diagnoses of bipolar disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and depression hidden from the world, and had abused human growth hormone, prescription medication and alcohol.

He’d also abused his wife. At first, she hesitated to admit that fact publicly — the stories of things that happened inside their home would change the reputation of a man who’d been a titan in Calgary’s business community. And what happened in their marriage didn’t always fit with what Karen thought intimate-partner violence looked like. For years, Karen had downplayed the danger in their marriage. “I didn’t realize I was in an abusive relationship,” she says.

In Karen’s own words, George had physically hurt her “less than a handful of times” over two decades. Once he tried to strangle her in their bathroom, leaving a neck injury that still causes her pain. Another time, he’d pounded her face in an Argentina hotel room.

But George also used spyware to track Karen’s text messages and emails. He belittled her, telling her she had early onset dementia. He sent her torrents of rage-filled texts and calls. He withheld information about the family finances — her financial requests had to be approved by George or his assistant. He once secretly cancelled her credit cards before she was hosting a fundraising lunch.

After George’s death, Karen started reading the growing literature around intimate-partner violence and saw her marriage in the pages.

Coercive control is a pattern of behaviour where an abuser works to humiliate, manipulate and diminish their partner’s sense of self-empowerment, with the goal of dominating and controlling them. It takes different forms, such as limiting a person’s access to their own finances, isolating them from family and friends, selecting their clothes, coercing them into sex, or tracking their whereabouts.

Coercive control is part of the epidemic of gender-based violence happening in secret across the country. Psychological abuse — the hallmark of coercive control — is the most common form of intimate-partner violence in Canada, according to Statistics Canada. Most people never report it to police, but with devastating consequences — coercive control is a strong predictor of femicide* in intimate-partner relationships. Studies show that coercive control in an abusive relationship escalates the risk of fatality by nine times, and cases involving coercive control are more likely to result in serious harm than cases involving discrete acts of physical violence.

Karen says she might have left their marriage earlier had she understood the risks. She’d always felt that she needed to stay until her children came of age. “If I had understood the danger that I seriously was in, maybe I could have made more of an informed decision as to how I needed to get out,” she says.

She has since become an advocate for survivors of intimate-partner violence, and for better mental health and addictions services. In 2019, then-Mayor Naheed Nenshi asked her to join The City of Calgary’s Community Action on Mental Health and Addiction Stewardship Group. In 2020, she wrote a book called A Perfect Nightmare about her marriage.

Women who are struggling to break out of abusive relationships reach out to Karen privately to ask what they do. “A lot of times, they don’t know the actual danger they’re in. The first thing I’ll ask them is: ‘Has he ever tried to strangle you? Are there guns in the house?’ A lot of times they’ll be like, ‘Oh, it’s not that bad, you know?”

Women underplay the risks when they are in abusive relationships, especially when the perpetrator primarily relies on psychological means of torture, she points out.

People who work with and for survivors of intimate-partner violence are pushing for better awareness of coercive control. They argue that, if we’re to stop intimate-partner violence, we need to understand coercive control in order to recognize it. Many advocates believed that major change was finally at hand after NDP MP Laurel Collins introduced a private member’s bill to amend the Criminal Code of Canada to create an offence of exercising coercive control over an intimate partner in 2023. The bill, C-332, made it past all three readings in the House of Commons (backed by the rare support of all parties) and past second reading in the Senate. But, when Justin Trudeau resigned as prime minister, Parliament was prorogued in January 2025, and the bill died.

“It was a tragic setback,” says Leslie Hill, executive director of Discovery House, which runs shelter and support groups for families affected by domestic violence.

The week before Parliament progrogued, four women were killed by intimate-partner violence in Canada — including one in Calgary and another in Edmonton. More have been killed since: statistics for the first six months of 2025 are not yet available, but, on average, a woman is killed by a former or current intimate partner every six days in Canada.

The concept of “coercive control” grew out of research done on prisoners of war during the 1950s.

Sociologist Albert D. Biderman studied American men who’d been captured by Communist forces during the Korean War, and wrote false confessions in captivity.

Biderman learned that the men had been subjected to a regimen of psychological techniques to undermine their moral strength. Their captors used eight methods: isolation, monopolization of perception, degradation, exhaustion, threats, occasional indulgences, demonstrations of omnipotence and omniscience, and the enforcement of trivial demands.

Taken together, these techniques were a teaching method for POWs. Through fear and stress, they taught the prisoners how to comply with their captors’ demands. Biderman put these techniques together in a tool explaining coercive methods of control, now known as Biderman’s Chart of Coercion. American military trainers at Guantánamo Bay following the 9/11 attacks used this chart verbatim to conduct interrogation training.

Physical violence is not listed anywhere on Biderman’s chart — only the threat of it is. Physical pain “is not a necessary nor particularly effective method of inducing compliance,” Biderman wrote. The threat of violence was often more successful for the captors than violence itself.

In the decades following Biderman’s work, people noticed a similar pattern of coercion used on survivors of intimate-partner violence. Physical violence was common (and cruel), but not the worst part of the abuse for women, writes Jess Hill, an investigative journalist whose 2019 book, See What You Made Me Do, includes a history of coercive control. Some women weren’t subjected to physical violence at all, but they endured a kind of psychological and emotional torture that robbed them of their autonomy and ability to make decisions.

People working with domestic-violence survivors adopted Biderman’s chart of coercion to describe the techniques used by perpetrators of domestic abuse. In 2007, Evan Stark, a forensic social worker who researched domestic violence for 30 years with his physician wife, Dr. Anne Flitcraft, gave the pattern revealed in Biderman’s work a name — coercive control.

The idea that an abused woman is a “battered woman” (a term that’s rarely used anymore), or that only physical abuse counts as “real abuse,” remains the prevailing view of many in the public and the legal system, and of many abused women themselves, says Andrea Silverstone, CEO of Sagesse, an Alberta non-profit that works to prevent domestic violence. This restrictive definition of abuse hurts women. If coercive control was widely recognized as abuse, more people would recognize dangerous situations and fewer people would ask why women don’t just walk away, Silverstone explains.

“It helps to understand that [coercive control] is a removal or a colonization of a person’s identity to the point that they’re no longer able to express their personal agency or make decisions in their own best interest,” she says.

After years of lobbying from advocates, governments are beginning to recognize that coercive control is an often-deadly form of abuse and should be viewed as a crime. In 2013, the U.K.’s Home Office officially changed its definition of domestic violence to include coercive control. Two years later, England and Wales became the first jurisdiction to criminalize coercive control. Since then, Scotland, Northern Ireland, Ireland and Australia have followed.

In Canada, Silverstone and other advocates have been calling for a similar law for almost a decade. They say legislation will help survivors recognize when they are living in danger and will help police respond in cases of coercive control. “What we hear from the police and our clients is that, when this pattern exists, there aren’t tools in the justice system to support intervention,” says Hill. There are laws for physical assault and stalking, she points out. “But, when it’s this kind of insidious pattern of abuse that the police are able to see, they don’t have legislative tools to intervene.”

Says Silverstone: “It’s sort of shameful that Canada doesn’t have this legislation when so many other jurisdictions that are equivalent Commonwealth jurisdictions do. I feel like it’s a no-brainer, and it shouldn’t be taking as long a journey as it’s taking.”

This belief isn’t universal among people who’ve dedicated their careers to studying and preventing domestic violence. Some worry that criminalizing coercive control may have unintended consequences. Jennifer Koshan, professor of law at the University of Calgary, argued to Parliament and Justice Canada against criminalization of coercive control. She says that a criminal law of coercive control could be used against victims — a pattern that she sees in the family law system.

Since March 2021, Canada’s Divorce Act has recognized “coercive and controlling behaviour” as a form of family violence. Koshan and her colleagues’ research shows that fathers often respond to allegations of family violence by claiming that they are the real victims of coercive control because mothers sought to restrict their access to their kids. “Now women are sometimes being found to be coercive and controlling, simply when they’re trying to protect their children from violence — that’s seen as controlling their child’s relationship with the other parent,” Koshan says.

Koshan has other concerns, too. A coercive control law could disproportionately hurt marginalized groups, particularly Indigenous and racialized people who are already over-represented in the criminal justice system. Although Indigenous peoples account for approximately five per cent of the adult population in Canada, they make up 28 per cent of all people receiving federal sentences in Canada; Black people, at four per cent of the adult population of Canada, account for nine per cent of sentenced offenders under federal jurisdiction. Koshan questions whether a specific law would meaningfully improve the lives of women targeted by coercive control. In the U.K., when the definition of domestic violence was changed to include coercive control, calls to police for domestic violence increased 31 per cent over the next three years. But it’s not clear that more calls led to positive change for survivors.

“For me, until we do a much better job of understanding how criminalizing this particular form of violence could end up being used against the most marginalized members of society, I just don’t think it’s something we should adopt,” says Koshan. Criminalizing coercive control would require a fundamental shift in the way that judges and prosecutors think about the law, she explains. The legal system takes an incident-based approach to violence: one act of violence is a crime. But coercive control is a pattern, often made up of smaller acts that could, in the hands of a powerful storyteller, be presented as harmless or even romantic.

“The best analogy I’ve heard, but it’s not a legal analogy, is that understanding the difference between incidents of violence and coercive control is like the difference between looking at a photograph and looking at a film,” says Koshan. “If you look at a photograph, it captures a moment in time but if you really want to know what is going on in a particular relationship, you have to see the whole film.”

Advocates who work with domestic violence survivors say they share concerns about unintended consequences of criminalizing coercive control. But any potential downsides could be prevented by careful monitoring and studying of the effects, they argue. One essential component that critics and advocates agree on is that Canada needs an expert advisory panel on domestic violence. The panel could be on watch to ensure the law is used as intended. But so far, Canada has failed to act on this idea. The Mass Casualty Commission, the public inquiry into a 2020 two-day killing spree in Nova Scotia that started as an act of domestic violence, called for such an expert advisory group. Nothing has come of it.

Everyone who spoke with Avenue for this story called for more training of police and judges, and for more resources and funding. Most also called for additional shelter spaces. They want action that demonstrates that the epidemic of domestic violence is not binary — only victims and the perpetrators — but a long-standing societal problem that requires widespread change.

Glenn Andruschuk, a staff sergeant in the Calgary Police Service’s Domestic Conflict Unit, is among those who support changing the Criminal Code to include coercive control. Doing so would help the police with intervening in domestic violence cases, he says.

But a legal change is not at the top of his wish list for preventing domestic violence. His top priority is more funding for things like shelter beds, counselling and other supports for shelters, along with ads and awareness campaigns. And he wants an education program for kids in schools across Alberta that has a singular message about domestic violence: “It’s not okay, but it is okay to speak up.”

Karen Gosbee grew up in a home affected by mental illness and substance abuse. She learned to stay quiet in times of crisis. She carried those childhood habits into adulthood, and didn’t speak out about the horrors going on behind the scenes in what looked like an Instagram-perfect life.

After George died, she wanted to change the narrative around domestic violence — helping people understand that it’s not only happening in homes where women have bruises. Sometimes, the wounds are invisible.

*The predominance of women as victims is significant, which is not to undermine the importance or significance of men who also face intimate-partner violence.

Reported domestic violence occurrences in Calgary in 2024: 4,502 (4.4 per cent increase from 2023)

Reported domestic conflict calls (no violence): 18,964 (1.7 per cent decrease from 2023)

This story was created with the support of the Avenue Community Story Development Fund. The Fund supports the creation of local reporting on issues such as intimate-partner violence, mental health and addiction, the housing crisis and more. Thank you to our partners, including The Calgary Foundation. To find out more, or contribute, visit AvenueCalgary.com/StoryFund

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