Comparative Study of Pre-Assault Intervention Capacity and Its Implications for Indonesian Domestic Violence Law

Abstract

Domestic violence law responds more readily to discrete incidents, whereas coercive control develops through surveillance, dependency, restriction, and intimidation that may become legally visible only after harm occurs. Existing scholarship has not sufficiently connected offence design, intervention timing, and reform of Indonesian domestic violence law. This study examined whether criminal law could recognise coercive control before physical assault became the principal basis of a case and identified a defensible model for Indonesia. It employed normative legal research using statutory, conceptual, and comparative approaches to Indonesian law and the offences of England and Wales, Scotland, New South Wales, and Queensland. The findings showed that coercive control could not be reduced to psychological violence because its central harm lay in cumulative restrictions on autonomy. Serious-effect offences provided clearer boundaries but tied liability to harm already experienced, while likely-harm models could operate earlier when combined with a serious course of conduct and a defined mental element. Indonesian law recognised psychological harm and economic control but did not connect controlling acts as one course of conduct. A hybrid model was more defensible, retaining existing offences while adding an autonomous pattern-based offence subject to seriousness, likely harm, intent, proportionality, and clear rules on concurrence.