The National Family Violence Law Center at GW (NFVLC) manages the nation's Legislative Clearinghouse on family court and related matters. The Clearinghouse is informed by research and is designed to provide a national resource to assist state and federal policy reform efforts aimed at better protecting children and their safe parent in family courts. The Clearinghouse serves Congressional and state policymakers in the growing number of states reeling from child abuse and homicides by an abusive parent and seeking to improve family courts’ adjudications to reduce harm to children.

To help inform our work, we are currently collecting information on how coercive control cases are playing out in the states where coercive control laws have already been enacted, including Hawaii, California, Connecticut, and Washington. If you have such a case, please submit your case synopsis, including information on whether coercive control was found and credited by the court, and whether the coercive control law helped gain protections for yourself and/or your child - and if so how precisely (protection orders, child custody outcomes, etc). We also want to hear about cases where the coercive control law may have been ineffective or used against your client/you if you are a family violence survivor.