Custody Courts Must Now See the Pattern.
On August 12, Colorado House Bill 26-1309 — “Abuse in Cases of Separation” — takes effect. When we wrote about it in July, it was a law on paper. Now it is a law in the courtroom, and the courtroom it changes most is the one survivors fear most: family court.
Sponsored by Representatives Meg Froelich and Tammy Story and Senator Katie Wallace, and signed by Governor Jared Polis on May 27, the bill did two things. The first was expanding Colorado’s definition of domestic violence to include coercive control and economic abuse. The second: starting this week, before a Colorado court decides where a child will live, it has to answer if one of these parents has been abusing the other.
The first question changes
For decades, custody law in most states has started from “the best interests of the child” and treated abuse allegations as one factor among many — alongside school districts, work schedules, and who signed up for soccer. Survivors know how that goes. The parent who controlled the money, the phone, the friendships arrives in court calm and credible. The parent who lived under that control arrives anxious, exhausted, and “difficult.” The pattern that explains everything is invisible, so the person carrying it looks like the problem.
HB26-1309 reorders the questions. When domestic violence is alleged in a case over parental responsibilities — Colorado’s term for parenting time and decision-making — the court must now make findings about it, by a preponderance of the evidence, before applying the best-interests standard. Not as a footnote. As a threshold.
And if the court finds that abuse happened, a presumption activates: giving parenting time or decision-making power to the abusive parent is presumed not to be in the child’s best interest. The burden shifts. It is no longer the survivor’s job to prove that her ex is dangerous enough to limit; it is his job to prove he has changed — through real intervention and demonstrated behavior change, not a certificate of attendance.
One advocate following the bill put it simply: “changing the first question changes everything that follows.”
What counts — and what can’t be used against you
Three details in this law were written by people who understood how abuse actually works.
The conduct doesn’t have to be a crime. The court’s finding is about what happened, not what was prosecuted. Coercive control rarely produces a police report; it produces years of isolation, surveillance, and financial dependence that no officer ever saw. Under this law, that record still counts.
Protective behaviors are excluded. Actions a parent took to protect themselves or their children cannot be counted as abuse against them. Survivors who fled, who hid money to escape, who kept a child home from a visit out of fear — the law says plainly that this is not the same thing, closing off one of the oldest tactics in the family-court playbook: the abuser who claims to be the abused.
The evaluators must be qualified. Where courts order treatment or assessment, the bill requires licensed mental-health professionals at the master’s or doctoral level with specific expertise in domestic violence and child abuse — a direct answer to years of custody evaluations performed by people who couldn’t recognize coercive control when it was sitting in front of them.
What a presumption can and cannot do
A statute does not retrain every judge, evaluator, and attorney by Wednesday morning. Findings still depend on evidence, and pattern evidence still has to be gathered and presented: messages, financial records, journals, witnesses. Colorado’s family courts carry the same history of disbelief as everyone else’s, and implementation will be uneven before it is reliable. The honest promise of this law is smaller and still significant: the survivor who walks in with a documented pattern now has a legal framework obligated to look at it, and a written finding at the end — on the record, appealable, real.
Colorado is not alone in this. New Hampshire wrote coercive control into its definitions in July. Canada made it a federal crime this summer. One state’s effective date is a small light; the pattern across the map is getting hard to miss.
If you’re in the middle of it
If you are separating from a controlling partner in Colorado — or anywhere — three things are true this week that were worth saying before any legislature agreed. What happened to you was real. Documenting it is not paranoia; it is testimony waiting for its moment. And you don’t have to navigate life after abuse alone.
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If you or someone you know is struggling or in crisis, help is available. Call or text 988 to reach the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.
