South Carolina’s attempt to criminalize coercive control died in committee. The bills’ failure reveals a basic limit of the law: it can punish an act, but not a pattern.
Between 2022 and 2024, Mica Miller called the police on her husband seven times. Each time, her sister would later tell South Carolina lawmakers, the officers left without acting. “There was nothing for them to do,” Abigail Francis testified, “since there were no laws to guide them against coercive control.”
Mica Miller died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in a North Carolina state park on April 27, 2024, two days after serving her husband with divorce papers. She had married John-Paul “JP” Miller, a Myrtle Beach pastor, in 2018. In the weeks before her death, she filed a series of police reports and sought a restraining order, alleging that John-Paul had slashed her tires, hidden a GPS tracker on her car, and harassed her in public. More than a year after her death, in December 2025, a federal grand jury indicted him on charges of cyberstalking Mica and lying to investigators. John-Paul pleaded not guilty and denies any abuse.
Mica’s case is a textbook illustration of coercive control: the slow, patterned domination that lies at the heart of many abusive relationships. The term describes a prolonged, deliberate campaign involving surveillance, financial control, social isolation, and intimidation, all aimed at stripping a person of their autonomy and freedom. Had the bill that now carries Mica’s name passed, it would have made the pattern a crime in South Carolina. But despite national coverage and emotional testimony, “Mica’s Law” stalled in the Senate Judiciary Committee — the fourth such bill to die before it reached the floor since 2020. The recurring sticking point is how to define the offense narrowly enough to enforce. This year, the more immediate cause was just a late-session redistricting fight. “Redistricting became the priority, and that sucked all the oxygen out of the room,” the bill’s sponsor, state Sen. Stephen Goldfinch, told WMBF News. He plans to reintroduce it in 2027.
What is coercive control?
The idea that the law should reach a pattern, not just an act, isn’t new. In 2007, the sociologist Evan Stark — who had helped run one of America’s first battered-women’s shelters — coined the term “coercive control,” arguing that the real injury of abuse is often not violence but entrapment, a “condition of unfreedom.” He called it a “liberty crime,” and urged a new kind of law to match.
Much of the English-speaking world obliged. England and Wales criminalized coercive control in 2015; Scotland, Ireland, and parts of Australia followed. But those countries had legal systems geared toward unified action. American criminal law is splintered across fifty codes, with no federal statute to anchor it — and a deeper reluctance besides. Coercive control is built from acts that are, one by one, perfectly legal: checking a phone, holding the bank card, deciding who a spouse may see. Criminalizing the pattern unsettles a legal tradition designed to punish discrete, provable acts.
What follows is that coercive control has no categorical home in the United States. It is not a federal crime. It is not, in the American psychiatric manual, a diagnosis. About a dozen states — California, Connecticut, and Massachusetts among them — recognize the term in their family and civil codes, where it can support a restraining order or shape a custody case; Hawai’i alone treats it as a misdemeanor. Everywhere else, it survives mainly as a folk-psychology trend.
Dilution by trend
Survivors of coercive control tend to surface with the same after-effects: a hypervigilance that won’t switch off, broken sleep, a shaken trust in their own memory after years of gaslighting, and — because isolation is the abuser’s first tool — social circles thinned to nothing. What they need is to be believed, a language for what happened, and other people who have been there.
Mainstream institutions have so far failed to answer those needs. The courts have no charge for coercive control; psychiatry has no diagnosis. Beginning around 2021, social media stepped in to fill the institutional void. A TikTok genre nicknamed NarcTok turned clinical language into viral content; within a year, videos tagged #NarcTok had drawn some 1.9 billion views. The trend handed survivors a vocabulary they badly needed — narcissist, gaslighting, love-bombing — to explain what had happened to them, along with a checklist of red flags. But the relief came with a flood of misinformation. A recent Guardian investigation found that more than half of the 100 most-viewed mental-health videos on TikTok contained harmful misinformation, most from creators with no clinical training. In a feed that rewards certainty, a single checklist could tag ordinary spats and life-threatening campaigns of control with the same keyword. And the marketplace of recovery coaches that grew out of that feed holds both good actors and bad ones, with no easy way to tell them apart.
Peer support
What survivors have left is each other. Peer fellowships — among them TAR Anon, run by STAR Network — do the one thing no statute has managed: recognize the pattern and call it by its name. They meet online, across time zones, with no waitlist and no diagnosis required to walk in. For someone told for years that nothing happened, a room of people who know exactly what did can be the first step toward recognition.
It isn’t the legislation Mica Miller called seven times for. Mica’s Law is still waiting — on a committee, and on the sponsor’s promise to try again in 2027. But until it passes, survivors can give one another what the courtroom can’t: the steadying proof that what happened to them was real, and has a real name.
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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.
