5 Books That Could Save Your Life: Changing the All-island Conversation on Coercive Control.

The ‘5 Books That Could Save Your Life’ project was a collaboration between Haven Horizons, a national organisation dedicated to the primary prevention of domestic abuse and coercive control based in Ennis, Co. Clare, which set up the project and two Belfast-based organisations, Reclaim the Agenda and Belfast & Lisburn Women’s Aid.

Coercive control is an entrenched cultural problem that is entwined with a broader issue of patriarchal misogyny. It raises questions about how women are socialised, and about the entitlement of men who see their partners and children as possessions that they can control, abuse and sometimes murder.

A new cross-border partnership has worked to highlight coercive control as highly dangerous and the key driver of domestic homicide. The project involved an all-island dialogue to facilitate a broader social understanding of coercive control, spotlighting the attitudes and beliefs that minimise domestic abuse, allowing it to thrive and to consider possible solutions to the problem.

There was a series of in-person events in Ennis, Co. Clare, Dublin, and Belfast. Haven Horizons organised the first event at the Ennis Book Club Festival in Co. Clare. The second event at the Titanic Centre in Belfast was part of Women’s Aid Belfast and Lisburn Women's Aid 50th Anniversary Conference. The third event in the Seamus Heaney Centre was organised by Reclaim the Agenda. The final event was held in the Department of Justice in Dublin. At these events, a moderated panel used five selected books as a springboard to consider why the rates of coercive control, domestic abuse and domestic homicide are so high across the island.

The statistics both in the North and South reveal a tsunami of domestic abuse.

Recent Police Service of Northern Ireland statistics reveal:

· The number of domestic abuse homicides doubled between 2024 and 2025.

· There were six murders with a domestic abuse motive in that period, double the previous year.

· A report of domestic abuse is made to the PSNI every 16 minutes.

Recent statistics from An Garda Síochána reveal:

· In the Republic of Ireland, 2022 was the deadliest year in a decade -12 women and 5 children were murdered.

· Domestic abuse callouts have increased by 45% in the last four years.

· A report of domestic abuse is made to An Garda Síochána every 10 minutes.

These statistics are a stark reminder of the women, children and families who have been affected by abuse, of the lives destroyed and sometimes ended.

The panel included domestic abuse experts and activists Madeline Mc Aleer from Haven Horizons, Danielle Roberts from Reclaim the Agenda and Noelle Collins from Belfast & Lisburn Women’s Aid. Irish Examiner columnist Sarah Harte moderated it.

The five books selected for the project included Remembered Forever, by Luke and Ryan Hart, whose mother and sister were murdered by their father in a domestic homicide; Brutally Honest, by Spice Girl and coercive control survivor Mel B; Invisible Chains, by psychologist Dr Lisa Aronson Fontes, In Control by Professor Jane Monckton Smith, a criminologist and former UK police officer, and What is to be Done About Violence Against Women by Professors Kate Fitz-Gibbon and Sandra Walklate, experts in the field of domestic abuse.

The project raised valuable public awareness that any person can be a victim of coercively controlling behaviour because coercive control cuts across all social strata. For some women who may appear successful to the outside world, they are only as safe as their male partners allow them to be, and coercive control, often hidden, is a daily reality for many women.

It also highlighted, among other issues, how the media plays a role in perpetuating the myth that is part of our cultural storytelling that killers in domestic homicides, who are often portrayed as otherwise respectable men, snap and lose control in a crime of passion. In fact, the evidence indicates that perpetrators murder because they are losing control of the victim.

The Shared Island Civic Society Fund, a Department of Foreign Affairs initiative, supported this innovative project. It concluded with a webinar in November, during which the expert authors discussed their books and their motivations for writing them. They also discussed the importance of sharing knowledge and considering this topic from different perspectives if we are to find solutions to one of the most pressing human rights issues of our time.

By Sarah Harte, Planning and Communications Strategist Haven Horizons