CCChat-Magazine_Issue-20

The CCChat Interview
Paul McGorrery
Paul McGorrery is
a lawyer and PhD
candidate in
criminal law and
family violence in
Australia.
His research
focuses primarily
on the criminal
law's response to
emerging harms
such as
psychological harm
and coercive
control.
He is also co-editor
of the recent book
Criminalising
Coercive Control:
Family Violence
and the Criminal
Law.
P
aul McGorrery has been looking at
coercive control and how it is being
reported, in the British media. His insights
have been fascinating and I was thrilled to
be able to have a conversation with him
about his work. This is what we spoke
about:
M: Hi Paul, thank you so much for letting me interview you
for the magazine. I’ve been really fascinated in the research
you’ve been involved in but, for the readers who don’t
know you, could you talk a little about what you do?
P: I wear multiple hats. I have a full time role as manager
of legal policy at the Sentencing Council in Victoria. But
everything I do around coercive control is separate to that
and is part of my PhD research at Deakin Law School, into
how the criminal law responds to non-physical forms of
harm generally, but especially in the context of family
violence.
I think a lot about why I’m in this space because I
acknowledge it’s not my space. I see myself as an ally at
most, but I think there’s a level of empathy because I was
bullied quite a lot in primary school and high school and
there is certainly some correlation between bullying and
coercive control. Twenty years later, I found myself
working in workers’ compensation at the federal level in
Australia, and I found that psychological injuries were
accounting for 7% of all workers’ compensation claims but
33% of costs, so there was something really serious going
on with non-physical harms that people were suffering,
and I became fascinated by the notion.
I then started prosecuting criminal cases down in Victoria,
so I moved from Canberra to Melbourne, and they had all
of these family violence cases – one in particular always
stood out for me - her husband had tied her to the bed and
tortured her for a good hour or so – and it was all because
he thought she was cheating because she’d sent an email to
a male friend. At the end of it, he allowed her, and this was
his language, he ‘allowed her’ to get up and kiss his feet and
beg his forgiveness after he had shaved her head and
thrown all her hair into the bin.
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