In recent years, society has begun to understand and criminalise coercive control: a pattern of manipulative behaviours used to dominate and isolate someone. The UK and several other countries now recognise coercive control as a form of domestic abuse. This legal and cultural shift is a powerful statement: psychological abuse is real, and doesn’t need to leave bruises to be dangerous.
But there’s a blind spot.
While we have started to hold perpetrators of coercive control accountable in personal relationships, a strikingly similar pattern of manipulation continues to play out.
Why do we treat these behaviours as criminal in the home, but ignore them in the office?
Understanding Coercive Control
Coercive control involves a sustained pattern of domination, limiting autonomy, exploiting power imbalances, and isolating another person. It can include surveillance, shaming, gaslighting and threats.
Gaslighting, originally coined from the 1938 play Gas Light, is a psychological tactic where one person causes another to doubt their memory, perception, or sanity. In domestic relationships, gaslighting is a common abuse tactic: denying conversations ever happened or accusing the victim of being overly sensitive or unstable.
These behaviours are sinister. They strip away confidence, erode reality, and encourage dependency.
So why do they look so familiar in many workplaces?
The Workplace Mirror
While the dynamics may differ in context, the psychological impact can be alarmingly similar. Consider the following common workplace scenarios:
- Micromanagement that verges on surveillance: Constantly monitoring an employee’s every move, requiring justification for each task, and punishing minor deviations.
- Undermining and sabotage: Taking credit for others’ work, subtly or covertly discrediting them in meetings, or setting them up to fail.
- Gaslighting around performance or perception: Denying past conversations, shifting expectations without documentation or admission, or insisting that concerns are imagined or exaggerated.
- Isolation tactics: Exclusion from meetings, withholding key information, or manipulating team dynamics.
In abusive domestic situations, these behaviours would likely be recognised as coercive control. In the workplace, they’re often brushed off as “strong management,” “office politics,” or justified as the employee being too “soft” or “not a good fit.”
The result? Psychological harm and a sense of learned helplessness, not unlike the emotional toll experienced by victims of domestic abuse.
Why Isn’t It Treated the Same?
There’s a common learned belief perhaps even faith, that the workplace is inherently rational, structured, and protected by HR policies. But professionalism can be a mask. Behind the performance reviews and team-building jargon, manipulative behaviour can thrive in power imbalances and weak accountability structures.
Domestic coercive control laws are still evolving. The Law rarely penetrates organisational life. While employment law protects against discrimination and harassment, we might question its failure to recognise psychological abuse as a standalone workplace safety risk, despite The Health & Safety Act incorporating stress specifically.
Human Resources are often required to protect the organisation, not necessarily the individual. When the abuser is high profile, complaints can be downplayed or dismissed to avoid exposure. The term “being managed out” is real and is used frequently in corporate scenarios, although few would outwardly admit it. Whistle blowers or grievance bringers are frequently seen as the problem rather than the real cause of the problem, the abuser.
The Cost of Ignoring Psychological Abuse at Work
Failing to recognise coercive control in the workplace has tangible consequences for the individuals exposed to this treatment. They may suffer long-term mental health effects: anxiety, depression, PTSD, and burnout. Talented individuals often leave toxic environments, leading to high turnover and potential reputational damage for companies.
HR Director magazine reports that between March 2021 and March 2022, cases involving workplace bullying increased by 44%. Despite the rising number of legal cases against employers, there is lacking evidence suggesting the situation is improving leading us to believe that organisations are prepared to tolerate such behaviour. In fact, there was a 45% increase in the defence of “banter”. It must be acknowledged, that the increase in claims could in part point to improved cultures rather than worse conditions.
Workplace cultures that tolerate psychological manipulation covertly promote inequality. Worse, they enable an environment where toxic leaders rise to the top, not because they’re effective, but because they’re adept at domination masked as competence.
Despite legal provisions in The Worker Protection Act and The Protection from Harassment Act, challenges remain. Bullying is difficult to redress unless it overlaps with discrimination or harassment based on protected characteristics. Employees often feel like resignation is the only way to escape or address such behaviours and even constructive dismissal claims carry risks that may deter reporting, including damage to career prospects. HR responses and sometimes lack of policies around the subject can discourage employees from reporting bullying or gaslighting.
Time to Rethink
This raises important questions:
- If a pattern of controlling and gaslighting behaviour in a relationship is a crime, why isn’t it at work?
- Should psychological safety be a legal obligation in employment, not just a cultural goal?
- What role should HR, management, and leadership play in recognising and preventing workplace coercion?
- How might organisations introduce more independent resolution of such claims?
- Should there be formal training on psychological abuse dynamics in professional development and compliance programs?
- Could trauma-informed leadership be a standard, rather than a progressive extra?
By reframing these behaviours through the lens of coercive control, not just “poor management” we can reframe a previously tolerated and often justified stance. Perhaps even begin to change the dynamics and circumstances that allow them to persist.
Moving Forward
Is it time for a reckoning?
The workplace is not exempt from the ethical responsibilities we’ve embraced in other parts of society. If coercive control is a form of abuse in the home, then it is abuse in the office, too. Recognising the parallels isn’t about criminalising every difficult boss or conflict, but about creating structures that understand, identify, and respond to psychological harm before it becomes institutionalised or normalised.
Creating healthier workplaces starts with asking better questions and refusing to accept silence as the answer.
If you’ve experienced coercive control or gaslighting at work, you’re not imagining it. And you’re not alone. Talking about it is the first step. Change only happens when we stop accepting manipulation as part of professional life that must be endured.
If you are experiencing poor or declining mental health as a result of psychological harm and would like support. Please contact Kirsty or Louise today.
