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Family Law

Is Coercive Control Recognized in Hawaii?

Yes — Hawaii got there first. House Bill 2425 was signed by Governor David Ige on September 15, 2020 as Act 020, making Hawaii the first U.S. state to write “coercive control” into a domestic violence statute. It's codified at HRS § 586-1, the definitions section of Hawaii's domestic abuse protective order law. Here's what it actually says — and why, unlike Washington, Connecticut, or Colorado, it doesn't currently reach child custody.

What HRS § 586-1 actually says

HB2425 added a new definition to § 586-1: “coercive control” means a pattern of threatening, humiliating, or intimidating actions, which may include assaults or other abuse, used to harm, punish, or frighten an individual. The definition goes further, describing coercive control as a pattern of behavior that seeks to take away a person's liberty or freedom and strip away their sense of self, including bodily integrity and human rights — designed to make someone dependent by isolating them from support, exploiting them, depriving them of independence, and regulating their everyday behavior. The statute then lists eight non-exclusive examples: isolating someone from friends and family; controlling how much money is accessible to them and how it's spent; monitoring their activities, communications, and movements; frequent name-calling, degradation, and demeaning; threatening to harm or kill them or a child or relative; threatening to publish information or make reports to police or authorities; damaging property or household goods; and forcing someone into criminal activity or child abuse.

Coercive control is now part of the definition of “domestic abuse”

HB2425 also rewrote § 586-1's definition of “domestic abuse” to mean physical harm, bodily injury, assault, or the threat of imminent physical harm, bodily injury, or assault, extreme psychological abuse, coercive control, or malicious property damage between family or household members — or specified offenses against a minor family or household member by an adult one. That matters because § 586-1 is the definitions section for Chapter 586, Hawaii's civil domestic abuse protective order statute: a documented pattern of coercive control is now, on its own, a basis for “domestic abuse” sufficient to support a protective order, separate from physical violence.

The same bill also touched four insurance statutes (HRS §§ 431:10-217.5, 432:1-101.6, 432:2-103.5, and 432D-27), adding coercive control to a parallel “domestic abuse” definition used there for insurance-access purposes. That piece isn't relevant to family court evidence, so we won't dwell on it here — the protective-order definition above is the one that matters for documenting a pattern.

A note on the custody connection: in Washington, Connecticut, and Colorado, the coercive-control definition used for protective orders is directly cross-referenced into the state's child custody statute. Hawaii is different. Chapter 586 (protective orders) and Chapter 571 (family courts, including custody) are separate parts of the code, and as of the most recently codified version of HRS § 571-46 — the statute governing custody's best-interests-of-the- child factors — there is no cross-reference to § 586-1's coercive control definition. Lawmakers have tried to add one: House Bill 2192 and Senate Bill 2395 in 2022, and Senate Bill 29 in both 2023 and 2024, would each have added “any history of coercive control of the child or a parent of the child by the other parent” — using the § 586-1 definition — as an explicit best-interests factor. None of those bills have become law as of this writing. Hawaii's separate family-violence presumption in § 571-46 (HRS § 571-2's definition, covering physical harm, fear of physical harm, and forced sexual activity) does not by itself include coercive control. Given how often this keeps getting reintroduced, confirm current status with a Hawaii family law attorney — it may have changed since this was written.

Why this still makes text messages relevant evidence

Even without a direct custody cross-reference, a documented pattern of coercive control remains legally significant in Hawaii: it's an independent basis for a domestic abuse protective order under Chapter 586, and a protective order — along with the underlying pattern of conduct — can still be relevant to a family court's broader view of a parent's fitness, even where no single statute names “coercive control” as a specific custody factor. And the definition's own examples name the exact territory a text thread lives in: monitoring someone's communications and movements, controlling their finances, threatening to publish information about them. A single message rarely proves a pattern of threatening or controlling behavior — a full, timestamped export across weeks or months does that far more effectively than any single screenshot.

This is general information about Hawaii law as currently written, not legal advice. Statutes get amended, and — as the repeated attempts to reach HRS § 571-46 show — this is an area of active legislative interest in Hawaii. Verity is not a law firm. Talk to a Hawaii family law attorney about how this applies to your situation before relying on anything here.

See the pattern across the whole thread

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