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Colorado House Bill 26-1309 placed coercive control inside the definition of domestic violence that a Colorado court applies when it decides parental responsibilities. The act was signed on 27 May 2026 and, because it carries a safety clause, took effect that day. Coercive control means a pattern of threatening, humiliating or intimidating conduct used to harm, punish or frighten a person — and it is now one of the named forms of domestic violence in Colorado’s family code.
Colorado HB26-1309 changed a definition and a set of duties in family court. It did not change what is happening in your house, and it cannot tell you whether what is happening in your house fits. This page explains the clinical concept the statute borrowed and what that behavior looks like from inside a marriage. It does not give legal advice, does not assess any person, and cannot say what any court would do. Those questions belong to a family lawyer in Colorado and to WomensLaw.org.
What actually changed in Colorado in May 2026?
Colorado HB26-1309 rewrote how domestic violence is defined and handled in cases about parental responsibilities under the Uniform Dissolution of Marriage Act. The act amended C.R.S. § 14-10-103 so that “domestic violence” now means any one of eight things committed by a party, whether or not the conduct is a criminal offense: physical assault or bodily harm, or the threat of it; damage to property; conduct against an animal; stalking; sexual assault; coercive control; economic abuse; and human trafficking.
The second change is procedural. Where a party puts evidence of domestic violence before the court, the court may consider any relevant and admissible evidence and shall make findings on the record by a preponderance of the evidence on whether it occurred. That is a duty to decide and say so out loud, triggered by evidence somebody submits — not a duty to go looking.
Coercive control was already in Colorado’s family code before HB26-1309, and a great deal of the coverage implies 2026 was the first time the phrase appeared. It was not. HB24-1350, known as Kayden’s Law, took effect on 7 August 2024 and put the term into the statutes that govern parental responsibilities, including the best-interests statute at C.R.S. § 14-10-124 and the training and expert-testimony section at § 14-10-127.5, where coercive control is defined as “a pattern of threatening, humiliating, or intimidating actions, including assaults or other abuse, that is used to harm, punish, or frighten an individual” and illustrated with eleven examples. Colorado’s protection-order statute at C.R.S. § 13-14-101 reached some of the same conduct earlier still, defining domestic abuse to include coercion. The honest description of HB26-1309 is therefore narrower than the headline version: a concept already in the code moved into the definition of domestic violence itself, in the part of the code a family court applies to children.
What none of that tells you is how a court would weigh anything in your life. Nothing on this page is a prediction, and no page can make one. The full text of the act is public at the Colorado General Assembly, and what it means for your matter is a question for a lawyer.
What do the statute’s examples look like in an ordinary week?
Colorado’s eleven statutory examples are written in the abstract, and almost nobody recognizes her own marriage in an abstraction. The categories describe behavior that is, from the inside, unremarkable, deniable and boring to describe. Nobody has ever gone to a lawyer with the sentence “he controls the thermostat.”
Monitoring or controlling activities, communications or movements is, on a Wednesday, the location sharing that was set up for safety in 2021 and has never been turned off. In the CDC’s National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey — a nationally representative survey of 15,609 US adults including 8,842 women, collected September 2023 to September 2024 — 18.6% of US women, about 23.8 million, reported an intimate partner tracking or monitoring their whereabouts (Zhang Kudon et al., 2026, Table 7).
Controlling finances, economic resources or access to services is asking before you spend forty dollars in a household where you earn. In the same survey, 8.8% of US women — about 11.2 million — reported a partner keeping them from having money of their own, and 15.2%, about 19.4 million, reported a partner making decisions for them that should have been theirs to make.
The clinical model that explains why these hang together comes from Mary Ann Dutton and Lisa Goodman in Sex Roles, 2005. They describe coercion as a system with four parts: a demand, a credible threat of a consequence, surveillance to establish whether the demand was met, and occasional delivery of the consequence to keep the threat credible. A contingent threat is worthless unless somebody is checking, which is why the phone, the mileage and the twenty unaccounted minutes are not separate from the control.
In clinical work, women almost never open with an incident. They open with the forecasting — reading his face in the hallway before the coat is off, and rearranging the whole evening in about a second and a half. Then they apologize for how small it sounds. That skill is not a personality trait. It is a trained response to an unpredictable contingency.
If you are in immediate danger, call 911.
National Domestic Violence Hotline — 1-800-799-7233, 24 hours · text START to 88788 · thehotline.org
988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline — call or text 988 Deaf, DeafBlind and hard-of-hearing callers: National Deaf Domestic Violence Hotline videophone 855-812-1001, 24 hours (a partnership between the National Domestic Violence Hotline and Abused Deaf Women’s Advocacy Services).
Calling leaves the number in your call log and texting leaves the thread in your messages. Both can be deleted afterwards. If that is not something you can do safely, a friend’s phone or a payphone is the safer route.
What if the thing I did was protect myself?
Women who have shouted, thrown something, blocked a doorway or hit back read a statute like this one and find themselves on the wrong side of it. HB26-1309 wrote a sentence directly into the definition: “‘domestic violence’ does not mean behaviors that are used by a parent to protect themself; a family or household member, including a child; or property, including an animal, from the harm or risk of harm presented by the other parent.” That carve-out is now part of the definition a Colorado family court applies, and it is the sentence in the act least likely to reach the person it was written for.
In Michael P. Johnson’s typology of partner violence, violent resistance is force used against a controlling partner rather than force used to control one. It looks similar in a single frame and functions in the opposite direction. Whether any particular act was resistance, and how any court would characterize it, is not something a webpage can determine — it depends on facts, evidence and a judge, and it belongs to a lawyer.
Women who fought back tend to arrive holding one memory of themselves at their worst: the behavior that came last, the response after four years of forecasting, rather than the pattern itself.
Why does it feel like none of it would count?
Coercive control feels unreportable because it is built out of components that are individually unremarkable, and because the instruments that decide what counts were built to register incidents. Evan Stark, the forensic social worker who developed the concept, told the Vermont legislature in 2015 that interventions focused on discrete assaults rather than a course of conduct “miss the significance of abuse in the vast majority of cases, fragment and trivialize the reality of partner violence for women and children.” Every time you have tried to explain this and watched it break into pieces in your hands, you were watching a property of the framework, not a defect in your account.
A second reason sits in memory rather than in law. In a review of the memory literature in Psychological Bulletin, the finding is that people with a history of trauma and with depression or PTSD tend to retrieve categories of events rather than single ones — “he does this all the time” instead of “on the 4th of March he did this” (Williams et al., 2007). Overgeneral autobiographical memory is the name for it. It is a documented consequence of living under threat, and it produces exactly the kind of account that a legal system reads as vague.
Statutes do not automatically fix recognition, either. The legal scholar Carrie Leonetti, reviewing New Zealand’s Family Court after coercive control was added to its Family Violence Act in 2018, found that in the four years following the amendment no Family Court judgment identified coercive control or weighed it in a safety assessment (Leonetti, 2024). That study is about New Zealand, not Colorado, and it describes a different court system. It is still the most relevant published evidence on the gap between a statute naming coercive control and a court noticing it.
What this law does not do, and what no page can tell you
Colorado HB26-1309 does not make coercive control a crime and does not tell a court how to decide any case. The only rebuttable presumption in this part of Colorado’s family code concerns sexual assault that resulted in the conception of a child, at C.R.S. § 14-10-124(4)(a)(III); no presumption attaches to a finding of domestic violence. The words screen and screening appear nowhere in the act, which requires findings on evidence a party submits rather than any proactive process of the court’s own. The act contains no training requirement of any kind for judges. And it took effect on 27 May 2026, on the Governor’s signature, under the safety clause in its final section — no later date applies to it. Several widely circulated summaries of this act say otherwise on each of those points, and they are wrong; this page is written from the enrolled text, which anyone can read.
Clinical writing is not legal advice, and the two do not substitute for each other. This page can tell you what HB26-1309 changed, when it took effect, and why the pattern is so hard to describe. It cannot tell you whether coercive control is happening in your marriage, what a Colorado court would find, or what to file. The first of those is an assessment and requires a person; the rest are legal questions and require a lawyer. A disclaimer does not convert a legal statement into a non-legal one, so this page does not make legal statements about your situation at all.
The people who can help are specific, and two of them are free. WomensLaw.org is a project of the National Network to End Domestic Violence and covers Colorado custody and protection orders in plain language at no cost. The National Domestic Violence Hotline — 1-800-799-7233, or text START to 88788 — has advocates who do safety planning, which depends on facts about your household that no website can see. A family lawyer licensed in Colorado is the third, and many county bar associations and Colorado Legal Services run reduced-cost routes to one.
A next step does not have to be a decision. It can be ringing an advocate, or writing down nothing at all for a while. You do not have to have decided anything to start. Not leaving. Not staying. Nothing at all.
SOURCES
- Colorado HB26-1309, Abuse in Cases of Separation, signed and effective 27 May 2026, Chapter 163. Bill page · Enrolled text · Signed act, as chaptered
- Colorado Revised Statutes § 14-10-124 (2025), Best interests of the child. Justia
- Colorado Revised Statutes § 14-10-127.5 (2025), Domestic violence training for court personnel — expert testimony — child placement decisions. Justia
- Colorado Revised Statutes § 13-14-101, Definitions (civil protection orders). Colorado Bureau of Investigation PDF
- Colorado HB24-1350 (Kayden’s Law), effective 7 August 2024. Bill text
- Zhang Kudon, H., Zhu, S., Chen, B., Breiding, M.J., Leemis, R.W., Zhang, X., Schwank, A., & Basile, K.C. (2026). The National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey (NISVS): 2023/2024 Intimate Partner Violence Data Brief. Atlanta, GA: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Injury Prevention and Control. PDF
- Stark, E. (2007). Coercive Control: How Men Entrap Women in Personal Life. New York: Oxford University Press.
- Stark, E. (2015). Testimony on Coercive Control, Vermont House Judiciary Committee, H.103, 25 February 2015. PDF
- Dutton, M.A., & Goodman, L.A. (2005). Coercion in intimate partner violence: Toward a new conceptualization. Sex Roles, 52(11–12), 743–756. doi:10.1007/s11199-005-4196-6
- Johnson, M.P., Leone, J.M., & Xu, Y. (2014). Intimate terrorism and situational couple violence in general surveys: Ex-spouses required. Violence Against Women, 20(2), 186–207. doi:10.1177/1077801214521324
- Williams, J.M.G., Barnhofer, T., Crane, C., Hermans, D., Raes, F., Watkins, E., & Dalgleish, T. (2007). Autobiographical memory specificity and emotional disorder. Psychological Bulletin, 133(1), 122–148. doi:10.1037/0033-2909.133.1.122
- Leonetti, C. (2024). Missing coercive control in family court proceedings. William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice, 30(3), 447. PDF
Educational content. Not therapy, legal, or financial advice. Nothing on this page is an assessment of any person or any relationship, and nothing on it is a prediction about any court.