By way of context to *that* Herald article, in 2000 the Scottish Executive adopted this non-statutory definition of domestic abuse. In 2018, Holyrood legislated for a new offence of a course of abusive behaviour towards a partner or an ex-partner to capture coercive control.

Police records for the last decade give you some empirical sense of the sheer scale of recorded domestic abuse incidents which the criminal law couldn& #39;t reach until the 2018 Act was passed. These are only *recorded* incidents, mind you, so the iceberg principle applies here.

As for the "what about the men/feminism gone mad" argument: absolutely, men can be victims of domestic abuse too. The data strongly supports that, and it matters. But the data also shows it is predominantly experienced by women at the hands of their male partners or ex-partners.