I was advised to do mine in different ways by different agencies. You could describe noteable incidents in date order, with dates and specifically the words he used. This may help you if you get to the stage where you are cross examined.
Coercive control is a pattern of behaviour, so you might want to organise your reports of incidents into particular themes, eg financial, sexual, physical violence, etc. However, it needs to be relevant to the children and you will probably be asked to streamline it to whatever is relevant to the children’s welfare.
I had substantial ‘logs’ of abuse but no one was really interested in anything other than where it is relevant to the children. Much abuse happened in front of the children, which was why a lot of mine was deemed relevant but other stuff I just left out in the end, eg, my ex hacked into my email account and even though this is against the law, family court did want to get into it as they were purely concerned with the children.
Google ‘Scott schedule’ - there are templates online (I think the website is family law advice). This is what I was asked to write.
The other thing is that you need actual hard evidence. If it comes down to your word against his it is very difficult to make a finding, I had bags of texts, emails, letters and also a report from a professional body that found my ex guilty of dishonesty and fraud, and even still the court tried to dissuade me from fact finding, even though Cafcass said it was necessary. In the end we did go ahead, and my ex was found ‘guilty’. Download your texts/WhatsApp and emails. Copy the really bad ones that show his pattern of abuse.
The only thing they were concerned with that didn’t directly involve the children was physical and sexual abuse, which they acknowledged that this was affecting my wellbeing and hence my ability to care for the children, but also I had taken time of work because of this and this was recorded in my medical records.
The court are not bothered with ‘he said she said’ type of stuff, and you can really only go into this if you yourself are squeaky clean. I also got the impression that they are sick to death with the word gaslighting - in his ‘defence’, 100 percent of which was lies, he said it was all my fault because I gaslighted him. The judge rolled her eyes and asked him for an example, but he could not provide one (which is why I say write down specifically what has been said).
With regards to the police, I think if you are able to show that you have not fabricated the issue of domestic abuse out of nowhere since separating and as such have reported it in the past, then I suppose that gives your version of events credibility. However, that doesn’t necessarily have to be the police - you may have emailed women’s aid or even texted a friend to ask for advice/help at the time. It doesn’t have to be police - there are lots of reasons why someone does not report things of this nature to the police. I reported my ex’s harassment because I wanted him to stop, and had a couple of 999 calls when he was violent but each time the police were useless. They do not get emotional abuse. One officer said to me ‘it’s not a crime to be nasty’, another said ‘he’s just being a dick’, another said ‘it’s just a bad break up’, then it was ‘it’s because he has mental health issues, just try to ignore him’. Absolutely useless. Unless your life is in imminent danger, they are not interested. I was told eventually that my ex would be charged but then they came back and said it didn’t meet evidential threshold for coercive control, despite Cafcass saying it did, and despite CPS online guidelines. Unless you have evidence, eg photos/ medical reports of injuries, they are not interested.
Another side to the issue of police reporting is that my ex did fabricate a load of lies and then reported my so called ‘violence’ to the police. Obviously they dismissed it as no one ever spoke to me about it, but he had crime numbers to put on his witness statement. It did not give his stories one ounce of credibility- anyone can report anything to the police and they give you an incident number regardless of what is done about it.
It’s so frustrating as I found the constant emotional abuse worse than the physical/ sexual stuff, but in court it was mainly about the physical and sexual stuff and utterly humiliating and traumatic to keep describing the things my ex has done to me, and then have him cross examine me over it. The emotional abuse has affected me so much more, but is harder to prove and evidence.
Good luck - I know how stressful this is xx