About
An independent practice, built to hold up under cross-examination.
Coercive Control Canada is the practice of Elizabeth Joy Dubois, MSW, RSW — a Registered Social Worker who prepares independent expert reports on coercive control. The practice exists to make coercive control clear and usable for the people who have to weigh it: the courts, counsel on both sides, clinicians, and the services now preparing for a new offence.
She prepares independent expert reports and delivers professional education and training.
How the work is done
Independence
Retainers are accepted from counsel for either party — including responding parties in family cases and defence counsel in criminal matters. In every case the duty is to the court: fair, objective and impartial, as the rules for expert witnesses require (Rule 20.1 and Form 20.2).
Method
The work is about how a pattern is assessed and explained for a court: reading events in date order so the shape of things becomes clear, telling a genuine pattern apart from a difficult relationship, and giving an honest account of what a record can and cannot establish.
Mentorship & membership
Ongoing professional mentorship with Dr. Deborah Sinclair, a leading Canadian expert witness in the field. Member in good standing of the OCSWSSW (#811905), the OASW, and the AFCC; RISA-certified.
Public education
Alongside this practice, Elizabeth Joy Dubois writes and publishes public education on two other sites: betrayaltrauma.ca, for people living with a partner’s compulsive sexual behaviour, and sexaddictionhelp.ca, for people in recovery from it and the clinicians working with them. Both carry free material and paid courses, and she has a commercial interest in both. They are named here rather than left to be found.
The three sites are one body of work. Coercive control, what it does to a partner’s hold on what is real, and compulsive sexual behaviour turn on the same thing: who in a relationship gets to decide what happened — and what a culture that trains men to rank women has to do with how a man learns he is entitled to.
That is the subject of the work. It does not stand in for the material in any individual file, and no opinion given in a report is drawn from anything else.
No testimonials, outcome statistics, or case studies of matters handled appear anywhere on this site — by choice, and consistent with professional advertising standards.
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