Everyone has a duty to call out coercive control, doctor says

Dr Niamh Collins said she was aware of people dying in domestic abuse cases. File picture. 

Emergency medicine consultant Dr Niamh Collins has said that everyone has a duty to call out bad behaviour if they witness it, saying society needed to recognise coercive control and to hold each other to account.

Dr Collins, who was instrumental in assisting the woman involved in the first coercive control case in the State, told RTÉ radio’s News at One that she had known patients who died as a result of domestic violence and she had felt compelled “to step up” and “go the extra mile” for the woman at the centre of the case.