Specialist Accreditation Conference 2024: Coercive control as a criminal offence

Carolina Soto, barrister at Black Chambers, maintains a practice in criminal and family law. Soto has worked in criminal law for approximately two decades and will be speaking at the conference.

The session will include the particularisation of the “new” offence, the role “culture” may play in prosecution and/or defence of a coercive control charge. The session will also look at relevant family law cases involving coercive control and the role of evidence across both criminal and family jurisdictions.

Pursuing a career in law

Soto was inspired to pursue a career in law after watching “Dead Man Walking,” the iconic 1995 American crime movie starring Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn. “I saw the movie, it had a really profound impact on me, and I thought I definitely want to work in criminal law,” she says.

Soto was interested in criminal law because it’s an interesting area of law which connects to other areas of law such as family law, but it also stems from her childhood. Soto grew up in a household where there was domestic violence. As a child, she thought that if she ever became a lawyer, she would work in this area of law so that people, particularly children, who live in that kind of environment can get the help that they need.

Soto was admitted as a solicitor in 2005 and worked at Legal Aid for a decade, working exclusively in criminal law.

“I really enjoyed it, but I wish I had moved into other areas within Legal Aid.

“I wish I had done family law. I wish I had done care and protection law. Those are things that I just took it upon myself to learn when I went to the bar. But I had a considerable Local Court practice. … I suppose it laid the foundation of the work that I do now,” she says.

Work as a barrister

Carolina was called to the bar in 2018 and specialises in domestic violence matters across the Local and District Court in both first instance and appellate matters.

“I really wanted to diversify my practice because I knew that I would become a better advocate for people particularly women if I had a better understanding of how, after we finished with the criminal law matter, how that sort of filters into family law.

My practice at the moment is probably a hybrid of the two, criminal and family [law] … a large portion of my work is domestic violence related or family violence in the family law space,” she says.

What she enjoys most about her work and the most challenging aspects

Given the area of law, Soto says that the “content of the work can be really distressing. People that are interacting with you are coming at a time where they are highly stressed, they are very emotional … the hardest part is taking that on board and making sure that you can draw a line between … work that I’m doing versus taking the work home.”

But on the flip side, Soto says that the “most enjoyable part [of the work] is the clients.

“I know that’s a very odd thing to say, particularly in the domestic violence space, where you are forming relationships with your really passionate, devoted instructing solicitors who want a particular outcome for a client that might be leaving a domestic violence situation.”

In those circumstances, counsel and the instructing solicitors are both invested in the same outcomes.

What to expect from the conference?

Soto will be speaking at session three on day one of the conference. She says “there’s a lack of information out there in relation to coercive control because it’s such a new and evolving area.

“But I don’t think there’s quite a lot of information about coercive control, how it affects the criminal law space, but also how that might affect family and vice versa. The entire point … is to try and amalgamate those two areas”

Soto acknowledges that the family law jurisdiction is “far more evolved in the family violence space than the criminal jurisdiction. … I think that there definitely needs to be a lot more done in the criminal law space and … we can really learn a lot from what’s happening in the family jurisdiction and vice versa.”

The session will be important for family lawyers as it will feature a discussion on what happens if there is a coercive control charge (or charges) and how it may affect family law proceedings.

The specialist accreditation conference will be held on 15 – 16 August 2024. Day one of the conference will be held at the International Convention Centre, Sydney and day two will consist of a half-day of online webinars. For more information about the conference, including registration details, please click here.