HB 2995: Coercive Control In Arizona

ByCarlton Research

What Arizona’s “Alec and Lydia Act” Reveals About Coercive Control in Custody Decisions

June 20, 2026

When a parenting dispute reaches an Arizona family court, the governing question is the best interests of the child. A bill awaiting the governor’s signature would change how that question gets answered when domestic violence is alleged. House Bill 2995, named the Alec and Lydia Act, passed both chambers of the Arizona Legislature and, as of June 20, 2026, awaits the signature of Governor Katie Hobbs, according to KJZZ reporting on June 15. It has not yet been signed into law. The bill is instructive less for any single provision than for what its structure reveals about how coercive control is entering American custody law.

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A case that exposed a gap

The legislation is named for two children, Alec and Lydia, who were killed by their father during court-granted unsupervised parenting time in May 2024 before he took his own life, as reported by FOX 10 Phoenix. Their mother, Hope Hooton, has described a custody arrangement that granted unsupervised access despite what she characterized as documented domestic violence and coercive control. The bill, sponsored by Representative Lisa Fink, passed the House on June 11 by a 51 to 4 vote after Senate amendments, reflecting broad legislative support.

What that history exposes is a structural feature of family law: the analysis traditionally turns on discrete, provable incidents of physical harm. Coercive control, a term the sociologist Evan Stark used to describe a pattern of domination that need not involve physical violence, tends to be invisible to an incident-based framework. The bill is an attempt to make that pattern legally legible.

Folding coercive control into the definition

The central move is definitional. HB 2995 expands the meaning of domestic violence in Arizona’s custody statutes to include coercive control, described as a pattern of threatening, coercive, or emotionally abusive conduct, according to the Arizona Legislature’s bill summary. The bill enumerates specific behaviors that can constitute the pattern, including threats to kill or injure, monitoring of finances, stalking, harassment, and the use of surveillance or tracking technology.

This reveals a recurring design choice in coercive control legislation. Lawmakers must translate an academic concept into language a court can apply, and they tend to do so by listing concrete behaviors rather than relying on an abstract standard alone. The enumerated list narrows judicial discretion and gives litigants a vocabulary, though scholars such as Julia Tolmie have noted that defining a cumulative pattern in statute carries definitional and evidentiary complexity that incident-based offenses do not.

A presumption that shifts the default

The bill’s second structural feature is a rebuttable presumption: awarding legal decision-making or parenting time to a parent found to have committed domestic violence is presumed contrary to the child’s best interests, as described in the BillTrack50 analysis of the measure. The presumption can be overcome, but the burden moves onto the parent against whom the finding was made.

This matters because a presumption changes the default outcome rather than merely adding a factor for a judge to weigh. The bill pairs that shift with an evidentiary standard, a finding by a preponderance of the evidence, and a rule that a domestic violence claim need not be corroborated by another witness or exhibit, per AZFamily’s reporting. Together, those choices reveal a legislative judgment that the older approach placed too heavy a proof burden on the parent raising abuse.

Why the structure matters beyond Arizona

The significance is comparative. Arizona is not writing on a blank slate; it is following a path. Coercive control entered United States family law incrementally, and the same architecture, a definition that includes non-physical patterns plus a custody presumption, recurs across states. Examining the structure rather than the status helps explain why these reforms tend to concentrate in family and civil law rather than the criminal code: the family court already asks a predictive, welfare-based question, which accommodates a pattern-based concept more readily than a criminal trial built around proof beyond a reasonable doubt for a specific act.

The evidence behind the concern is not confined to advocacy. Research on the economic and safety consequences of intimate partner violence, including work by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, documents that non-physical abuse produces measurable financial and psychological harm. That body of research is part of why legislators increasingly treat coercive control as relevant to a child’s environment, not a private grievance.

The open questions

Analyzing the bill structurally also surfaces what it does not resolve. Identifying a coercive control pattern still depends on a judge’s ability to recognize it, which is why commentators consistently pair these reforms with calls for judicial and professional training. Whether a custody presumption produces safer outcomes, or generates new disputes over what counts as a rebuttal, is an empirical question that will be answered case by case. For anyone navigating these issues, accurate guidance comes from a licensed attorney and from primary legal sources rather than summaries.

Governor Katie Hobbs signed HB 2995 into law on June 22, 2026, and later Carlton Research analysis of the enacted statute appears on the hub page for Arizona’s coercive control law (HB 2995).

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Disclaimer

Coercive control law moves fast. Jurisdictions are actively criminalizing it, amending definitions, and changing the scope of litigation. This article is current as of its date of publication and may not reflect subsequent changes. It is provided for general educational purposes and is not legal advice. A bill on the Arizona governor’s desk would change how family courts weigh domestic violence in custody decisions. House Bill 2995, the Alec and Lydia Act, passed both chambers and awaits signature as of June 2026. It is named for two children killed during court-granted unsupervised parenting time in 2024.

The bill is notable less for any single clause than for its structure. It folds coercive control, a pattern of non-physical domination, into the legal definition of domestic violence, enumerates specific behaviors that can establish that pattern, and creates a rebuttable presumption against awarding custody to a parent found to have committed domestic violence. That same architecture appears across US states, almost always in family and civil law rather than criminal codes.

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