A strategic briefing for investors, board prospects, and institutional partners — who we are, what we've built, where we're going, and why the moment for this work is now.
Kill the Precedent exists to interrupt the institutional patterns — in family courts, child welfare systems, law enforcement, and the medical and legal infrastructure surrounding intimate partner violence — that misread survivors as unstable, abusers as credible parents, and neurodivergent children as evidence of parental neglect.
Our mission is to give survivors language for what was done to them, give practitioners the training they should already have received, and give civil rights litigators the framework they need to move these cases differently in court.
Intimate partner violence is among the most documented and least addressed public health crises in the United States. Brain injuries caused by intimate partner violence affect more Americans than military combat and professional football combined. Coercive control — the sustained pattern of psychological subordination that defines most abusive relationships — is recognized in academic literature, criminalized in the United Kingdom, Scotland, Ireland, and parts of Australia and Canada, and largely absent from American law.
Family courts and child welfare systems, almost universally untrained in coercive control, routinely misread its symptoms in survivors as evidence of mental instability, while abusers' polished public presentations are read as credibility. Neurodivergent children's documented behaviors get reframed as parental neglect. The result is a structural pattern that fails survivors, fails children, fails the practitioners who entered these professions to help, and reproduces the harm it was built to prevent.
The field is at an inflection point. International legal precedent is established. American institutions are beginning to follow. In 2022, the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges added coercive control to the model legislation it promotes to state lawmakers. Multiple U.S. states have adopted coercive control language in civil and family law over the past five years, with criminalization pending in New York and active work in others.
The reform is coming. The question is whether the educational, legal, and cultural infrastructure exists to make implementation real once it does. KTP is positioned to be the institutional voice that closes that infrastructure gap.
KTP operates on four integrated pillars. Each reinforces the others; the integration is the strategy.
Trade publishing and public media — giving the broad public the language and framework most are missing.
Professional curriculum development and licensed training delivery — equipping the practitioners making decisions about families with the literacy they currently lack.
Research, model legislative language, and civil rights case literature — providing civil rights litigators and policy advocates with the documented patterns needed to move cases and statutes forward.
Accessible distribution of materials, ongoing public publishing, and the operational sister organization Phoenix Rising — giving survivors both language for their experience and a structural model for healing without family separation.
KTP publishes three books in deliberate sequence.
Written for the general reader and distributed nationally in paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats. Its purpose is cultural reframe — giving the public the language and framework for understanding coercive control, institutional failure, and the civil rights dimensions of family court and child welfare.
Contains the same core material expanded with citations, case literature, statutory frameworks, and the complete KTP curriculum modules embedded as appendices. Designed for adoption by law schools, social work programs, court systems, domestic violence organizations, and law enforcement training programs.
Held for later release, after active child welfare proceedings are resolved — both for legal protection and to allow the narrative its full arc.
Two interlocking continuing-education-grade modules, designed for licensing to jurisdictions, universities, and institutional clients.
Covers the architecture of coercive control, the dark triad personality presentations that fool trained professionals, reactive abuse and provocation cycles, and the institutional patterns that replicate abuser tactics in the systems intended to interrupt them.
Covers behavioral literacy for autism, ADHD, sensory processing differences, and other neurological presentations routinely misread as evidence of neglect — paired with the legal protections under IDEA, ADA, and Section 504 that make such misreadings actionable civil rights violations.
Both modules are designed for Continuing Legal Education (CLE) and Continuing Education Unit (CEU) accreditation. Curriculum licensing represents the recurring revenue spine of KTP's long-term financial model.
KTP's operational sister organization, Phoenix Rising Cooperative Living, is structured around the principle that healing happens better when families remain intact and supported, rather than separated and routed through fragmented services. Phoenix Rising begins in Year One as a documentation and policy project, with operational cooperative housing as a multi-year goal that scales with KTP's revenue.
KTP is structured as a California for-profit LLC. The for-profit structure is deliberate: it allows the organization to operate without grant-cycle dependency, retains founder direction at the formative stage, treats survivor expertise as professional knowledge worth being paid for, and supports the commercial licensing model that drives long-term sustainability. A 501(c)(3) structure may be considered later — particularly for Phoenix Rising as it scales operationally.
KTP is not a legal services organization. KTP is the educational and research infrastructure that civil rights attorneys, policy advocates, and legislative drafters draw on. The research and curriculum are designed to support work under four primary federal frameworks:
42 U.S.C. § 1983 — the federal civil rights cause of action against state actors. IDEA — Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. ADA — Americans with Disabilities Act. Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act.
International precedent is now substantial and accelerating. The United States is beginning to follow.
| Jurisdiction | Status | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| United Kingdom | Passed 2015 | Criminalized coercive control under the Serious Crime Act |
| Scotland | Passed 2018 | Gold-standard Domestic Abuse Act — the most comprehensive in the world |
| Ireland | Passed 2019 | Domestic Violence Act includes coercive control criminalization |
| New South Wales | Passed 2024 | Criminalized coercive control statewide |
| Queensland | Passed 2025 | Hannah's Law — maximum penalties of fourteen years |
| European Court of Human Rights | Active directive | Called on all 46 member states to include coercive control in DV definitions |
| Hawaii | Criminalized | Only U.S. state to have criminalized coercive control as of late 2025 |
| California | Civil/Family | Rebuttable presumption against awarding custody to coercive controllers |
| Connecticut | Civil 2021 | Jennifer's Law — expanded DV definition to include coercive control |
| Massachusetts | Civil 2024 | Expanded DV definition to include coercive control |
| New York | Pending | Senate Bill 5650 — would establish coercive control as a Class E felony |
| NCJFCJ Model Legislation | 2022 | National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges added coercive control — state-level adoption now actively in motion |
With no institutional funding, Kill the Precedent has produced:
Fully deployed website at killtheprecedent.com — 48 pages of original research, analysis, and advocacy content
Interactive research database linking foster care outcomes to trafficking, homelessness, and aging-out trajectories — 28 sourced entries
Complete drafts of both the Coercive Control Curriculum and Neurodivergence Curriculum — CLE/CEU accreditation designed in
31 original blog posts covering TBI, qualified immunity, coercive control, Dark Triad, family court, child welfare, DV funding, and legislative reform
7 printable training briefs — Vols. 1–7 — in active use, free to download, covering reactive abuse, quicksand model, neurodivergence, Dark Triad, and preemptive narrative control
Complete Reform & Accountability page with documented legislative wins, 8-point agenda, insurance model, and misconduct registry framework
Phoenix Rising organizational page — cooperative housing concept with funding development targeting HUD, DOJ, Cal OES, HCD
Let's Kill the Precedent podcast — co-host Kristan T. Harris of The Rundown Live confirmed, launching within 30 days with full submission infrastructure live
Brand infrastructure — full design system, stylesheet, editorial voice — deployed consistently across 48 pages
Strategic partnerships — Voices of Hope / Empowerment Online featured, Daniel Ryan Cotler (Voiceless No More) recognized, cross-promotional relationships in development
Toni Bones is a civil liberties activist with more than a decade of documented organizing experience, including work with CopBlock and on the ground during the Ferguson uprising. Her background is in citizen media, civil disobedience, and pattern documentation of institutional misconduct.
She is also a survivor of severe intimate partner violence, traumatic brain injury, and sustained coercive control — and a survivor, currently, of the family court and child welfare systems whose failures KTP exists to interrupt. She brings to this work the rare standing of someone who has lived through what the materials document, and who has the analytical capacity, organizing experience, and writing rigor to externalize that lived knowledge into resources others can use.
In the past nine months, while continuing to build KTP and navigating an active child welfare proceeding, she has rebuilt her own legal and financial infrastructure — securing identity documentation, banking, employment, transportation, and stable housing — from a baseline created by years of documented coercive control. The same period produced the bulk of the curriculum drafts, the research database, 48 pages of deployed site content, and KTP's complete foundational infrastructure.
The execution capacity is demonstrated.
The international precedent is established. American institutions are beginning to follow. The model legislation exists. The legislative momentum is real. What is missing is the educational, training, and litigation infrastructure to make implementation possible — and that infrastructure is what KTP has been building, quietly and rigorously, for nearly a decade.
The reform will happen. The question is whether the field will be ready when it does. We are getting it ready.
Kill the Precedent is actively seeking mission-aligned board members, investors, institutional partners, and advocates. If this briefing resonates — reach out.
letskilltheprecedent@gmail.com → About the Founder →— Toni Bones