Internalised Conflict Avoidance Capture (ICAC): Conversational Containment, Evidentiary Erosion, and the Invisible Statute of Limitation in Coercive Control

This paper introduces Internalised Conflict Avoidance Capture (ICAC) as a formal sub-condition within the Invisible Statute of Limitation (ISL) framework. ICAC describes a late-stage and post-separation mechanism of coercive control in which conflict avoidance initially adopted as a survival response becomes habitual and self-enforcing, leading victims to knowingly forego actions of clear legal, personal, or moral importance. Building on the author’s prior work on the Ambience Violence Indicator (AVI) and ISL, this paper demonstrates how conversational containment including repeated engagement with perpetrators, their relational proxies, or misaligned professional systems prevents the re-emergence of autonomous cognition. Rather than facilitating recovery, premature conversational processing externalises reflection, interrupts analytical consolidation, and sustains cognitive dependency. The paper further maps ICAC across AVI Layers L4–L7 (Cognitive Distortion, Social Containment, Identity Erosion, and Existential Entrapment), showing how coercive control persists without proximity through internalised suppression of action. Particular attention is given to post-separation contexts, where victim inaction is frequently misclassified as consent, ambivalence, or lack of credibility. The paper argues that delay in recovery produces delay in evidence, resulting in procedural blindness, evidentiary erosion, and prolonged exposure to harm. ICAC is advanced as a legally significant explanatory mechanism that rebuts trait-based misinterpretations of victim behaviour and restores trajectory-based analysis to coercive control recognition, safety assessment, and prosecution.