Porthtowan TEDx Speaker on Using AI to Detect Coercive Control

Most people have been told at some point that they’re being too sensitive, or reading too much into things. A speaker at Porthtowan’s first TEDx event reckons artificial intelligence could give them a way to show they were right all along.

A first for Porthtowan

The talk came at TEDxPorthtowan Women, billed as the village’s first event of its kind, held to mark International Women’s Day on 8th March under the theme Breaking the Mould: Every Generation Empowered. Twelve speakers were chosen from 150 applicants.

Among them was Dr Lisa Turner, described as an award-winning coach and forensic AI pioneer, who spoke about where artificial intelligence and human behaviour meet.

The case Lisa made

Lisa’s argument centres on a kind of harm that, by design, is hard to pin down. Gaslighting, coercive control and manipulation work, she says, precisely because they are deniable, subjective and hard to see, which can leave people, and women in particular, stuck in situations where their experience is dismissed.

She pointed to figures to back the scale of it. Research, she said, shows that 97% of cases that escalate to physical violence were preceded by psychological abuse, while psychological abuse remains the hardest form of harm to prove. In the UK, she added, there are 58 reported offences of coercive control for every single conviction.

The workplace came up too. Lisa cited research by Kusy and Holloway across more than 400 organisations, which found that a single toxic person can debilitate individuals, teams and whole organisations, and that the effects linger long after that person has gone.

“Toxic behaviour, whether in workplaces, relationships, or communities, has been almost impossible to prove,” Lisa said. “It’s designed to be deniable, deliberately ambiguous, and emotionally manipulative. But we now have the technology to surface patterns and behavioural indicators in communication that can help people better understand what is happening, trust their reality, and take action backed by evidence.”

How the tools are said to work

Drawing on a PhD in engineering and mathematical modelling, Lisa has built what the release describes as one of the world’s most advanced libraries of custom AI tools, aimed at coaches, leaders and personal growth practitioners. The forensic tools, she says, are designed to detect coercive and manipulative communication patterns in real messages, emails or spoken accounts, with a built-in process meant to strip out bias so the analysis rests on the communication itself rather than who is speaking.

According to Lisa, the tools go further than a simple yes or no answer. “You simply input emails, messages, meeting transcripts, or describe what’s happening in your own words. The AI asks questions, tracks patterns, and measures change over time. However, what makes this revolutionary is that these tools don’t just say ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ They provide TWO critical scores: The Risk Level: How toxic is this behaviour? And the Confidence Score: How certain can we be, based on the quality of evidence?”

What she says it’s for

Lisa set out three uses she believes organisations should be putting their money behind. If you feel targeted, she says, the tools give you evidence to trust your own reality and the language to name what is happening. If you have been accused, she argues they guard against false accusations and point out where there is room to grow, without judgement, because people often find hard truths easier to hear from AI than from another person. And there is prevention: running an email through the system before you send it, and getting back something along the lines of “You might want to rethink that.”

Her wider point was that the technology already exists, and that most people simply don’t know it does. Burnout is high, she says, women are leaving jobs over toxic cultures, and domestic abuse charities continue to describe coercive control as the hardest form of abuse to prove.

“We can give people their power back,” Lisa said. “And we can do it RIGHT NOW with technology that already exists, whether you’re dealing with a toxic workplace, a coercive relationship, or a manipulative community.”

The question she left the room with was a simple one: are we willing?