#economicviolence is trending —What is it exactly?
Financial Abuse
This form of abuse is one of the least commonly known but one of the most powerful tactic of entrapping a victims in the relationship. It is so powerful that many victims of abuse describe it as the main reason that they stayed in an abusive relationship or went back to one.
Some forms of financial abuse include: giving you an allowance, not letting you have your own money, hiding family assets, running up debt, interfering with your job, and ruining your credit.
More: National Network to End Domestic Violence
Also
Angela K. Littwin of Texas has written Escaping Battered Credit: A Proposal for Repairing Credit Reports Damaged by Domestic Violence, forthcoming in the University of Pennsylsvania Law Review. Here’s the abstract:
Debt and domestic violence are connected in ways not previously imagined. A new type of debt - which I have labeled “coerced debt” - is emerging from abusive relationships. Coerced debt occurs when the abuser in a violent relationship obtains credit in the victim’s name via fraud or coercion. It ranges from secretly taking out credit cards in victims’ names to coercing victims into signing loan documents to tricking victims into relinquishing their rights to the family home. As wide-ranging as these tactics can be, one consequence consistently emerges: ruined credit ratings.
Coerced debt wreaks havoc on credit scores, which is particularly problematic because the use of credit reports is no longer confined to traditional lenders. Employers, landlords, and utility companies all make extensive use of credit scores in screening. Thus, a credit score that has been damaged by coerced debt can make it prohibitively difficult for victims to obtain employment, housing, or basic utilities, all of which are requirements for establishing an independent household.
Page Three of this Forbes 2011 article includes a gif of another article, from the New York Times: Aggressive Women Destroy Marriage. The entire article is worth reading: Women’s Economic Power Decreases Domestic Violence Against Both Genders
Jeni Klugman from the World Bank in an interview.
This PDF from an Australian organization, Good Shepherd Youth and Family Service, has good information.
Economic abuse is a form of domestic and family
violence involving behaviours that negatively
affect a person’s finances and undermine that
person’s efforts to become economically
independent (Weaver et al. 2009). Economic
abuse is also referred to as economic control,
economic deprivation, economic violence,
financial abuse or financial control. It often
occurs together with other forms of violence and
may overlap as part of a pattern of controlling
behaviour. Economic abuse has only recently
been recognised in Australian domestic and
family violence laws. It has been described as
including:• unreasonable controlling behaviour that
denies a person’s financial autonomy
• withholding financial support reasonably
necessary for the maintenance of a partner
• coercing a partner to relinquish control over
assets
• unreasonably preventing a person from taking
part in decisions over household expenditure
or the disposition of joint property
• coercing a person to claim social security
payments
• preventing a person from seeking or keeping
employment. (ALRC/NSWLRC 2010, pp. 196-
197).ii