Report on Financial Abuse

"Financial abuse is a serious form of abuse that deprives women of sufficient financial resources to fulfill their basic needs.It is based around gendered issues of power, coercion and control and can cause a range of poor health outcomes for the women who experience it. Financial abuse of women in intimate partner relationships happens when men control and limit women’s access to, and use of, money. It is a profoundly under-recognised phenomenon as it is deeply hidden within societal expectations that couples will equitably share their financial resources for the good of the whole family. Financial abuse may lead to a deeply concealed feminisation of poverty within relationships, regardless of the overall assets a family may hold.

Following relationship breakdown, financial abuse commonly continued through minimisation of child support responsibilities, constrained options for affordable housing and men’s misuse of bureaucratic procedures designed to mediate the relationships between families and money.

This report foregrounds the detrimental and costly role that domestic abuse plays in our community. A failure to recognise these behaviours as abusive will both further embed them as acceptable models of behaviour within couples,and reinforce their usage as a means via which men can deny their financial responsibility for the costs of their children’s upbringing.

All women will benefit from a definition of financial abuse that takes the problem out of the realm of personal relationships and identifies it as a recognised form of domestic abuse.Taking the issue of financial abuse seriously is fundamental to an understanding of often deeply hidden ways that patriarchal relationships continue to disadvantage women and children and of the detrimental and costly role domestic abuse plays in our community."

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