‘A Man’s Home is His Castle. And Mine is a Cage’: A feminist Political Economy Analysis of Economic Abuse in Victoria
There is increasing understanding that economic abuse coincides with other forms of family violence and abuse, as the perpetrator is driven to exert power and control. Despite this, its hidden nature and the various forms it takes means it is seldom addressed in system responses. In today’s post, Dr Madeleine Ulbrick (@MaddyUlbrick) of Good Shepherd Australia New Zealand (@GoodAdvocacy) shares insights from her recently completed PhD on economic abuse responses in Victoria. She argues that to effectively achieve women’s physical security, their material security must be prioritised.
Although rarely mentioned as a legal or policy consideration, economic abuse frequently occurs alongside other forms of violence and abuse. My research examined how economic abuse manifests and is responded to in Victoria, using a feminist political economy method – a necessary approach to the global issue of men’s violence against women. My findings reflect 80 interviews conducted with victim-survivors of economic abuse and judicial officers, legal practitioners, and family violence service providers across metropolitan, regional, and rural Victoria.
The interview data reveals the routes through which such abuse affects women, from rape and sexual abuse, to trafficking and malicious abuse of the immigration system; dowry related ‘bride burning’; domestic servitude and unwaged labour in the family business; exploitation and manipulation of legal, social welfare, financial, disaster relief and insurance systems; to insurmountable debt; and escalating, inescapable, and life threatening forms of physical violence. Together it represents new empirical data on the dimensions and experiences of economic abuse. It reveals both the ways in which it is enabled by social structures and the ways in which law fails to intervene and, indeed, too often operates to perpetuate it.
I also explored coerced debt as a key aspect of economic abuse. The victim-survivors’ stories highlighted how surprisingly easy it is for perpetrators to manufacture a situation of long-term, intractable indebtedness and associated hardship for victims of this form of family violence.
Legal participants described situations where victims were ‘literally used as a human line of credit’, and noted that the period immediately after childbirth particularly exposes women to a vulnerability that perpetrators exploit, in which they treat women as a resource, and in which financial entities are blatantly ignoring obvious pressure.
However, my research also found that even where banks do respond positively and proactively to the presence of economic abuse, such intervention may not mitigate the risk of violence, and in some cases may exacerbate it. For one victim participant, blocking a line of credit resulted in extreme violence. In her words:
‘When I got home, and he discovered – oh my gosh, I reckon that was the closest I’d ever been to being killed in my entire life by him. He was so furious at what I had done. And I hadn’t taken anything that was his. I’d just safeguarded what was mine.’
The stories of victim-survivors in this way brought to light the extensive and multi-faceted experiences of economic abuse and its consequences, and compellingly established the seriousness and risks of economic abuse, contrary to its classification in legal and other contexts as a less serious form of abuse. Consequently, I argue that risk and security discourses need to be expanded to incorporate women’s experiences of economic abuse.
The nature, dynamics, and consequences of economic abuse
While economic abuse is increasingly recognised as a form of family violence, current responses seldom identify it as the facilitative pathway to other forms of violence and control, limiting women’s options for freedom. Photo by Mark Fletcher-Brown on Unsplash
Victorian legislation defines economic abuse as behaviour that is coercive, deceptive or which unreasonably controls another person in a way that denies economic or financial autonomy, or withholds the financial support necessary for meeting reasonable living expenses. It can involve the deprivation of social mobility (for example, denying participation in the labour market), as well as forced and unwaged labour in the home or family business. Economic abuse can include covertly redrawing on mortgage facilities or coercing a victim to unlawfully claim social security payments. It can also involve generating debt in a victim’s name by applying for a loan without the victim’s knowledge or consent, or by pressuring the victim to sign a contract. Economic abuse represents a course of conduct that is repetitious in nature, long-term and ongoing. It is part of a complex system of abuse which keeps the victim financially dependent and socially isolated. It can result in poverty, homelessness, and loss of custody of children. At the extreme end, economic abuse fractures the life course of the victim irreparably.
Economic abuse is considered a hidden crisis; a silent form of family violence that is often not recognised by victims themselves, and as such, under-reported. Because it is a non-criminal form of family violence, it is generally perceived as less threatening, occurring in more subtle ways, and therefore considered to pose less of an immediate risk.
Due to its hidden nature, it is also difficult to recognise and measure, which means that the true prevalence or scale of economic abuse in Australia (or internationally) is unknown. Notwithstanding this, attempts to measure this problem show that in much the same way as all other forms of family violence, economic abuse is gendered, and data from family violence services reveals a bleak picture: between 77 and 99 percent of women presenting to family violence services report a history of economic abuse – and this is consistent with international accounts.
Economic abuse also diminishes quality of life for those who experience it. International research suggests it can cause debilitating chronic health consequences and mental health symptoms. This was similarly reflected in my research, for example one victim-survivor described serious and ongoing health issues, including pelvic and sexual health problems, that kept her out of the workforce. The victim-survivors in this research connected economic abuse with sexual violence, and the commodification of their bodies, exploited as currency.
Economic abuse is fundamentally embedded in the gendered processes and structures of society, and through the devaluation of care and domestic labour at household and transnational levels. It is enmeshed in the gendered dynamics of relational exchange, and domestic financial management systems - specifically the ritual of “joint” sharing emblematic of heterosexual marriage-like relationships. At its core, economic abuse is an expression of power and control.
No accessible legal remedy
Multiple legal problems, across intersecting jurisdictions, also arise in the post-separation family violence context, which cause financial detriment for women. Indeed, the average number of legal problems for victims of family violence is 20, compared to 2.4 for people not affected by family violence, and many of these are a direct or indirect consequence of economic abuse. Nevertheless, there are limited options for victims to recover from economic abuse, through either legal or non-legal avenues. For example, while economic abuse is legally recognised in Victoria as a form of family violence in the Family Violence Prevention Act 2008 (Vic), and can form the basis of an intervention order, the range of behaviours that encompass economic abuse are highly diverse, and therefore broader than the legal definition covers. Furthermore, while the Magistrates’ Court can exercise family law jurisdiction for division of smaller property pools, there is a reluctance to do so, and there exists a jurisdictional (financial) limit, which has not been re-evaluated since 1998. Therefore, the civil system is often not an avenue where economic abuse can realistically be addressed. For victim/survivors, risk and trauma are associated with the family law process, and abuse of legal systems can be used by perpetrators as well, to inflict further harm and derail successful legal action.
Currently, victims must endure a family law system that appears incapable of facilitating a safe and effective financial remedy for economic abuse. Recent research in Victoria found that victims of economic abuse who pursue property settlement (which in many cases, may consist entirely of debt or superannuation), face legal costs representing 126 percent of the settlement amount. This means the majority of victim/survivors are in a significantly worse financial position even if they win in court.
Moreover, there are no legal protections for victims of family violence related debt. The family law provisions for dealing with joint debt are not commonly exercised and there are numerous practical impediments to the effective use of those provisions.
Economic abuse: an ‘economy’ of violence
Jacqui True’s influential body of work on the political economy approach to family violence has been extended by this research; specifically, the notion that denial of material security corresponds with denial of physical security. As others have argued, while family violence is increasingly recognised as a serious crime, it is not perceived as a critical security risk in the way that other more public crimes, such as terrorism, are. Economic abuse is an even more peripheral security concern. This rendering of risk and security makes gender invisible and excludes and undervalues women’s security.
Economic abuse is often dealt with separately to other forms of family violence. The silos in existing literature, understandings and approaches have meant that there have been very few, if any, systemic efforts to connect economic abuse as a facilitator of violence rather than merely as an individual tactic of abuse. In this way, by focusing on examining differing types of violence, there has been a failure to recognise the extent to which different forms of violence against women are connected.
My findings emphasise that it is a mistake to consider a single incident outside the broader context. For many women, experiences of non-physical and physical violence ‘seep into one another’, radiating out in multiple, diverse directions. Considering this, I argue that we must deal more directly with the centrality of power and control, and the influence of structural violence, to economic abuse. Economic abuse must be regarded as a serious material and physical security concern in the lives of women who experience family violence. Economic abuse was experienced in different ways in the lives of survivors in my research. Yet in all cases, it was experienced alongside other forms of violence and abuse. I contextualise this violence as colliding with the unequal structures of society and suggest that economic abuse and the insecurities it produces heighten women’s vulnerability to serious and ongoing violence.
Securitising an ‘invisible’ risk
My thesis also explored risk and the ways that the social construction of gender, neoliberalism and the politics of mobility produce gendered risks, vulnerabilities and insecurities. As one legal participant said:
‘It boils down to the fact that economic abuse is considered low risk. But more so, it is considered a civil issue. That’s the problem’.
The positioning of economic abuse as low risk, and the perception that it is difficult to prove due to evidence-gathering difficulties, also means it is not being identified regularly by police. Because the police apply for the majority of family violence intervention orders, the overall lack of understanding among police, and its invisibility in a system focused on discrete incidents, in relation to economic abuse is concerning. The prevalence of economic abuse, coupled with the lack of reporting/identification, means that a large percentage of family violence intervention orders have been marred by these gaps in understanding. This strongly undermines women’s security.
By taking the risk of economic abuse into account and matching interventions to the level of control in the relationship, the escalation and repetition of other intersecting forms of family violence could be forestalled.
We need a reconsideration of the concepts of risk and security to encompass economic abuse. Risk needs to be understood through a lens of intersectional axes of oppression, which views material security as central to physical security. This is a necessary corrective to dominant approaches that do not fully comprehend the structures that both condition and heighten women’s vulnerability to violence. In this way, my findings reorient the risk framework, so that economic abuse is read as a legitimate risk to women’s everyday security. Indeed, economic abuse creates a situation in which the pursuit of security is almost impossible to navigate.
Our understanding of risk and family violence has been narrowly construed through the siloing of the differing forms that coercive control take, and this is especially so in understanding the risks of economic abuse to women’s safety. As a result, there has been a restricting of women’s access to recourse and remedy and a limiting of their ability to protect their physical security. As Sandra Walklate reflects, ‘the everyday insecurities that impact most substantially on women are hidden or distorted, excluding women’s experiences of violence from mainstream knowledges of risk and everyday security’. To overcome this impasse inspires reformulations of risk that push ‘the boundaries of how everyday security might be differently conceived to better account for the gendered realities of women’s lives’. We need an alternative framing of risk, which prioritises women’s material and physical security as inseparable. Alongside this, the cultural norms that sustain and enable men’s violence against women must be confronted, and the structural forces of inequality dismantled. The challenge remains as to how we can make this considerable security risk visible.
This post is part of the Women's Policy Action Tank initiative to analyse government policy using a gendered lens. View our other policy analysis pieces here.
Posted by @SusanMaury @GoodAdvocacy