Examining, and supporting, women’s financial wellbeing at a single point in time will never fully capture, nor compensate for, the effects that experiences of violence have on their lives. Life Course Centre (@lifecourseAust) researchers Dr Alice Campbell (@ColtonCambo), Professor Janeen Baxter (@JaneenBaxter7) and Dr Ella Kuskoff (@EllaKuskoff) from The University of Queensland (@UQ_News) are investigating how violence and multidimensional disadvantage intersects and accumulates for women over the life course.

For Anti-Poverty Week, in October 2021, we undertook special research analysis on the associations between experiences of violence and financial hardship for young Australian women.

*The accumulation of violence, particularly coupled with financial hardship, limits women’s freedoms and choices across the life course.* Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

This analysis clearly demonstrated that violence pushes young women into poverty at rates much higher than for women not subjected to violence.

The Australian Government recognised this link between violence and financial hardship for women when it announced details late last year of an Escaping Violence Payment of up to $5,000, and has since announced further investments in women’s safety and financial counselling services this year.

Our research on the bidirectional links between women’s financial hardship and their experiences of intimate partner violence were echoed in a report this year from the Australian Institute of Criminology that also highlights how these risk have escalated during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Moving beyond ‘point in time’ thinking

It is important to recognise that focussing on women’s economic wellbeing at just one moment in time is insufficient for understanding and ameliorating the full impact that violence has on women’s life course.

In our latest research, published as a Life Course Centre Working Paper, we examine the accumulation of violence and multidimensional disadvantage in the lives of Australian women from childhood through young adulthood (18-29 years). The data we analysed came from more than 8,000 women taking part in the Australian Longitudinal Study on Women’s Health.

Violence against women: freedom, power, and patriarchy

Our work is grounded in a feminist sociological perspective. According to this perspective, violence against women is rooted in inequitable hierarchies of power: the power of individual men over individual women, and the power of men as a social group over women as a social group. The power differentials that give rise to and are reinforced by violence against women constitute patriarchy.

This perspective prompts us to look beyond poverty and towards the ultimate cause and consequence of violence against women: women’s ‘unfreedom’. Unfreedom is a term we have borrowed from the work of economist Amartya Sen, and it describes something more than a lack of material or financial resources.

Unfreedom means disempowerment, blocked opportunities, and social exclusion. It means a lack of freedom to exercise one’s agency and live a meaningful and minimally decent life.

Multidimensional disadvantage as a measure of unfreedom

So how do we measure a concept as complex and seemingly abstract as unfreedom?

Researchers have developed measures of multidimensional disadvantage for this purpose. These are based on the idea that deprivation across multiple domains is a more accurate measure of a person’s unfreedom than deprivation in a single domain.

In our own work, we have created a measure of multidimensional disadvantage that captures deprivation in material, employment, education, health, and social domains. We classify women as very deeply disadvantaged if they are deprived on at least two-thirds of indicators.

As an example, we would consider a young woman to be in very deep disadvantage if she had a low-income healthcare card, was feeling extremely stressed about money, had not completed high school, was not currently studying or working, reported very high levels of psychological distress and poor health overall, and was feeling very stressed about relationships with members of her family.

In other words, we would consider such a woman to be unfree.

The erosion of freedom begins in childhood

For the most disadvantaged women in our study, the erosion of their freedom began in childhood with experiences of violence and economic hardship in their families of origin – experiences that were clearly out of their control and in no way their fault.

Our definition of childhood violence included being the victim of physical, sexual, or emotional abuse, or witnessing the perpetration of violence against a parent.

Of the women in our sample, 63% grew up without violence or economic hardship, 3.6% grew up with economic hardship but no violence, 26.5% experienced violence but no economic hardship, and 7.2% grew up with both violence and economic hardship.

The negative impacts of childhood violence and economic hardship on women’s freedom were already visible as they emerged into adulthood at age 18. Compared to women who grew up without violence or economic hardship, levels of multidimensional disadvantage (on a scale of 0-100) were:

· 4.5 points higher for women who grew up with violence but no economic hardship

· 6.6 points higher for women who grew up with economic hardship but no violence, and

· 9.3 points higher for women who grew up with both violence and economic hardship

Worryingly, as women moved through their 20s, the gap between those who grew up with violence and those who grew up without it widened further.

Some women get caught in cycles of violence

Assaults on women’s freedom continued in young adulthood in the form of intimate partner violence. Consistent with what we know about cycles of violence, women were far more likely to be the victim of intimate partner violence in young adulthood if they had experienced violence in childhood.

Compared to women who grew up without violence or economic hardship, the odds of experiencing intimate partner violence in young adulthood were:

· 2.6 times higher for women who grew up with violence but no economic hardship, and

· 4.1 times higher for women who grew up with violence and economic hardship

Women’s levels of multidimensional disadvantage increased when they had been the victim of intimate partner violence in the past 12 months—by more than two points when they had experienced economic abuse, and by more than one point when they had experienced physical violence, sexual violence, or isolation.

These effects were cumulative and correlated, with many women experiencing multiple forms of intimate partner violence at once.

The accumulation of violence produces women’s unfreedom

Cumulative experiences of violence resulted in a substantially increased risk of women being in deep or very deep disadvantage in young adulthood, as the graph below shows. For example, at our final point of observation, women who grew up with violence and economic hardship and reported intimate partner violence multiple times throughout their 20s were more than 30 times as likely as their most fortunate peers (12.7% vs. 0.4%) to be in very deep disadvantage.

*Predicted probabilities of being in deep and very deep disadvantage in survey wave 6 (2019) by childhood and intimate partner violence (IPV) experiences*

So, what needs to change?

Our findings reinforce what a destructive and pervasive impact violence has on women’s lives.

The effects of violence against women are multifaceted, and multifaceted interventions to ameliorate these effects are therefore required.

Providing one-off economic support is unlikely to be enough if women are not also supported in terms of their mental and physical health, housing, and employment. Further, we cannot wait until the moment of crisis to intervene. Women must be provided with numerous “off-ramps” from the road to unfreedom at all stages of their lives.

Crucially, prevention must go hand in hand with response. As we laid out in our analysis last year, the prevention and ultimate eradication of violence against women requires broad social changes to achieve gender equality.

The solutions for us to end violence against women in one generation exist. All that is required is the political will to implement them.

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 @LifeCourseAust

For women, the road to ‘unfreedom’ is paved with violence