Coercive or controlling behaviour has been an offence since 2015, but its financial aspects are poorly understood and can leave lives in ruins, a new report says
Even in 2015, financial abuse – defined by SEA as control of money and finances – and economic abuse – described as control of the resources that money can buy, such as food, clothes and mobile phones, as well as the sabotaging of career prospects – was not explicitly recognised in law as part of coercive or controlling behaviour. Largely as a result of SEA’s campaigning, that was rectified in the Domestic Abuse Act 2021.
“It is better recognised now, but awareness by victim-survivors themselves is poor while police appear to rank economic abuse at the bottom when assessing risk. Yet in two of the cases in the report, the perpetrator was found guilty of manslaughter – a context of such control that the victim felt she had no choice but to take her own life.”
Natalie Curtis: ‘My husband had made me financially destitute. I couldn’t even afford the diesel to get to work.’In Scotland, because it is seen as a gendered crime, it does not include family members as the England and Wales legislation does, and carries a prison sentence of up to 14 years. How can that happen? “Coercive behaviour is a course of conduct, not a single event such as a physical assault,” Wiener said. “A victim is subject to the arbitrary control of the perpetrator, deprived of all rights and stripped of her autonomy. The victim is terrorised by a fear of what might happen to herself and her children if she fails to comply to rules that often change constantly. It’s as if she’s in a permanent state of siege.
“That’s what £750,000 worth of lawyers buys you,” Irya said. “When I was with him I had to pay for everything in the house. He wouldn’t allow me hot showers. Physical abuse was always the response if I objected. It only stopped in 2018 when I thought he was going to kill me. The implications of my economic abuse, that have unfolded since, I couldn’t have foreseen.”
Protocols do exist, as does legislation that would permit victims to be compensated, and the SEA website lists the steps a woman experiencing the aftermath of economic abuse can take. Allied Irish Bank, for example, provides personal loans to those who have a poor credit score as a result of to domestic abuse.
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