What is financial abuse? Oftentimes people don’t realize they are victims, experts say
Imagine being forced to pay for the vehicle that your former lover drives.
Imagine getting your credit report and discovering that same ex used your Social Security number to open credit cards in your name, then learning you have to pay off the accumulated debt, but get to keep nothing that was purchased.
Now imagine this is the same person who told you knew nothing about how to manage money, who took every cent from your paycheck and left you a meager allowance, who made you show receipts for every penny you spent.
As unimaginable as these scenarios sound, they play out daily all around the Sacramento region, the state and nation daily, said domestic violence expert Marci Bridgeford of Sacramento’s WEAVE Inc. It’s called financial abuse, she said, and WEAVE advocates see it in all types of relationships — straight, gay, lesbian, transgender, affluent or working class.
Hollywood films like “The Burning Bed” and “Sleeping With The Enemy” dwell more on the physical and psychological aspects of domestic violence, said Paula Del Pozo, WEAVE’s director of residential services, and from the reactions of clients at WEAVE’s safehouse, financial abuse isn’t something most people know much about.
“Sometimes clients will say: ‘Oh, it has a name. I’m not crazy.’ Or, ‘I was feeling that this wasn’t right, but I didn’t know. Boom! Now I know,’” Del Pozo said. “It’s like they’re not alone in this world. There are lots of people having the same experience.”
The other side of that, Del Pozo said, is “when you identify the problem, you can really seek the solution. If you don’t know it’s a problem, it’s really hard to get to a solution.”
WHAT IS FINANCIAL ABUSE?
Just as with physical abuse, the goal of financial abuse is to manipulate, threaten or intimidate someone into staying in a relationship with a partner fixated on power and control, Bridgeford said. The National Network to End Domestic Violence noted that research shows financial abuse occurs in 99% of domestic violence cases and that victims of abuse often cite their lack of access to cash or credit as a reason why they stayed in a relationship.
One former WEAVE client, a 30-year-old woman, spoke with The Sacramento Bee on condition of anonymity out of fear that her comments would provoke retaliation by her former partner with whom she has two young children. She said she went from helping her partner with the rent to having all her money tied up on bills and rent every month.
“He would give me a substantial amount of money and say, ‘Here’s the rent,’” she said. “He would do that around the 15th or somewhere in the middle of the month, but then throughout the month, I would say, ‘Hey, I need money for this’ or ‘I need gas money’ and he would tell me to take it out of the money he gave me.
“Then I would get my paycheck before rent, and I would tell him, ‘We have this much rent money that we need,’ and he would tell me, ‘Well, how is that possible? I just gave you a whole stack of money at the middle of the month?’”
Those bills included a $6,000 balance that her partner ran up on a credit card she’d established before she met him, when her credit record had no blemishes.
HOW ABUSER WON HER TRUST
Ironically, the young woman said, what attracted her to this man was that he was more than a dozen years her senior and she felt he could guide her on how to better manage her finances. For about 18 months, she said, his pay brought stability and extra financial support when she needed it.
That won her trust, she said, and when he lost work, she wanted to be the person he could lean on, so she began giving him money for the rent. Later, after he went back to work, she discovered he was using money to fund a drug habit even as she was contributing more money to support the household.
The situation grew increasingly dire, she said, as her partner persuaded her to use her paycheck to fund payday loans and to take out a loan on her car.
Del Pozo and Bridgeford said there are elements of this client’s story that they hear often from people fleeing abuse. Oftentimes, Del Pozo said, individuals fleeing abuse have been given an allowance that it’s impossible to manage successfully and that becomes part of what fuels a cycle of abuse.
Bridgeford said: “I’ve had a case where the husband is the one that worked and the wife was home. She wasn’t allowed to work. She cared for the kids and he would give her an allowance for food and for household items, but he didn’t give her enough. So she was always, in her words, ‘begging for more money’ and that really just gave him permission to control and to start the verbal abuse and then the physical abuse that happened.”
In other cases, those perpetrating harm will get their partners’ passwords, user names and other confidential information, opening up credit lines and taking out loans without telling them. Once they have that information, they take control of the accounts. This access also allows the perpetrators to track their partners’ whereabouts and spending.
‘I WAS FREAKING OUT’
All too often, Del Pozo said, she hears from women who have been told or taught that they don’t have a head for finance and need a man to manage things for them.
A few things are generally true in U.S. society, she said: Men are portrayed as better at managing money, people don’t like to talk about money and people often measure their self-worth by how much money they have.
It’s possible, Del Pozo said, for perpetrators to do terrible things that will cripple survivors financially for the rest of their lives. She has seen people come to the realization that:
- They have debts in their name that they knew nothing about until they left.
- By putting their names on the leases, they accumulated an eviction history that will make it hard for them to find a home or apartment even though they did not manage the finances.
- Either gaps in or lack of a work history means they qualify for only minimum-wage work.
In many cases, Del Pozo said, WEAVE clients aren’t tackling these issue until they’ve been in the safehouse for four or five of the six months they can live there. Sometimes, they are dealing with children who are angry with them for forcing them to leave their other parent, their home and their friends. Or, they may have trouble adjusting to leaving behind a partner they loved and hoped to build a live with. They also could be immersed in court battles.
The WEAVE client who spoke with The Bee recalled bouts of trembling uncontrollably the day she fled her home with her children. She had to leave, she said, after confessing to a worker under contract with Child Protective Services that there was drug use and physical abuse in the home and that her children had been around it.
“I was freaking out, honestly,” she said. “My heart was racing. I couldn’t stop trembling. I didn’t know if I was doing the right thing, but I kept confirming with myself that I was doing the right thing because I could stay with him and lose my children or I could leave and have my children. ... I would cry and then I would try to be strong. Then I would tremble some more. It was just a really emotional roller coaster.”
Del Pozo said: “At the first stage, when they’re at residential services, we deal with the immediate crises. That could be emergency food, transportation, medical, things like that, clothing, things that have to be satisfied to move on to a different conversation.”
WEAVE’s clients are never forced to take part in any service, but advocates stand ready to do things like helping with résumés or going through and economic stability assessment with them. That assessment leads clients in evaluating their financial situations, Del Pozo said, and the tool often leads clients to evaluate what their household assets were and how much access they had to them.
MOMENT OF REALIZATION
It’s at this point, Del Pozo said, that many survivors come to see what financial abuse is and how it looked in their own relationships. This can be especially difficult for clients because they’re often talking with an advocate who’s half their age, she said, and they’re doing something that is taboo in this society: talking about money, revealing feelings about their self-worth.
This is when it’s imperative for an organization like WEAVE to have compassionate advocates who understand trauma, Del Pozo said.
“How do you talk about money, which is already hard? Part of that assessment is to figure out the barriers the client is going to have in order to eventually move on with their life,” she said.
At any point along the way, Bridgeford said, survivors may decide it’s all too much and return to their old lives. It can take as many as seven escapes, on average, before battered individuals make the break. WEAVE works with people trying to make escape plans either by phone, via a chat app on the WEAVE website, or in person.
They advise those escaping violence against emptying bank accounts, as that can be a giveaway to their partners that they are leaving, Bridgeford said, and often, there’s just not enough time between the decision to leave and the escape to do that. People are often more worried about surviving the escape, so they leave with only birth certificates, account numbers and the clothes on their backs.
Del Pozo said WEAVE has found a number of ways to help clients with the financial setbacks they face, though not everything is a quick fix, but there are other things that are more difficult to repair.
“Feeling that you mattered and your life’s important and you have the capability to make smart decisions, I feel like that is what is damaged the most,” she said, “and it takes a lifetime to overcome those experiences, to find that self-worth, that you’re really capable to live by yourself, pay your own bills and have hopes and dreams of a future for yourself that you can build on your own. ... That’s the emotional damage an abuser can do when they take control and power over the other person.”
WHERE TO GET HELP
Are you in an abusive relationship? Contact these agencies for assistance:
The Center for Violence-Free Relationships: 530-626-1131 or 916-939-6616, www.thecenternow.org
A Community for Peace: 916-728-7210, acommunityforpeace.org
Empower Yolo: 530-662-1133 or 916-371-1907, empoweryolo.org
My Sister’s House: 916-428-3271, www.my-sisters-house.org
WEAVE Inc.: 916-920-2952, www.weaveinc.org
This story was originally published December 2, 2020 at 5:00 AM with the headline "What is financial abuse? Oftentimes people don’t realize they are victims, experts say."
