Sophie Francis-Cansfield, a policy and public affairs manager at Women’s Aid, agrees, saying the crisis could be “catastrophic for survivors and their children, leaving them vulnerable to abuse and potentially trapping them with their abuser”.
“Economic abuse is a common factor within domestic abuse,” she says, citing a 2019 Women’s Aid report, in which almost a third of surveyed domestic abuse survivors reported their access to money being restricted.
“Perpetrators will very much control the finances of their partner to restrict the independence of the women, and ultimately stop them from fleeing,” Francis-Cansfield adds.
Nicola Mann from Women Against Rape says mothers fleeing male-perpetrated domestic abuse face an additional barrier. They risk losing their children because fathers tend to have more money and better resources to fight for custody.
“Social services often cite domestic abuse as a reason, or ‘neglect’, but a mother’s poverty shouldn’t be misconstrued as neglect,” she says. “With the soaring cost of living, this will happen even more.
“Asylum seekers, women with disabilities, single mothers, women of colour, and sex workers, have the least power in society and are going to be most affected by this crisis – and their children have [the] least power of all.”
Mann adds: “Above all, women need money in our hands in order to flee violent men.”
‘Our poverty was orchestrated’
Ryan Hart has experienced the devastating consequences of financial abuse.
“One of the main methods of control my father used to control what we could and couldn’t do was financial control – to keep my mum poor, essentially so she couldn’t survive away from him,” he said, speaking on a panel at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia last month.
Ryan’s mother wasn’t allowed to work full-time or take promotions, her wages went into the joint account, and his father gave her only small amounts of money to buy the bare minimum for herself and their children.
“In winter, my father made sure we were all with him by only heating one room in the house because he claimed that we couldn't afford to heat more than one room, so if we wanted to be warm, we had to be in the room with him so he could watch what we were doing.”
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