The Untold Financial Cost of Abusive Relationships
Money, Abuse, and Poverty
It’s 6am on a Sunday. Normally, I wouldn’t answer the phone at this hour, but I see her name and I can guess why she’s calling. She is on foot, she says, halfway between her house and the Rec Center. Her boyfriend has finally fallen asleep after hours of physically and sexually assaulting her. It wasn’t the first time. I’ve known about the abuse for a while. It’s getting worse. Of course, I’ll come get her.
We discuss her options. He knows where all her friends live and she can’t risk him finding her. The Battered Women’s Shelter has security but they also have a strict 7pm curfew and a 30 day maximum stay. She works second shift. Their apartment is leased in her name. He hasn’t worked since they’ve been together. To pack what she could carry and take her three kids to the shelter would be to loose her job, abandon most of their possessions, and default on her lease. She’s not going to risk being unemployed and homeless in a month with three kids, whose father (not the boyfriend) is god-knows-where.
She tells me she is going back. I’m against it. She says it’ll take a week, maybe two. She has to make him break up with her and think it’s his idea. I don’t like this plan at all, but it’s not really up to me.
Experts tell us about 1 in 5 women and 1 in 7 men endure severe physical violence from an intimate partner at some point in their lives. These numbers are disproportionately higher for Native American women, black women, and LGBTQI+ people. Chances are many people you know will experience abuse at the hands of someone they love at some point. Statistically, leaving is the most dangerous moment in an abusive relationship.
When your friend decides to leave an abusive situation, you might assume the danger is over and their fears about what comes next are all in their head, imaginary scars from their own emotional damage, signs that they are broken inside.
I would argue that, in this moment, your friend is, in fact, the wisest, strongest, and bravest person in this scenario. Wise because they understand the person they are fleeing far better than you ever will, so believe them when they tell you the lengths that person might go to. Strong because they have endured more than they are probably ever going to tell you to survive to this point. And brave because they are choosing to put themselves in an increasingly dangerous situation in order to save themselves and protect those they love. Do not discount how much this could cost them.
Surviving
The first funeral I ever attended was in early elementary school. My baby sitter left her husband after years of abuse. She was at a friend’s house with their young son. He found her, killed her, and then killed himself.
Laypeople give horrible advice to friends who are enduring domestic abuse. “Just leave. Go to a friend’s house. Go anywhere.” Experts tell us 75% of people killed by abusive loved ones are killed after they leave.
My friend has never done this before, but she understands him well enough to know the threat he poses to her and her children. He has a psychopathic need to control her. Leaving him, putting herself outside his control, is going to be seen as an escalation in his mind, and he is likely to retaliate, as he sees it.
I feel protective of her. It goes against every instinct I have to let her walk back into that house with a smile and a box of doughnuts to explain where she’s been.
But I remember everything about seeing my beloved babysitter’s body in that casket as a kid. The knot in my stomach hearing for the first time that my kind and patient caregiver had been living under violence and cruelty in her own home. I thought the world of her, and I will never see her again because she did exactly what I want my friend to do now.
I bite my tongue and drive my friend to the bakery. She doesn’t need my knee-jerk “just get out of there” advice. She needs a safety plan.
In my adult life, I have been down this road with friends more times than I can count. People who ask “why don’t you just leave” don’t realize how much more there is to plan when safety is at risk.
You need to understand that this is not going to be a normal break up!
Where will they be safe? What if the person tries to hurt those they love? What if the abuser shows up where they work or at the kids’ school? How will they access their money? What can they do about shared assets? Will they lose access to medical necessities? What should they tell friends and family to keep themselves safe?
The logistical challenges of every situation are different. When your friend decides to leave a violent situation, their first job is to survive. They might have to lose status, wealth, or earning power to do that. We know abuse takes a lasting toll on a person’s mental and physical health, but we rarely talk about the long lasting financial penalties.
Financial Abuse and Control
One friend’s boyfriend locked her Green Card in his safe. She had a right to live and work in this country, but he controlled her ability to prove it, so he regulated how she could work.
He didn’t want her to look attractive to other men. That was his shitty excuse. She needed a job with an ugly uniform or one where she could wear the long shapeless dresses he liked to buy her. Reading between the lines, she wasn’t going to get a job that paid much. He wasn’t just discouraging competition from other men; he was preventing her financial independence.
Financial abuse can take a lot of forms: preventing someone from working; making someone empty their savings and max out their credit; cutting off someone’s access to their own money; showing up at work to inflict terror on their career prospects; preventing them from leaving the house when they’re scheduled to work so they get fired. I have at least one friend who’s suffered each of these.
My friend who needed her Green Card found out her boyfriend had put a GPS tracker in her car the day she went to the Latino Community Center seeking advice on how to replace her documents. After that, I switched cars with her. Her car and cellphone GPS stayed at my place.
It’s frighteningly easy to track someone’s online activity, read their emails, get their cellphone GPS, and recover their deleted browser history. The more access an abusive person has to education and resources, the easier it is to do this. The less access you have, the harder it is to learn how to defend against it.
Tip: Libraries can be a godsend for people with limited access and funds. They offer free information, literacy, and language skills. If you don’t know how to access safety, resources, or shelter in your area, go ask a librarian.
Career Impact
Flash back to the nineties, I’m with a different friend, a family friend. It’s the coldest winter we’ve had in a while. Her eight-year-old has strep throat. Her utilities keep getting shut off, over and over. Her boss is giving her side eye about why she keeps having to deal with these “personal problems” during the work day. Pre-Y2K, the power company in our town didn’t have an after hours number, and most everyone was still using landlines. She has no choice but to call from the office. She knows her abusive ex-boyfriend is doing this to mess with her. It’s exactly his style.
The guy she’s talking to at the power company swears on a stack of bibles that there is no way they would have turned off service at the request of her ex-boyfriend. “How high up in the company would someone have to be to make that happen?” she asks. “It would have to be, like, a Vice President,” he says dismissively. “That’s not a problem for him,” she insists. It’s true. This guy was rich and well connected. He loved flexing his power, this time literally. She was a single mom making barely more than minimum wage. But the guy at the power company was sure she was just being dramatic.
She finally gets handed off to a supervisor, who tells her all anyone needs to shut your power off is your name, address, and social security number. Of course her control freak ex-boyfriend had all of those things. Are you kidding? The manager flagged her account for stronger security requirements, proving that the utility company had a simple process to deal with this the whole time. Why did she have to endure half an hour of gaslighting from the first representative, under the displeased eye of her boss, just to get to someone who was willing to offer her that service?
Now she has been flagged as a “difficult woman” with both the electric company and her boss.
Homelessness
In high school, a friend of mine ran away from her abusive father. Her dream was to finish school. Not get a GED. Not go through some program in a group home in state custody. She was determined to walk in her cap and gown with the rest of her class.
Over half of homeless women and children are on the streets because they are fleeing domestic violence. She had an after school job that earned her enough money to eat, but not enough for rent. I would do her laundry and sneak her into my house for showers so no one realized she was homeless. I would bring her tampons every month.
I had never thought about what happens to someone who can’t afford pads or tampons. Period Poverty is a major worldwide problem. Would you go to school if you knew you couldn’t contain your menstrual fluids? You can’t miss school every time you’re on your cycle and keep your grades up. All around the world, female bodied kids drop out of school for this reason alone.
My friend made it through. I didn’t go to my own graduation, but I went to hers. I have never seen her happier. At the time, I had never known someone who had sacrificed so much for their education. I know now that far too many people endure this and worse fighting for a better life.
Income is the money in your paycheck today. Wealth is your buying power over time. If you live paycheck to paycheck, you get income but you accumulate no wealth. If you lose employment and housing in your struggle to survive, it becomes increasingly difficult to become financially stable.
One bad choice shouldn’t cause you to lose everything. One unlucky break shouldn’t make you homeless. Your body’s reproductive function shouldn’t cost you your future. Yet we know this is the reality for many, many people.
I’m surrounded by people whose talent and creativity blow me away, people whose compassion and generosity humble me, people whose ingenuity is groundbreaking and inspiring.
But also, many of them have had to start over more than twice. They carry health problems from the trauma and the poor medical care of their past. They struggle still with basic needs, especially around their health. They lose sleep over debt or the inability to get enough credit to go into debt. They can’t afford to take a week off work, and they know retirement will never be an option. Their lives bear the scars of the tradeoffs they made between their safety and their earnings.
I’m glad the people in my life are safe and that some have chosen to share their stories. When we make space in our culture to understand the realities of other people’s problems, we are better equipped to understand how to meet our modern challenges. So thanks to everyone who shared their pain and their successes in order to help shape the conversation. And thank you to those who choose not to share, for being a part of our world and for owning your boundaries.
Post Script: It’s winter. There are likely shelters and soup kitchens around you who are desperate for your old coats, blankets, warm hats, gloves, and scarves. This year, I’m giving out menstrual supplies to some of my favorite charities in honor of the inspiring and generous women who have given me strength in my life.
National Domestic Violence Hotline
1−800−799−7233
TTY 1−800−787−3224
https://www.thehotline.org
Post Script (01/01/19): Today, I came across this article, which might interest you.
