The horror reality one in four women face

Gender relations specialist, Lula Dembele, describes the challenges of recovering from financial abuse as being “whole of life encompassing”. It’s a reality she knows all too well.

In a brave address on the first day of the FW Leadership Summit 2024, the advocate and victim-survivor of family violence unpacked the barriers to exit many women face during financially abusive relationships.

“If you can think of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, when someone’s trying to rebuild their life, we’re talking about the bare minimum of what it takes to have a safe and secure life,” Dembele said, referencing the motivational theory by American psychologist, Abraham Maslow.

“So we’re talking about housing, we’re talking about income. So often when women are in an abusive relationship they’re faced with the choice of staying in violence or being homeless and impoverished.”

She then shared the sobering fact that it costs, on average, $13,000 to leave a financial abusive partnership. It’s a sum out of reach for many, particularly women.

Caroline Wall, Commonwealth Bank of Australia’s (CBA) Head of Customer Vulnerability, said there is no one single answer to how women can overcome the barriers attached to financial abuse. Sadly, it’s too varied.

“Everyone’s experience from an abusive relationship is different and no one knows what is best or what the experience is like and the person experiencing it,” Wall said. 

“We do know that there are some genuine barriers to seeking help. That might be a fear of retribution, a fear of psychological harm or it might be that you are tied to that person, you know, through financial independence and then when people do try to leave, they can face additional hurdles.” 

Wall used the instance of financial abuse involving coercive control and systems abuse to illustrate her point. 

“We see perpetrators deliberately trying to put in multiple credit requests with financial institutions with the sole purpose of trying to destroy someone else’s credit score,” she said. 

“We know that when you’ve got a poor credit score, it can be incredibly difficult to rebuild your financial independence.”

She said there are also examples where perpetrators deliberately ignore court orders around refinancing properties to try and drive their partner or ex-partner into financial hardship.

“The best thing we can do for victim-survivors is prevent the perpetration of these forms of abuse.”

Dembele experienced financial abuse in her marriage. It resulted in the loss of the family home.

“I had used inheritance to put the deposit down,” she told the crowd, adding that she is also in an ongoing battle over child support payments.

“Just every level is incredibly burdening, you have to be the one to report, you have to be the one to seek enforcement. And then you’re the one that gets the retribution and you’re targeted.”

Wall said CBA is committed to play a role in ending financial abuse in communities in Australia through its Next Chapter program.

“We’ve been working in this space since about 2015, which culminated in the launch of Next Chapter in 2020,” she said. 

“There’s multiple different facets to the program, one you touched on is stopping perpetrators from misusing transaction descriptions to deliver low value transactions with the sole purpose of delivering that harassing, threatening message.” 

“So we’ve blocked over a million of those in the last three years and then manually reviewed through our specialist team on average about 1500, which are really high risk cases where we’re seeing people being stalked, harassed, threatened and intimidated.”

Wall said the Next Chapter program also partners with community organisations, including the Independent Collective of Survivors and Good Shepherd who run the bank’s financial independence hub. 

This is the same hub that provides one on one counselling and coaching services to women considering rebuilding their financial independence after they’ve left an abusive relationship.

“The best thing we can do for victim-survivors is prevent the perpetration of these forms of abuse,” Dembele said.

She said, as someone with a background in policy and strategic policy, collectively in Australia there is an understanding “that most people are engaging with those systems in good faith”.

But, there needs to be a shift in focus to look at how to mitigate problems of the systems being misused.

“The sad fact is if you’ve got one in four women experiencing these forms of violence and one in five, et cetera, et cetera, we go over the stats all the time. It’s a very high likelihood that we have one in four men perpetrating these forms of violence,” Dembele said.

“That’s 25 per cent of your potential clients or people engaging with services. We need to be stopping that before it starts.”

If you have experienced or are at risk of domestic / family violence, you can call the national counselling service 1800RESPECT (1800 737 732). www.1800respect.org.au.