Opinion

Why do women stay with their abusers? Here’s one overlooked reason.

Relationship abuse, which affects 1 in 3 American women, is about more than physical violence. It is a pattern of coercion and control that can include emotional abuse, sexual assault, and efforts to isolate and control a partner not only socially but also financially. In countless testimonies, survivors tell of being financially trapped in abusive relationships.

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Advocates, experts and policymakers are slowly beginning to recognize that focusing on physical violence is not enough to protect victims from harm. Economic abuse was finally codified as a form of abuse by Congress in the 2022 reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act. Yet much more needs to be done.

Economic abuse can take many forms, from persuading or forcing a partner to quit their job to slowly undermining their work by making them late, sabotaging important projects, or showing up at their workplace and causing a scene. Abusers might control a partner’s finances, prevent them from having their own bank account or even outright steal money from them.

In a U.K. survey, 32 percent of survivors said access to money was controlled by their abuser, and 56 percent reported that their ability to work was restricted. These actions leave the victim financially dependent on their abuser and make it harder for them to walk away, even as abuse intensifies.

Survivors have been sharing their stories of economic abuse for years, but research I recently conducted with colleagues at Oxford University and Aalto University in Finland — one of the first large-scale studies of economic abuse — puts numbers on the extent of this abuse across a large population of just under 14,000 abusive couples.

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We used data from Finland that allowed us to link police and tax records and look at abusers’ and victims’ finances over the course of several years. People of all genders are victims and perpetrators of abuse, but our study focused on the most common type of abusive relationship: a man victimizing a woman.

We looked at relationships that would eventually become physically abusive and result in a police report, then went back in time to see how the abuse unfolded. A clear pattern emerged.

Immediately upon moving in with their partner, women in abusive relationships saw a significant drop in their earnings and employment. In the two years after moving in together, their annual earnings fell by 6 percent, and their employment rate dropped by 4 percent. When we looked at previous relationships these women had been in that did not involve reports of abuse, we did not see a similar decline in their finances.

We also compared the women in abusive relationships with others who had similar earnings and education levels to confirm that the abuse, not broader trends in the economy, was the main factor affecting their finances. This comparison revealed that the true cost of economic abuse was even higher than our initial analysis showed: Victims’ employment rates fell 12 percent and their earnings declined 26 percent, when matched against similar women with non-abusive partners.

While a woman’s financial power dropped immediately after she moved in with her abusive partner, physical violence often took time to escalate. Fifty-one percent of couples in our sample lived together at least two years before the first police report of violence. This suggests that, at least for some couples, economic abuse laid the groundwork for physical violence by making victims more dependent on their abusers — echoing what we’ve heard from survivors.

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Our study also pointed a way forward. We found that when a woman has more outside economic options, there is a five percentage point jump in the probability that she leaves her abuser. Giving victims of domestic violence the resources to restore financial independence and walk away might be one of the best ways we can help.

While complicated to implement, in the more extreme cases of economic abuse, we might consider requiring some form of restitution from abusers to victims. This compensation could restore a woman’s economic power and redistribute wealth that was taken from her.

More generally, economic empowerment could help women avoid becoming trapped in abusive relationships. Research shows that when women have greater ability to earn money, rates of domestic violence drop. Our study found that college-educated women with higher incomes were less likely to be victims of economic and physical abuse. Better education in financial literacy could empower women to take charge of their money and hold on to economic power.

On a personal level, women should think carefully before giving up their financial independence. It is not uncommon for women to “lean out” when they move in with a partner, especially if they have children. But this should be a freely made choice that benefits both partners by redistributing paid and unpaid labor within the family.

Control over money is a form of power and, in many cases, an integral part of the abusive dynamic. It must also be an integral part of the solution.