Economic abuse
A pattern in which one partner controls the other’s ability to get, use or keep money and resources: withholding money, taking wages, running up debt in their name or stopping them from working. It is usually part of wider coercive control, and it can continue after separation.
What drives it
Control of money creates dependency: without income, credit or savings, leaving becomes hard and staying looks like the only option. It explains why someone with no visible injuries feels trapped, and why the abuse often shows first in a bank statement or a credit file.
How it shows
Work
Being made to quit or turn down promotions, a partner who calls repeatedly at work or turns up, arriving exhausted after being kept up the night before an interview, wages paid into an account they can’t access, and no money for lunch or travel despite a salary.
Relationships
An allowance from their own wage, receipts demanded for every purchase, the partner holding all cards and passwords, loans or bills taken out in their name without consent, rent or bill money spent, threats to ruin their credit, and a car or phone taken away as punishment.
Self
As target: you ask before buying food or toiletries, you don’t know your own balance, there is debt in your name you didn’t agree to, and the thought of leaving stops at "with what money?" As possible perpetrator: you need to approve their spending, and their own income or a job offer makes you angry or anxious.
What tells it apart
Money conflict in couples: In money conflict both people can argue and refuse. In economic abuse one person decides, the other asks, and disagreeing brings punishment or fear.
Financial dependence: Financial dependence is reliance on someone else’s money, with resentment and fear of being cut off, but nobody is working to keep the person dependent. Economic abuse is dependence that is created and enforced.
Coercive control: Economic abuse is one strand of coercive control. If there is also isolation, monitoring and rules about daily life, the wider pattern is more likely.
A test
Ask what the person can do with money without asking or fear: buy food, see their balance, take a job, open an account. A list that is short or shrinking may be economic abuse, whether or not there has been violence, and safety comes before working out the reasons.
How strong the research is
moderate. Measured by the Scale of Economic Abuse (Adams et al., 2008) and its shorter revision, the SEA-12 (Postmus, Plummer and Stylianou, 2016), which split it into economic control, exploitation and employment sabotage, and named in the statutory definition of domestic abuse in the Domestic Abuse Act 2021 for England and Wales. Most studies sample women already in contact with services, so how common it is in the wider population is less clear.
Where it comes from
Adrienne Adams, Cris Sullivan, Deborah Bybee and Megan Greeson, 2008 (Development of the Scale of Economic Abuse). Judy Postmus and colleagues, 2012 and 2016.