From Physical Violence to Intensified Economic Abuse: Transitions Between the Types of IPV Over Survivors’ Life Courses

Abstract

Scholars of intimate partner violence (IPV) cite the various forms of IPV perpetrated by violent male partners to establish their coercive control over women. This scholarship emphasizes IPV’s long-term destructive effects on survivors’ lives. However, until recently, the role of the state in the relationship between different manifestations of IPV has received little attention, leaving hazy the meaning of absent formal legislation. An opportunity to clarify the significance of this condition lies in Israel, where economic abuse is not yet recognized as grounds for legal and social sanctions. Based on in-depth interviews with 33 IPV survivors, the present study explores state actions involved in transitions between types of violence as revealed in cases of ongoing economic abuse.

Keywords

economic abuse IPV long-term effects the state

Introduction

The United Nations (UN) 1993 convention defined violence against women as a violation of human rights that prevents women from realizing their rights and the basic freedom to which they are entitled. However, scholars agree that intimate partner violence (IPV) continues to be widespread regardless of both international and country-level resolutions (Abraham & Tastsoglou, 2016b; Hearn et al., 2016). Moreover, quite a few countries, including Canada and the United States, have developed since 1993 a range of policies consistent with the UN convention. Yet, scholars find that such policies have not eradicated the state’s continuing to abet the reproduction of IPV (Abraham & Tastsoglou, 2016a; Peled & Krigel, 2016).

Focusing on Israel, Adelman (2017) analyzed “the political economy of violence against women” showing how the state reproduces women’s vulnerability as well as their exposure to IPV. Against this backdrop, many women, both in Israel and elsewhere, continue to be excluded from the possibility of functioning as protected citizens in their countries (Lister, 2003; Zufferey et al., 2016). Violence against women remains a widespread phenomenon that affects women of all social locations, while increased reporting and scholarly research have accompanied growing public awareness (Renzetti et al., 2011).

Reinforcing the recognition of IPV as a gender-based behavior, Walby et al. (2014) found that 45% of violent offenses against women are committed by someone known to the victim. It is also estimated that 35% of women worldwide have been the target of physical or sexual violence by their partners (Abraham & Tastsoglou, 2016b). In the United States, for example, about a third of all women have experienced IPV, of whom two million are severely injured by their partners annually (Black et al., 2011; Hahn & Postmus, 2014; Stylianou et al., 2013).

As our interest in this phenomenon is derived from MacKinnon’s (1989) focus on state policies as reproducing men’s violence against women, we follow feminist developments in the field, leading us to use the term IPV survivors as referring to women. Sharp-Jeffs (2015) presented the gendered nature of IPV over the somewhat neutral resonance of “domestic violence.” She says,

The domestic violence definition also remains gender neutral, despite widespread recognition that IPV is both a cause and a consequence of gender inequality (UN, 2006). Research has consistently shown that as a pattern of abuse, IPV is disproportionately experienced by women and perpetrated by men. (p. 6)

Thus, she criticizes the gender neutral definition of IPV as “a pattern of coercive behavior in which one person attempts to control another through threats or actual use of physical violence, sexual violence, verbal and emotional abuse, stalking, and economic abuse” (Hahn & Postmus, 2014, p. 80). Instead, Sharp-Jeffs proposes a gendered notion of IPV, a notion consistent with Caldwell et al.’s (2012) contention that such usage is particularly suitable when discussing IPV’s long-term implications.

IPV is an ongoing struggle in survivors’ lives. Among its five types, economic abuse contributes to the continuity of IPV in women’s lives because it does not depend on a physical encounter. A study from New Zealand (Jury et al., 2017) and a multicountry analysis (Postmus et al., 2020) showed clear international consistency among researchers in the understanding of the phenomenon. Nonetheless, a British study separated it from financial abuse, distinguishing the appropriation of individual money from access to economic resources (Sharp-Jeffs, 2015). Both phenomena appear to operate alongside other types of IPV, producing continual fear and vulnerability (Postmus et al., 2020).

To enhance our understanding of how the continuous nature of IPV in women’s lives is abetted by the state, we undertake to investigate it by focusing on the relations between various types of IPV. We ask under what conditions a particular type of violence (e.g., physical) is reduced while another type of violence (e.g., economic) is intensified over the life course of survivors. In the following section, we review the literature on IPV’s long-term effects and institutional sanctions on the various types of IPV, we introduce the Israeli case, and finally, we present our theoretical framework focusing on the state’s role in facilitating the relations between various types of IPV.

Literature Review

After years of neglect, the issue of economic abuse has received some attention (Postmus et al., 2016). Economic abuse is defined as tactics employed by an abusive partner in a bid to control his partner’s ability to acquire and preserve economic assets. These include behaviors such as economic control, economic exploitation, sabotaging the woman’s employment, or hampering the woman’s efforts to become knowledgeable in financial matters, to access funds, or to manage them (Adams et al., 2008; Littwin, 2012; Postmus et al., 2016, 2020; Sanders, 2015; Stylianou et al., 2013). Economic abuse takes both direct and indirect forms (Postmus et al., 2020; Renan-Barzilay, 2018), including controlling the purse strings, deliberately running up debt, demanding that the woman borrow money, sexual exploitation in exchange for money, refusing to work themselves, forcing the woman to work outside the home (in the official or unofficial economy) or to solicit others’ financial support, and taking control of her earnings (Pyles & Banerjee, 2010). Importantly, economic abuse usually does not appear on its own but rather coexists with other types of IPV (Basile & Hall, 2011), and it receives attention when studies focus on IPV’s long-term effects next to physical and mental health implications (Caldwell et al., 2012).

Long-Term Effects of IPV

Physical and mental health implications

A review of the research on IPV reveals that partner violence is one of the most severe and complex public health problems facing women. A wide-ranging review of mental health issues among women with a history of IPV reveals that they are 3-5 times at risk of suffering depression, suicidal tendencies, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and addictions, than are women who are not survivors of IPV (Dutton et al., 2006). PTSD, in particular, is very common among IPV survivors (Dekel et al., 2019; Gobin et al., 2013), and is also associated with a wide range of other health problems, such as digestive disorders, sleep disorders, heart disease, migraines, and chronic back pain due to the psychological damage, all of which may persist long after the violence has ceased (Lindhorst & Beadnell, 2011; Scott-Storey, 2011).

Economic and occupational implications of IPV

Adams et al. (2013) explained how IPV continues to plague survivors with long-term negative occupational and economic effects. Their study, which included 503 women and lasted for 7 years (with 5 waves of data collection during this period) concluded that IPV has significant negative impacts on occupational stability and the survivor’s economic welfare 3 years after the violence ended. Another study of 512 Hawaiian women found even longer-term consequences: Lower occupational stability was found in IPV survivors 6 years after the violence ended (Crawne et al., 2011). These studies indicated that IPV increases the risk of future financial hardship, as also found by Voth Schrag (2015). Such findings are consistent with research showing that IPV survivors earn less, work fewer weeks a year, work part-time involuntarily, and are more likely to experience periods of unemployment than those who do not suffer IPV (Kimerling et al., 2009; Meisel et al., 2003; Tolman & Wang, 2005).

Scott-Storey (2011) referred to the notion of cumulative abuse as the effect of multiple incidents of various types of abuse over the life course. She explained that as women were exposed to various forms of abuse, and in some cases, the “sheer number of different types of experiences” (p. 6) they suffered, traumatic long-term effects could be traced (Scott-Storey, 2011). In addition, the persistence of health and economic implications for a woman who has experienced cumulative abuse from her partner is often multidimensional. Understanding that one type of IPV rarely appears isolated from the rest, the literature on cumulative abuse can support the assumption that “more [types] is worse” in terms of long-term implications (see also Davies et al., 2015).

How does economic abuse add to cumulative abuse? Two aspects render such investigation particularly important: First, it enables assessing how economic abuse allows abusive partners to control survivors’ lives even years after the separation and distancing from him. Second, because in some locales, including Israel, economic abuse is not yet legally defined and formally sanctioned, such investigation facilitates the identification of sanctioned and unsanctioned forms of abuse. For the purpose of exploring the latter, we now address legal aspects of diverse forms of IPV.

Legal Aspects of IPV

Studies indicate that IPV is harmful in all of its many forms (physical, sexual, psychological, emotional, or economic) as it effectuates the abuser’s exertion of power and control (Abraham & Tastsoglou, 2016b; Johnson, 2009; Krigel & Benjamin, 2020; Lindhorst & Beadnell, 2011; Scott-Storey, 2011). However, the responses of many legal systems to IPV and its multiple variants were characterized by Brush (2013) as having “many faults in the goals and procedures,” resulting in the half-hearted and ambivalent approach of policy makers. This approach maintains the stated commitment as well as the practical aspects as distant from how feminists believe the state should pursue its commitment to survivors’ bodily integrity, moral autonomy, dignity, and human rights. The slow pace at which economic and emotional types of IPV acquire legal recognition is an apt illustration of Brush’s (2013) argument.

Scholars of law and jurisprudence cite civil protection orders (CPOs) as being the most common and widely used relief for IPV today in the United States (Baker, 2013; Johnson, 2009). While every state has enacted CPO statutes, each state offers differing definitions of what constitutes IPV (all refer to an actual or threatened criminal offense against an intimate partner), and most do not incorporate a definition that includes economic abuse. While there is evidence of some recognition on the part of the legal system of emotional aspects, including a few economic aspects (Ortiz-Barreda & Vives-Cases, 2013), mainly the system has restricted its recognition to primarily crimes and severe physical abuse. As a result, many women have no CPO cause of action to address and seek redress for the real and harmful abuse to which they are subjected (Johnson, 2009). The marginal recognition of economic abuse in the legal system is entrenched in the fear of entering into the private sphere of the family and “interfering” with the intimate economic relationship, where the husband’s day-to-day control of the family’s finances is perceived as natural and generally inappropriate for judicial intervention (Renan-Barzilay, 2018).

Economic abuse is rarely recognized as IPV by state criminal and civil codes due to the focus on physical assault, and economic abuse seldom falls neatly into the enumerated categories of abuse that constitute grounds for legal protection. Currently, the legal system’s general tendency to focus on physical harm presents significant challenges to women who are economically abused. These facts lead scholars to conclude that the domestic violence civil legal system fails to protect women subjected to certain forms of abuse (Adelman, 2017; Johnson, 2009) and that the law has played a significant role in the perpetuation of economic abuse (Renan-Barzilay, 2018).

Furthermore, scholars ask to what degree protective orders actually protect women from being subjected to continuing abuse; in some cases, it has been argued that seeking protection from violence increases women’s sense of security and reduces exposure to revictimization (Frantzen et al., 2011; Logan & Walker, 2009). However, a body of evidence criticizes the effectiveness of protective orders, suggesting that immediate protection from abuse (PFA) fails to reduce revictimization (Goodmark, 2012) and entails financial costs for the petitioners (Hughes & Brush, 2015). Thus, the state plays an active role in perpetuating violence against women (Adelman, 2017; MacKinnon, 1989), and the legal systems serve as a barometer of patriarchal attitudes that perpetuate violent practices (Abraham & Tastsoglou, 2016b).

The Israeli Context

Empirical research on the extent of IPV in Israel found that 13% of the participants were subjected to physical violence and 20.8% to verbal abuse. Furthermore, the prevailing perception considers violence between spouses to be a private matter. This finding may explain why the phenomenon is generally under-addressed and underreported (Eisikovits et al., 2004). An updated Knesset report revealed that women filed 12,333 IPV complaints with the police (Mizrahi-Simon, 2015). The picture emerging in the Israeli case corroborates other findings concerning IPV’s prevalence and the absence of a satisfactory institutional response.

Feminist scholars have criticized official indifference to continued violence (Adelman, 2017; Peled & Krigel, 2016), citing the similarity in the profiles of IPV survivors in Israel and elsewhere. Furthermore, as a consequence of Israel’s having adopted a neoliberal economic policy since 2002, the social services have accorded greater attention to the issue of economic independence for IPV survivors. As part of this process, specialized employment programs were developed, most of them financed by social services or by feminist nongovernment organizations (Herbst & Benjamin, 2016).

The institutional analysis of Israeli policy by Adelman (2017) illustrates how “battering states” reproduce IPV survivors’ vulnerability to further oppression, sidelining, and gender disparity in both the private and the public spheres. Despite international reports and conventions that already cite the need to codify emotional and economic types as well as the other forms of IPV, economic abuse is not even mentioned in Israeli law (Renan-Barzilay, 2018). Thus, the Israeli case provides an opportunity to examine how the various legal statuses of the different forms of violence cultivate the ability of controlling partners to sustain their abuse. Against the backdrop of the absence of legal sanction for economic abuse, we raise our research question: How do survivors experience economic abuse’s long-term implications following the transition from predominantly physical violence to intensified economic abuse?

An Institutional Perspective: The Role of the State

MacKinnon’s (1989) seminal work, has informed Adelman’s (2017) focus on the state, showing how it is complicit in reproducing diverse forms of IPV (Abraham & Tastsoglou, 2016b). However, in the case of economic abuse, the state’s role can be particularly intriguing. With couples’ financial arrangements evolving in the private sphere, where controlling practices are well hidden and silenced by both culture and community (Krigel & Benjamin, 2019), the involvement of the state may not be obvious, and the absence of formal legislation exacerbates this. In exploring the state’s contribution to the reproduction of women’s vulnerability to economic abuse under this condition, it may be conducive to examine the continuous paths of economic abuse. Possibly, the barrier to recognizing survivors of economic abuse as survivors of IPV contributes to establishing such continuous paths.

Our data were collected in Israel, where formal recognition of economic abuse is absent creating an institutional consistency with the local ultrapatriarchal culture (Renan-Barzilay, 2018). The institutional context tends to silence economic abuse and view it as part of men’s traditional devotion to the “good provider role.” The silencing embedded in the absence of formal recognition becomes more detrimental in its consequences when women make an effort to go against the stream and approach the authorities with their economic abuse complaints. If state representatives cannot hear the complaints, the state in fact neglects its commitment to survivors and fails to support the effort they make to unsilence their suffering (Heishriek, 2018).

The legal system and the political conditions in Israel were found by Adelman (2017) to essentially offer battering men the legal instruments to control their female partners’ lives. This institutional perspective introduced by Adelman (2017) calls for deepening our understanding of how “battering states” replicate IPV survivors’ vulnerability to further oppression and gender inequality in both the private and public spheres. Adelman’s observations can be viewed as corresponding with Fraser’s (1989) understanding of the state as operating in different directions, where the actions of different state agencies create a multiplicity of formal and informal policies, often contradicting each other.

Following this understanding of the state’s role, we are well aware that even if women are recognized as IPV survivors, they may still be left unprotected from as-yet-uncodified aspects of IPV. Engaging with the need to understand this issue, we extend Adelman’s (2017) project of revealing how diverse state actions reflect the intertwined effect of diverse institutions. We add a focus on types of IPV to Adelman’s portrayal of the Israeli state: By examining the transition between physical and economic abuse through the eyes of survivors, we raise the possibility that state action has a role in aggravating economic abuse over the life course of survivors.

Method

Recruitment

Research was enabled owing to the first author’s participation in a project conducted by the Israel Center for Domestic Violence Prevention. Findings on IPV survivors mirror those reported globally (Mizrahi-Simon, 2015), including implementation of neoliberal welfare policies, which have been in force in Israel since 2002. The author’s first placement in the designated field lasted about 3 years (between 2011 and 2014), during which she acquired tools and skills enabling her to gain a comprehensive understanding of the subject matter, recruit participants, and conduct in-depth interviews (between 2015 and 2016) with 33 women who perceived themselves to be IPV survivors.

All participants had undergone therapeutic intervention provided by the Domestic Violence Prevention Center. Some of them were supported in this way before approaching social services. Most participants (n = 29) were employed and could be considered financially independent; only seven were receiving state economic assistance at the time of the interview, primarily for housing. All participants but one are mothers (an average of three children each); a majority (n = 32) graduated high school, and several (n = 13) had professional qualifications. Nearly all participants (n = 29) were at various stages of separation from the violent partner; a minority (n = 4) were rehabilitating their relationships through counseling. The interviews took place at a time and locale of the participants’ choosing and lasted between 1.5 and 3 hr, most of them approaching 2 hr in duration. Having obtained the participants’ consent, we recorded the interviews and had them transcribed verbatim.

Analytic Procedure

The study is based on a phenomenological approach, which maintains that social phenomena must be understood from the viewpoint of those who experience them (Denzin & Lincoln, 2011). The interviews covered a wide range of topics, focusing on life during the violent relationship with their partners. We analyzed the data using the grounded theory strategies proposed by Charmaz (2014), focusing on inductive themes by examining the subjective meanings that IPV survivors ascribed to their ongoing relations with the abusive partners. This analytic process began with initial (line-by-line) coding of all interview transcripts, then continued with focused coding, and ended only when we felt that we had achieved theoretical coding, which led us to encounter a social process in the subjects’ life course (Charmaz, 2014).

This thematic analysis explored four main themes concerning the survivors’ experiences of the dynamic nature of IPV over their life course: (a) The subjective process wherein women realize the violent nature of their relationship, a process that was described by each of the participants. (b) The process wherein the physical violence is institutionally exposed and sanctioned. Again, this process was reported by all participants as part of their suitability for the social services intervention where they were recruited. (c) The burden of economic abuse as a barrier to the survivor’s sustainability. In this theme, the economic abuse was described by just more than half of the participants. (d) The long-term nature of unsanctioned economic abuse. While all of the participants have issues with partners’ court-ordered child support payments, for about a third of the participants additional forms of economic abuse emerged and were left unsanctioned. Our thematic analysis also placed these four processes over the life course of the survivors in two partially overlapping phases: The first is characterized by the sanctioning of the physical IPV while the economic abuse is entwined into daily routines, often in ways that hide its meaning as violence. In the second phase, often after no longer living with the abusive partner, the survivors experience the long-term nature of unsanctioned economic abuse.

Findings

Subjectively Observing the Mixed Nature of IPV

Participants described their relationships as involving a process of realization or awakening through which they developed their subjective observation of their relationship as violent. This process often involved a mixture of the two types of abuse: physical and economic. As we learn from one survivor’s account:

Then he gets stuck without money for cigarettes. . . . “Go to your sister and tell her to give you [money]. I need cigarettes.” I tell him: “I’m not going to ask my sister for money and certainly not for cigarettes. I will not humiliate myself, I will not tell her how I’m living. I will not tell her you made me needy . . .” but he forced me, and I went more than once and more than twice, and my sister, I was ashamed to tell her. . . . So I just said I haven’t got any money. I have got no money. It happens to everyone, doesn’t it? So what? Until I got fed up and did not go anymore and did not go; I did not go. I told him no, I’m not going.

Interviewer: And how did he react?

He threw the ashtray at me. All his cigarette butts, all the ashes in my face. And I did not go to the police or tell anyone. I was alone at home, no one saw, no one knew. I was silent. I was afraid he’d do worse. So it ended there, with dumping an ashtray on me. If I spoke, he would beat me more, so I’d better be quiet. Who will help me? Who will? I was silent, silent every time. [Linda]

A daily routine wherein the woman is required to beg for money from her family manifests how the physical and economic types of abuse are inseparable: The physical is used to force a woman to solicit others for financial support (Pyles & Banerjee, 2010). At the same time, the shame of begging for money from her sister incentivizes the IPV survivor to refuse to cooperate with yet another such demand. Beyond the close link between economic and physical abuse, a refusal to maintain the routine is punished by harsh physical abuse, leading to fear and silencing. However, the social encounter can also lead the IPV survivor to acknowledge her situation:

In the early years [of her marriage], for many years, it was his own bank account and at the time I did not understand, that in fact, control and violence began then, in fact the entire cycle was there. He played it there, there was economic abuse, physical violence, and also verbal and emotional and sexual . . . and everything. The whole cycle. And I did not understand . . . I lived in it, in a kind of bubble. I thought that it was probably the same for everybody else. As a young girl I was taught that my duty in the house is to make things good at home, that everything will be all right, that the husband be pleased. And I did not think I was actually in a place that was not good. So I went on. I went on like this, and had no demands. I also did not have any demands concerning the bank. And after about seven years, my sister said to me “What is this?” and she made me realize what was going on. ‘Til then, no one even knew about it; I was ashamed to say that he was not giving me money. I had to beg for anything I needed. And my sister said to me, “Why don’t you have a joint account? Do you know what is happening here?” Like, she woke me up: “What’s the matter with you?” [Tamara]

Shame, particularly as experienced through a sibling’s lens, again emerges as important in the development of the subjective observation or realization of the violent nature of the relationship. Here, we can see that “pleasing a husband” is understood as the normalizing (“that’s how it is probably for everybody else”) cultural upbringing that blinded the survivor to this issue, preventing her from seeing the economic abuse that is interwoven into violent relationships. A similar process of awakening, echoing the process of naming as described by Felstiner et al. (1980), occurs when a survivor encounters a social worker’s response to her description:

And I tell the social worker things and she starts crying with tears, and then I realized how serious my situation is. Because until then, you know, I lived in it and I knew it was not good, but then I saw her really crying, crying with tears. So, I said to myself, “If from my stories she is now crying, then my situation is really not good.” It woke me up as well. It woke me up. [Rona]

For other survivors, sisters provided the awakening gaze. Here, we see that a social worker’s tears served to convey the message that the subject’s story is heard as exceptionally distressing, even by a social worker who is used to hearing such accounts. These tears are interpreted by the survivor as a sign that her situation can be legally recognized as violence. In the next section, we analyze data revealing the weight of the institutional framing of physical spousal violence as a crime, leading to a turning point in women’s experiences of IPV.

Institutionally Sanctioned IPV

Following the awakening process and the ability to name their relationship as violent, survivors approach state authorities to request protection (Davis, 1999; Hughes & Brush, 2015). Authorities’ responses and practical sanctions become a wakeup call for the violent partner, compelling him to realize the limitations of his physical power, as we hear in the account below:

I think I realized that if I stayed there, I would die. I would die. And I have to go away anyway, no matter what. . . . And he understood that, too. He already understood that I could speak and I could talk and I was no longer afraid. And even if things became worse . . . The first time he was taken by the police, and then he could only see our daughter at the visitor centre with a social worker . . . And he already got his “punch in the face.” I mean, he was shocked then, and he knows it’s out there. The fact that I once complained and suddenly everyone knew. . . . So you know, it made him more careful in our second relationship. But even though there was less physical violence, there was more of the other. [Rona]

A list of sanctions is presented by a survivor who is undergoing the awakening process for a second time: First on the list is the abusive partner’s realization of her clear intentions to leave him. Second is a social sanction: She is determined to shame him—a respected man in a prestigious workplace—by telling both their families of origin and their friends. Elsewhere in the interview, she also enumerates the fact that she threatened to talk about his violence at his workplace in ways that could result in his job loss. This also threatened his father’s world, as she explained, as they are employed at the same workplace. Most important for our argument here is the third item on the list: The institutional sanctions of being arrested, getting issued a restraining order, and the prohibition of seeing his daughter outside a welfare center where social workers are present and guard his conduct.

This detailed set of sanctions is framed by the survivor as “a punch in the face” to the abusive partner, constraining his ability to turn to physical violence. From her point of view, he actually became more careful about the physical violence, and turned to “alternative” forms of violence in ways that echo Collins’ (2005) term “the past in the present”: The violence is invisible to others, but is still present with the survivor. In another case, it appears that seeking legal redress is revealed in court as only partially effective:

Then one day he came home from work and started screaming—I do not know what he said—[that] there were things missing from the room. So I said to him, “If you continue with that, I’ll call the police. You will not scream at home anymore.” He said to me, “What did you say?” And he kept screaming. So I called the police, and they removed him from the house immediately for a few days. After that, he was also issued a restraining order. The judge said, “But there was no physical violence here,” so I said, “Yes, but there was violence in the past.” She asked, “How long ago?” So I told her, “About a decade ago, he shoved me [with severe health consequences], which caused him to be removed from the home, and before that there was severe physical violence.” So she said, “Yes, it’s been a long time, but I want to talk to his lawyer alone,” and she told them unequivocally that he should not go back home because of his past. Because even for the smallest thing, they’ll remove him from the home again. He begged, he really wanted to go home. But he had no choice and he went and rented a place for himself. And then during those two years that I was at home, he was committing indirect violence.

Interviewer: How was the indirect violence committed?

The electricity was cut off because he was not willing to pay, even though the bill covered the time that he was living at home, and it was electricity for a few months. He did not want to pay. The children helped me here and there, I borrowed money, because I wasn’t working at the time. [Tamara]

Three stages in the development of the IPV are described in Tamara’s account: The first occurred a decade previously. Then extreme physical violence was routine until the survivor called the police and the abusive partner was issued a restraining order. The second stage occurred after his return home when his shouting triggered her to call the police. At this stage, the onus was on her to convince the judge of the connection between the two stages. Even though obtaining recognition of her suffering requires a struggle, the available legal sanctioning of the physical abuse informs the judge’s advice for the violent partner to leave the couple’s abode. In the third stage, which is created by the court decision, physical violence disappears and the couple separates, but an indirect form of violence, economic in nature, takes prominence. We see that under the condition of gaining recognition of the physical abuse and the legal protection, the intensification of the economic abuse becomes an unintended consequence.

The Chains of Economic Abuse

In the section above, we showed that following institutional sanction of the physical violence, abusive partners resort to economic abuse. Here, we see how economic dependency chains survivors to their abusive partners years after they actively try to protect themselves by approaching law enforcement. The economic dependency may even push women to arrangements of sexual exploitation:

After we separated, I moved to the city, he stayed for a while in the village, and then rented the house. In the first two years we were in touch. He paid me alimony, and we agreed that I would sleep with him whenever he wanted and he would pay all my expenses . . . and I lived like a queen. Until I realized that I was in a cage of gold so to speak, and I could not really get out of it [. . .] He was so obsessed then, about the sex, about the keys to the house, about the fact that he would come whenever he wanted and do whatever he wanted. That he knows I’m not with anyone else. That he still has the power with the money to continue to control me. [Rona]

Controlling is an obsession for the abusive partner who cannot face that the sanctioning of his physical violence has left him on his own. He exerts control through sex, through the keys to the survivor’s abode, and through maintaining monogamy restrictions. From the survivor’s point of view, his financial capability operated both to leave her still dependent on him (as she explains elsewhere in the interview, he sabotaged her employment), and at the same time, to trap her into the sexual exchange. As in Rona’s case, when couples divorce following the institutional sanction of the physical violence, the issue of alimony payments takes center stage in their interactions. Abusive partners use survivors’ dependency on these payments as a means of control over them:

(He) does not pay me alimony. He did pay me for four months a sum that he decided was appropriate. Once it was ₪1,500, another time ₪2,500. That’s how he played it. Just now, a month ago, we received a ruling from the Rabbinical Court regarding temporary alimony, which he also does not want to pay. We are supposed to have a hearing in January, so he says I must wait until January, as if that were soon, . . . Only then will he decide whether he is paying or not paying. Here again, I feel he . . . I do not want him to be part of my life, but he finds the way to control me in one way or another. And I give him the space to decide, because I want him to have a good relationship with the children. . . . So in that way, he continues to harass, he continues to harass. [Dafi]

Waiting for payments is prolonged for as long as the abusive partner feels he can do so. The waiting is significant in two ways: On one hand, it reflects the calculation made by the survivor not to pursue any external assistance in receiving the payment, to preserve the relationship of the children with their father. On the other hand, the waiting reflects the continuous harassment that is generated through endless small interactions that become necessary despite the separation (see also Pomicino et al., 2019). The weight of the financial dependency together with the hope of some relationship with the children is a heavy chain that does not allow the survivor to escape the abuse regardless of the separation.

What is particularly painful for the survivor is the contradiction between the active position from which she has made all possible efforts to separate from the abusive partner, and the current situation wherein he still has the power to keep her in a passive position of waiting without any option of actively changing her situation or locating an official source of assistance that would help her to change it. The years of waiting takes a toll of economic abuse on survivors:

I can’t open a bank account, as he [her ex-husband] left me with many issues. First of all, he ran up a huge municipal tax debt that he hasn’t paid for years. The debt is in my name, and they’re waiting to charge me for it. All lawsuits are directed at me, and the foreclosure is also on me. . . . So that’s why my account was frozen. So he didn’t pay municipal taxes, and there’s still a case against me with a huge debt that I cannot handle. I remain frozen to this day. He really managed to tangle things up for me. Even today, so many years after the divorce, I’m unable to move. [Linda]

Chaining is manifested both in the survivor’s statement that she has “remained frozen to this day” and in her statement that she is “unable to move.” Major debts, found by Littwin (2012) to be a common measure of economic abuse, as well as bureaucratic barriers, effectively constitute chains, as the abusive ex-partner can no longer inflict physical abuse on her after it was sanctioned. The abuser created enormous debt and associated it with her name as part of his way to control her. Below we show how the authorities consider her to be responsible for the debts despite their awareness of the physical violence that characterized the relationship during the years prior to her escape to a shelter. Some economic abusers combine with the measure of debt other violent behavior, such as theft:

Today, economic abuse is more difficult. Because I filed a divorce suit four years ago, and the court awarded me ₪3,000 [per month] alimony. And he does not pay it. That is economic abuse. And I have to face paying a mortgage alone. I have to cope; I owe debts for municipal water, for municipal taxes. I have to . . . lots of things. [And he] is not interested [. . .] Look, To this day I experience violence, even today. Today, for example, I receive gift parcels from all sorts of organizations, usually on holidays, so he takes all the things I get and he steals them, or sells them or gives them away, I don’t know what he does with them. He sells my things out of my home. [Yolanda]

After being sanctioned for his physical abuse, the abusive partner ignores compulsory payments to the municipality while noting the survivor’s difficulties created by his refusal to pay. To the systematic accumulation of debts, he adds outright theft of her possessions, as he is able to enter her part of the house which they still cohabit. This arrangement is necessary for her, as she cannot afford to move. She explains the arrangement as temporary until the divorce is final; however, he stalls the process by creating various obstacles. In this way, the survivor finds herself chained to the relationship in three ways: He does not leave the home; he would not cooperate with the divorce agreement; and she is buried in debt. The section below expands upon the phenomenon of continuity associated with economic abuse, as abetted by the state.

The Continuous Paths of Economic Abuse

Often economic abuse becomes more critical after divorce when abusive partners search for revenge or punishment. Consequently, a prevalent situation is one in which survivors are pursued after divorce for debts created by the abusive partners. One common paralyzing effect that such abuse may have, concerns the freezing of bank accounts:

Then I realized that he wrote checks and gave more and more after we divorced; he probably still had more checkbooks and he continued to write them. Then I got sued and files at the bailiff’s office were opened against me, and I saw that I couldn’t pay anymore, so my account was frozen. I was employed at the time, and they called and said, “We want to pay you, but how can we deposit it into your account if it’s frozen?” So basically, I couldn’t get my salary. [Jasmin]

Until she got the phone call from her employer, the speaker presents herself as not actually realizing the significance of the debts created by her ex-partner. Only after the phone call is she able to assess her situation, contemplating solutions to the fact that she has been dispossessed of her own bank account and thus unable to receive her salary.

The notion of the “battering state” contributed by Adelman (2017) in her analysis of Israeli policies on IPV is instructive. She reveals the punishment inflicted upon women who do not fall into the categories set forth in the policies. In this section, we show the nature of the repeated engagement of state authorities with the economic activity of the survivor that is created when authorities listen to the abusive men’s accusations regardless of information contained in the sanctions on their past physical violent behavior. The trust that men garner enables the state to put women under surveillance and, as we can see, these acts become a repeated punishment:

Today, I can say that I managed to stay afloat. The next day, the tax authorities came: “Show us your books, bills, dates . . .” He sends them over, and it’s the same thing all over again. He tells them that I have an income of ₪60,000 [per month, about $16,600 at the time of writing] on which I pay no taxes, while he does whatever he wants. Enough! Well . . . OK. I go through with it. Then, he takes me to court again. The tax authorities . . . sent National Insurance officials to me three times and tax collectors once. It didn’t work. None of it worked for him [. . .] but these things really break me. [Talia]

Again and again, authorities trust the abusive partner in their efforts to trace those who evade tax payments. The partner manages to use the authorities as his representatives in criminalizing the survivor and exposing her to the torture of the repeated search for hidden prohibited economic activity. The persistence of various forms of economic abuse perpetrated by the ex-partner has a powerful impact on the survivor’s life to the extent that she experiences the encounters with the authorities sent by her ex-partner as triggers for her repeated crises. Each such crisis obviously impedes her economic activity, threatening to push her back into poverty. Another prevalent form of authorities’ engagement with economic sanctioning of survivors is preventing the survivors their entitlements to state support. Authorities turn a blind eye to abusive partners not adhering to the requirements of separation agreements, creating a situation wherein women cannot obtain their housing support:

I’m going to check with the bailiff’s office if the files are closed and everything is good. Suddenly I find that there’s another case against me. And I’m going to find out where, because I went to open a bank account already, and they tell me that my account is frozen, and I say it can’t be. They told me, “Bank of Israel has foreclosed on you.” I say it can’t be, I arranged everything. It can’t be; something is wrong here. It turns out yes, it’s been frozen because he no longer pays the mortgage. And the house is still registered in my name, and he didn’t remove my name from the mortgage. Why is it still registered in my name? The court, in the divorce agreement . . . he took the apartment on the condition that I be absolved of all debts, including the mortgage. But he didn’t do it. The house is still in my name; he didn’t remove my name. So that’s why I don’t get rent assistance. According to the Housing Ministry, I have a house, so I’m not entitled. “Not entitled.” [Linda]

As far as the authorities are concerned, a survivor is still the owner of a house wherein her abusive ex-partner resides, regardless of her effort to follow what Adelman (2017) defines as the appropriate path: She spent 8 months in a battered women’s shelter. Regardless, her case is not discussed through the prism of being an IPV survivor with a complex separation agreement, which results in the state depriving her of her entitlement. Thus, the state can be viewed as collaborating with the abusive partner, punishing the survivor by ignoring the context of her situation. Importantly, the criminalization enacted by authorities that repeatedly accede to abusive partners’ demands to check on survivors, takes the form of burden of proof: The survivor who applies for housing support is under suspicion as someone who is trying to gain the status of protected tenant despite her owning a house, that is, gaming the system. Thus, the framework of criminalization is used against the survivor rather than against the abusive man.

Discussion and Conclusion

Women living with a violent partner experience various configurations of IPV in their day-to-day lives. The literature on IPV describes its various forms, and there is a wealth of studies describing mental, physical, and sexual violence (e.g., Basile & Hall, 2011; Crossman et al., 2016; Estefan et al., 2016). Concomitantly, the interest in economic abuse and its significance has also begun to increase (Littwin, 2012; Postmus et al., 2020; Renan-Barzilay, 2018). Alongside this interest is a growing discussion of economic and employment ramifications of IPV (e.g., Adams et al., 2013; Crawne et al., 2011; Sauber & O’Brien, 2020). Nonetheless, to the best of our knowledge, a study examining the role of the state in changing the dynamics of the relations between various forms of IPV has not yet been conducted. In particular, there has not been sufficient discussion of how physical IPV is reduced while economic abuse increases consequent to state practices.

The analysis of the in-depth interviews with IPV survivors elicited a social process that involves two main phases: a first involves a process of awakening from which an appeal to the authorities is initiated; and a second phase, triggered by the sanctioning of physical abuse while generating the unintended consequence of intensified economic abuse, often with long-term implications for the survivor’s life. The social process begins with women’s subjective understanding that they live under violence. This understanding often arises from social interactions with significant others in their lives. Following this realization, an encounter with an extreme act of violence leads them to approach the authorities for assistance in protecting themselves and their children from continuing physical violence.

The search for protection and assistance, both through social services and through the filing for a protective order after a violent incident by a partner, is documented in the literature on IPV survivors (e.g., Brandwein, 1999; Hughes & Brush, 2015). At the same time, there appears a critique of the effectiveness of the proposed protection for women after approaching official institutions (Goodmark, 2012). While it has been argued that seeking protection from violence increases women’s sense of security and reduces exposure to revictimization (Frantzen et al., 2011; Logan & Walker, 2009), there is also empirical evidence that a petition to the police or to the court to obtain PFA extracts an economic and employment toll from the survivors (Hughes & Brush, 2015).

Our findings show that the subjective meanings held by IPV survivors can be interpreted as indicating the changing nature of the violence against them. The findings reveal how, after approaching the authorities for protection from physical violence, exposure to ongoing economic abuse increases. It can be argued that this continuous exposure is also enabled by lack of legal protections against economic abuse in Israel.

Legal literature specializing in domestic violence cites the “problematic” nature of authorities’ responses to the need to protect IPV survivors (Brush, 2013). It has been suggested that due to the lack of legal recognition of economic abuse and its manifestations, in many Western countries, including Israel (e.g., Johnson, 2009; Littwin, 2012; Renan-Barzilay, 2018), women are left unprotected from men’s controlling practices. Our contribution lies in explaining how this complex legal context manifests in the lives of survivors throughout the life course. We demonstrate the role of the state in the process of reducing physical abuse alongside increased economic abuse, showing how the institutional and the legal recognition that may protect the survivor from continued physical violence also exposes her to the continuation of violence that is not recognized by law. The interviewees in this study showed us that after the intervention of the law and the authorities, in many cases violent partners realize the limitations of their power and change their conduct, from visible and familiar forms of violence to ones hidden from the public, legal, and social eye.

The phrase coined by Patricia Hill Collins, the past in the present, to describe how in an age of post–civil rights in the United States, racial power imbalances are hidden and contain vestiges of racial structures of the past and a new, “slippery”-yet-powerful racism (Collins, 2005), is apt in the case of IPV. In the same way as with racism, the legal recognition of physical and sexual violence creates the illusion that sanctions on their perpetrators lead to a cessation of violence. In fact, the past continues to exist in the present lives of IPV survivors who participated in this study. For them, coercive control and repression through economic means persists. These findings contribute to the fertile legal debate on the effectiveness of CPOs, which challenges the legal recognition of physical violence and physical harm only (Baker, 2013; Johnson, 2009) and reinforces the call for legal recognition of economic abuse.

Our study is limited in that we have not focused on one type of appeal to the authorities for protection from IPV. While there are studies that specialize in PFA, our study yielded various examples of institutional interventions (petitioning for restraining orders, social services intervention, battered women’s shelter, and/or legal aid for divorce), from the wealth of the accounts we heard at length from our participants. Future research that would collect data from survivors according to types of institutional intervention would be able to determine the forms of economic abuse that emerge following each such type of intervention. Furthermore, future research should examine the possibility that the progression of physical abuse to economic abuse has a class-related facet that would contribute to our understanding of economic vulnerability.

The descriptions of IPV survivors reveal how the state’s actions, which do not recognize economic abuse and its ramifications, combine with the actions of the former partners to deepen the sense of oppression and raise obstacles to survivors’ rehabilitation. These feelings of oppression are even more profound, as they do not include oppressive control by the partners “only,” but also include state supervision and control in such a way as to undermine survivors’ right to experience their citizenship as equal (Zufferey et al., 2016). Finally, our research findings reinforce the call for institutional recognition of economic abuse and its ongoing character over survivors’ life course, as well as recognizing the limits of legal recognition for the continuation of the various forms of IPV.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Karni Krigel

Author Biographies

Karni Krigel, PhD, is a Feminist Qualitative Sociologist. As a researcher, her studies focus on the ways in which domestic violence is present in survivors’ work life and she has developed a temporal perspective in the area of violence against women contributing to a processual understanding of survivors’ need for resources. Her articles were published in Aggression and Violent Behaviour and in Current Sociology. She is a recognized expert on the development of interventions for intimate partner violence survivors with an emphasis on supporting their ability to establish economic sustainability.

Orly Benjamin, DPhill, is an Associate Professor at the Sociology and Anthropology Department and at the Gender Studies Program, Bar-Ilan University. Her articles appeared in the Sociological Review, Sociological Perspectives, and more. She chairs the ESA research network on gender relations in the labor market and the welfare state. Her book, Feminism, Family and Identity in Israel: Women’s Marital Names (with Michal Rom, 2011), introduces her theory on couples’ negotiation and her book, Gendering Israel’s Outsourcing: The Erasure of Employees’ Caring Skills (2016), introduces a feminist perspective on public procurement in welfare, education, and health care services.

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