Money and its Morality From Use to Abuse
[Music]
hi
we seldom talk about economic abuse
there is a silence around it even though
in the legal definition of family
violence in australia and in some other
countries
economic abuse is seen as family
violence
but for most of us our idea of family
violence is somebody
beating us black and blue i myself came
to see money as abuse
when i was interviewing a young woman
whom i whom i’ll call ekta she was
27 and we were talking about
money migration and family this was in
she began crying when she was telling
her story
and she told how she had done her
graduate education in
india she had worked for a while in the
finance sector
migrated in 2005 to australia
but her single mother had bowed to the
pressure of having her married off
just before she came to australia
the idea being she’d be too alone over
here
the first few years of her marriage
first few months of her marriage
were good she soon learned that the man
had married her
because of her permanent resident
visa
ekta was the main earner
she looked after all the expenses of the
household
her husband sent all his earnings
and some of hers without consultation
to his family in india to build a
luxurious home
it was the lack of care that
made ekta and her daughter young
daughter
leave the marriage within three and a
half years
he had already emptied the joint account
ichtha’s story stayed with me because as
a sociologist of money
i had studied remittances
and seen remittances as a moral act
the sign of a filial child i myself had
sent money to my mother
in india but for ekta
remittances had become a medium of abuse
i then connected the abuse of money
with economic abuse and family violence
only in 2016.
the state of victoria’s royal commission
into family violence the final eight
volume report came out then
and it was there i read that economic
abuse
denying a woman money appropriating her
assets
sabotaging her work
meant that this was economic abuse and
economic abuse was family violence
reading that report also kind of
absolutely shook me because it changed
my own version of myself
my first husband was a gambler
and i had always seen that as addiction
as family as financial irresponsibility
even as emotional abandonment but what i
read in that report
was gambling was an example of economic
abuse
so i suddenly realized much after the
marriage was over
that i myself had suffered economic
abuse
and it meant that i had suffered family
violence
never talked about it it was as if it
was something to be ashamed of
embarrassed about one doesn’t talk about
money openly much of the time
but i had never anticipated that it
would happen
to me like the i also had graduate
education
in india and in the us and in australia
i was financially independent like she
was before marriage
i had never thought that
i myself because of migration and young
children
would become financially dependent on my
husband for a while
we all still do not talk about family
about economic abuse as family violence
part of it is that it’s only the
physical violence the physical assault
that is criminalized in australia
i’ve been asked many times why does a
woman
suffer economic abuse is it because
she’s submissive
is it because she’s financially
illiterate
ekta and i were neither of these things
economic abuse is gendered most often
a man economically abusing a woman
through money as i said
it is denying a woman money
appropriating her assets
sabotaging her capability of paid work
and why does it happen we know that
patriarchy
and gender inequality contributes to
much of it
men usually earn more than women
men own more of the productive assets
there is a sense of male entitlement
the women we studied and interviewed
for family violence and economic abuse
they also wondered why their husbands
abused them through money they abused
them took their money even when they
were it was their servings
they were the main earners some
thought that maybe it was because the
husband himself had
seen abuse as a child others
thought maybe there was some mental
problem there
in the end they had more questions than
answers
economic abuse is also difficult to
anticipate
because there is no
cultural practice that is associated
with money
that is necessarily abusive
remittances are seen as a moral act
what happened with remittances with ekta
was that the man was using it
without the morality associated
with remittances that means that you
also have to look after your wife and
child
this was a very major finding of the
study
that money as a medium of care
can become a medium of abuse if
you use it without morality
i met carol who was a teacher
when she was 67 and had gone
and come out of her second
she’s anglo-celtic and in her culture
the joint account
is at the center of what marriage means
in terms of togetherness in terms of
partnership so when she married again
she brought her savings of sixty
thousand dollars
and told her husband to put it into the
joint account
he himself didn’t have regular work
so for the first year when she was not
in regular teaching all the money in the
joint account was hers
yet for the first year she hardly had
any money to spend he had given her a
credit card
but she told me she did not spend it
because he went through the statements
and questioned her
on every dollar she was not able to give
gifts from her own savings to her
children
the emotional abuse attached to it
was also accompanied by a fear of
physical abuse
he had also sold her
sewing machine he had sold her roll top
desk that she loved without
without asking even despite her protests
so she became really afraid of him
she she told me she hid in a walk-in
cupboard for
three hours one day thinking that maybe
he’s going to hit her now
she felt she was going crazy after two
years in a bit
she left and he got more than half the
house that she
and her earnings had paid for
so money is a medium of care the joint
account is a medium of
care for her became a medium of
surveillance of coercive control so
coercive control
is what ekta and what carol
they were experiencing it is not
just that they were some small
uh differences
or conflicts about money coercive
control
is a malicious a malevolent
pattern of continued abuse
it is gendered as i said it is more men
doing it to women
but it is also gendered in that it uses
gendered
stereotypes women told us that the man
would say
i’m hitting you because you’re not a
good wife he’d tell somebody else
oh didn’t your mother teach you how to
cook
he’d tell a woman you’re so fat so
unattractive
using the gendered roles of mother and
homemaker and partner
most of them did not recognize this as
economic abuse
when it was happening to them
part of coercive control is
the man abuses you and then convinces
you
it’s your fault it’s because you did
something wrong
time and again the indian and the
anglo-celtic women
that we spoke to they said they were
walking on eggshells
they never knew when this violence was
going to descend upon them
he tell them that you are obsessive
about money
and that’s why i’m not giving you money
when he hit he’d say it because you made
me hit
it was your fault they feared they were
losing their mind
so coercive control is really a crime
in that it takes away a woman’s human
rights
and it takes away her freedom
after we when we spoke to the women they
said after they survived
and left their marriage they learned how
to talk about
money with their children how to talk
about family violence
they also learned how to talk to other
women about
about money and economic abuse
many of them went on to help women
formally and
informally when they saw woman in
total despair thinking she had lost
herself
some of them would share their story in
part
it was often too difficult even after 20
years
to share their story in full
but they tell her that there will be a
time
when she will survive when she will be
financially resilient
and she will be able to make choices of
the kind of life
she wants to live learning from their
stories
came up with the concept of the
relational literacy of money
it is not financial literacy that they
lacked
it was the knowing how to talk about
money there are three aspects to this
first you talk to your future partner
about your story of money how you’ve
grown up
how you see yourself dealing with money
and you listen to his or her story of
money
the second is to
have a continual conversation about
money across
life stages many of these women were
financially independent
before having children before migration
but it was the change of life stage and
they had not discussed
how they would deal with the balance of
your money
my money and our money
when you retire you need that
conversation
particularly with migration you need
that conversation
because you come in touch with the
cultural model of money that’s different
from yours
and the third is that you need to talk
to your children
about how to speak of money and intimate
relationships
there is no single primer of money
each person deals with money according
to their own biography
and money shapes and is shaped by
cultural
values and social relationships
but we have to learn from each other how
we have not succeeded
and how we have succeeded with money
it’s not very easy to talk to a future
partner of money
it’s private it’s also something that
you fear
that it might unravel issues of power
and dependence
but it’s a red flag if you cannot talk
to the person you want to spend your
life with about money
and even if you do talk to that person
maybe you won’t be heard
i learned this from asha’s story she’s a
software developer
i met her when she was 27.
she had reflected on money partly
because she was
already sending money home to her
parents
when she was working
and she had moved to australia to study
and then work
she had also realized that she wanted
more
responsibility over money than her
mother chose to have
so when she thought that they were going
to get married
she spoke to her future husband saying
that she wants to continue sending money
home
and maybe what they should do is to have
a joint account
where they would put in a specific
amount of money
and each of them can do what they want
with the rest of
their money and she told him that if
this
didn’t work for him they should
reconsider the relationship
when they did get married
he told her you now belong to my family
and your money is mine
she was the main earner she said that
one day she spent
two dollars on some papadum that came
from her part of india
and he he was very angry he said you
should have waited until we got to
another suburb
where it was less than two dollars
emotional and physical violence
followed she realized
partly because of her own reflections on
money
that what he wanted was control
her marriage was over within the next
two years
i learned about the need to discuss
money across life stages from
enid i met her
a few times but when we really did talk
about money and economic abuse
she was 57 and into her second marriage
she had had two abusive relationships
before
and she had decided that she was not
going to live a life of subservience
but then she met a man with whom she
could discuss money
and who wanted to be equal she was the
main earner
and then when he was past 60
he felt he wanted to retire from paid
work
and look after the land that they had
and
produce fruit and vegetables they sat
down and decided how much money they
found out how much money they would have
and they worked out each other’s needs
plus the needs perhaps of their adult
children
and they worked out how much
he would need how much he would need how
much needs to go into their joint
account
and so init said that every week
she would directly credit the agreed
amount
to his account and they’d work it out
again if it didn’t work
she was an excellent manager of money
she had put eight children through
catholic schools
despite the abuse and despite working
part-time
and then to a horror she found that one
of her daughters was in danger of
suffering economic abuse
she was good with money she had learned
how to be prudent how to be transparent
with money
she was financially independent before
marriage
and the first little bit of her marriage
but then they decided to have a child
she stopped paid work
but she had never asked her husband for
money
and she didn’t know how to talk about it
that’s when she approached her mother
and her mother
then learnt that what her daughter had
absorbed
was from the early years of growing up
when she had seen her mother put herself
last she had also absorbed the good
management and control of money
but she had not known the later insights
of her mother of how to share money
and either told her daughter that she
needed to discuss
this balance of joint money and
personal money now that they were in a
different
life stage and you had to have this
discussion
not just with respect because there is
something hierarchical about respect
but with unconditional mutual regard
so this this story ended with hope
the women showed great courage
in sharing their story of money
most of them at one point or the other
broke down
they said the trauma lasted they were
surprised themselves
at how deep the hurt had been
and yet they shared the story talking of
their vulnerabilities
their despair and their learnings
but they said they shared the story
because some good might come of it
they said they hoped that with talking
of money
their sons won’t become perpetrators
and their daughters won’t sell won’t
suffer
the absolute devastation of economic
abuse
thank you
[Music]
you