Making Safety Affordable: Intimate Partner Violence is an Asset-Building Issue
Amy Durrence
Director of Systems Change Initiatives
FreeFrom
Kirkley Doyle
Director of Data and Research
FreeFrom
Sonya Passi
Founder and CEO
FreeFrom
Amy Durrence
Director of Systems Change Initiatives
FreeFrom
Kirkley Doyle
Director of Data and Research
FreeFrom
Sonya Passi
Founder and CEO
FreeFrom
Our response to intimate partner violence isn’t working, and the proof is in the prevalence. Despite a movement spanning over 40 years, 1 in 4 women and nearly 1 in 2 transgender people still experience intimate partner violence in the U.S. So, what are we getting wrong about this violence? The answer lies in how we frame the problem. We approach intimate partner violence solely through crisis intervention, when in reality it is an asset-building issue.
Long-term safety for survivors begins with financial security and investment in survivor wealth. Survivors need living wage employment. Survivors need savings and other assets. Survivors need wealth. When faced with costs reaching six figures compounded by the effects of economic abuse (no job, no cash, no savings), minimum-wage work will not lead to safety, healing, and recovery. Through products, services, early interventions, and enduring continuums of support that center on survivors’ needs, we can disrupt the cycle of intimate partner violence in the U.S. and create generational safety, health, wealth, and prosperity.
In this brief, we explore three existing unmet needs that contribute to survivors’ inability to build wealth: money, tailored asset-building support, and safe and responsive banking and credit services. Within each identified need, we discuss specific issues facing survivors, strategic actions in response to those issues, as well as innovative ideas and existing promising practices to help funders take action to prioritize survivor wealth.
The experience of intimate partner violence is incredibly disruptive to a survivor’s employment. This disruption can take many forms — survivors missing work to deal with any number of urgent matters (seeking medical attention, obtaining a restraining order), harm-doers preventing survivors from going to work, or at times disruptively showing up to a survivor’s workplace.
Most of these products assume that users have at least some disposable income, access to assets, and financial capability to navigate and use the products. However, as a result of intimate partner violence, survivors rarely have the foundational assets, resources, or confidence necessary to benefit from these products.
Survivors can’t stay safe without financial security, but they are not getting the support they need to build financial security when they seek services.
Service providers and shelter leadership identify a lack of unrestricted funding as a barrier to doing financial work with their clients.
Banking as a survivor is not always easy or safe. Harmdoers use banks to commit economic abuse through tactics such as monitoring and controlling survivors’ online bank accounts, using banks to locate survivors after they leave, and incurring debts in a survivor’s name.