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Synopsis
Victim survivors who experience coerced business debts are mostly women. Many discover the extent of their liabilities after the relationship has broken down, when they are contacted by debt collectors, and are often shocked by how extensive these debts are. They often don’t realise that what they’re experiencing is financial abuse.
For some victim survivors, economic abuse escalates when they leave the perpetrator, who retaliates by using existing business structures to coerce victim survivors into debt. At times, the abuse is perpetrated post separation, particularly in the context of child support.
Many victim survivors are ‘incredibly overwhelmed’, yet very few free services assist with business debts as they often require specialist expertise in corporations law, insolvency law and tax law. The lack of affordable help and poor recognition of financial abuse, including among victim survivors, contribute to the relative ‘invisibility’ of economic abuse through coerced business debts.
The lack of affordable assistance leaves victim survivors to self-advocate in very challenging circumstances while fleeing violence, dealing with family law parenting and property settlement proceedings, seeking secure housing and trying to rebuild their lives
Source: Coerced Business Debts – Coerced-business-debts-Uncovering-hidden-harms-from-economic-abuse.pdf
Sadly, this is very old news! Way back in the early 1990s/late 1980s, Melbourne lawyers Jenny Lawton and Emma Swart coined the term ‘sexual transmitted debt’ to cover this coercive monetary conduct, often – mostly – engineered through guarantees and all-monies mortgages. Sexually transmitted debt is debt transmitted by men to women – husband/partner to wife/partner, son to mother (often a widow). I have acted in such cases with success in extricating the women from these debt burdens, and have written about the phenomenon in various publications – for example
‘Cash or Kind: Economic Violence and Sexually Transmitted Debt’ in Cross-Cultural Exploration of Wife Abuse: Problems and Prospects¸ 1997, Ayan Se’ver, ed., Edwin Mellan Press, pp. 145-72
Equitable principles resting upon coercion and duress can be called upon, and cases in both Australia and the United Kingdom relating to banks and finance providers are open to be called upon and applied here.