Economic Abuse

The following are common economically abusive behaviors:

Preventing you from having or keeping a job
Interfering with your efforts to maintain a job by sabotaging childcare, transportation, or other arrangements
Harassing you at work
Refusing to work
Not including you in family financial decisions
Not allowing you access to the family finances
Making you ask for money
Taking your money
Demanding an account of everything you buy
Controlling your access to financial information
Not allowing you to talk to others about money
Not allowing your name to be on accounts, which would allow you to build credit
Forcing you to put your name on accounts and then destroying your credit
Making fun of your financial contribution and saying it is not worth anything
Expecting you to behave in a certain way because you make less money or are not the “breadwinner”
Destroying or interfering with homework
Preventing you from learning English
Forcing you to work “illegally” when you do not have a work permit
Threatening to report you to INS or IRS if you work “under the table”
Taking the money your family back home was depending on you to send to them
Forcing you to sign papers in English that you do not understand i.e. court papers, IRS forms, immigration papers
Harassing you at the only job you can work at legally in the U.S., so that you lose that job and are forced to work “illegally”