Mapping Gendered Economic Abuse Across the Relationship Lifecourse: A Qualitative Meta-Ethnography

Abstract Purpose In this paper, we provide a review of extant qualitative research that reports on women’s experience of economic abuse during intimate relationships and following separation. To advance understanding of the processes of economic abuse that play out over the course of an intimate relationship, we draw on Zelizer’s social meaning of money and Risman’s causal mechanisms of gender to provide a conceptual basis and typology to begin to untangle gender, finance, and violence in intimate-partner relationships. Methods This qualitative meta-ethnography draws on 19 studies that centre the lived experiences of women survivors of economic abuse. Following a multi-faceted literature searching strategy across leading academic databases, studies were coded and analyzed drawing on Zelizer and Risman to conduct a gendered analysis of economic abuse in intimate relationships. Results The studies identified seemingly innocuous, but ultimately controlling behaviors that served to establish the financial gender order within and beyond relationships. The evidence showed that it is fairly straightforward for economically abusive male partners to exploit the established financial gender order to their advantage to assert power within their intimate relationships. Patterns of abuse could often be difficult for women to identify given the cultural acceptance of men’s financial authority and autonomy. The included articles, however, highlighted points in abusive relationships where catalytic events ruptured the victim-survivor's perspective on their financial or physical safety. After leaving an abusive ex-partner, however, some women endured institutionalized economic abuse through government systems, such as child support and family law court proceedings, whereby fraudulent economic behavior continued to be enacted. Conclusions The research studies included in this review, and our synthesis of their findings, have brought women’s experiences to the fore in order to shed light on the often invisible experience of economic abuse. The processual framework of the financial gender order helps to identify points within intimate relationships where economic abuse escalates. An ongoing, yet concerted effort is required to identify and dismantle the individual, community and institutional sites at which unquestioned and archaic gendered financial assumptions are enacted and proliferate.