THE ECONOMIC ABUSE PARADOX™
SAFECHAIN™
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THE ECONOMIC ABUSE PARADOX™
When Financial Remedy Proceedings Perpetuate the Harm They Were Intended to Resolve
By Samantha Avril-Andreassen FRSA
Founder and CEO, SAFECHAIN™ Ltd (Company No. 12038453)
ORCID: 0009-0009-9479-0819
samantha@safe-chain.org | safe-chain.org
June 2026
ABSTRACT
This paper examines the phenomenon of economic abuse within financial remedy proceedings in England and Wales. Drawing upon the Domestic Abuse Commissioner’s 2025 Everyday Business report, the Nuffield Foundation’s Fair Shares research, Resolution’s practitioner survey, and the SAFECHAIN™ governance framework, it argues that financial remedy proceedings can, in certain circumstances, become the vehicle through which economic abuse continues rather than the mechanism through which it is remedied.
The paper introduces five interconnected SAFECHAIN™ concepts — The Participation Gap™, The Shadow Ledger™, The Passport of Erasure™, Institutional Fragmentation™, and The Economic Abuse Paradox™ itself — and proposes a framework for measuring institutional readiness to recognise and respond to economic abuse as a systemic justice issue rather than a secondary financial consideration.
Keywords: economic abuse, financial remedy proceedings, coercive control, participation integrity, institutional fragmentation, domestic abuse, family justice, SAFECHAIN™
PART 1 — THE QUESTION NOBODY WANTS TO ASK
Family courts are intended to resolve financial disputes arising from the breakdown of relationships. The Matrimonial Causes Act 1973 grants the court broad discretion to achieve fair outcomes, having regard to all the circumstances of the case. The stated purpose is justice.
But what happens when the process itself becomes a vehicle through which economic abuse continues?
This question sits at the centre of an increasingly uncomfortable reality emerging from domestic abuse research, practitioner surveys, and the direct testimony of survivors. It is a question that the Domestic Abuse Commissioner’s 2025 report, Everyday Business, makes impossible to avoid.
The report found evidence of domestic abuse in 87% of reviewed family court case files and in 73% of observed hearings. It described domestic abuse as the everyday business of the family courts. Its findings reference important work undertaken by Surviving Economic Abuse and the Nuffield Foundation’s Fair Shares Project, both of which point towards the same troubling conclusion.
Economic abuse is not simply a relationship issue. It is a justice issue. And in some cases, the justice system may be reinforcing rather than repairing the harm.
This paper examines how that reinforcement occurs, what structural conditions enable it, and what institutional responses are required to disrupt it.
PART 2 — UNDERSTANDING ECONOMIC ABUSE
2.1 The Invisible Form of Abuse
Economic abuse remains one of the least understood and least visible forms of domestic abuse. Unlike physical violence, it often leaves no visible injury. Its mechanisms are financial, procedural, and institutional rather than physical. Its effects frequently continue and compound long after separation.
The Domestic Abuse Act 2021 defines economic abuse as behaviour that has a substantial adverse effect on a person’s ability to acquire, use, or maintain money or other property, or to obtain goods or services. This statutory definition represents important progress. But statutory recognition has not yet produced consistent operational response.
Economic abuse in practice manifests through:
• Financial dependency created and maintained through the removal or restriction of independent income.
• Restricted access to bank accounts, savings, and financial information.
• Coercive debt — debts incurred in the survivor’s name without knowledge or consent.
• Hidden assets — company structures, undisclosed accounts, and financial arrangements designed to reduce visible wealth.
• Manipulated liabilities — false invoices, inflated expenses, and fabricated business costs that reduce the apparent value of assets.
• Credit damage — deliberate or incidental destruction of the survivor’s credit profile through coerced defaults.
• Housing insecurity — control of accommodation as a mechanism of power and ongoing threat.
• Strategic non-disclosure — the deliberate concealment of financial information during legal proceedings.
For many survivors, leaving the relationship marks the beginning — not the end — of financial vulnerability. The damage accumulates. The consequences compound. And the system that is supposed to resolve the harm frequently encounters it without the frameworks necessary to recognise it.
2.2 The Coercive Control Dimension
Economic abuse rarely operates in isolation. It is typically one dimension of a wider pattern of coercive and controlling behaviour. The Serious Crime Act 2015 introduced the offence of controlling or coercive behaviour in intimate or family relationships. The Domestic Abuse Act 2021 extended and strengthened those provisions.
Yet the family courts continue to encounter coercive control primarily through the lens of child arrangements proceedings. In financial remedy proceedings — the arena most directly affected by economic abuse — coercive control is frequently under-recognised, underweighted, and structurally difficult to evidence.
A pattern of coercive control designed to create financial dependency over years cannot easily be captured in a Form E. But its consequences are visible in every column.
PART 3 — THE RESEARCH LANDSCAPE
3.1 The Fair Shares Findings
The Nuffield Foundation’s Fair Shares research examined how separating couples negotiate financial arrangements. Its findings are significant and disturbing.
The research found that survivors whose relationships ended due to domestic abuse frequently experienced economic abuse as part of that wider pattern of harm. The majority were caring for dependent children. Female survivors were found to be financially worse off at the conclusion of proceedings than other divorcing women.
This finding presents a direct challenge to the stated purpose of financial remedy proceedings. If those proceedings exist to achieve fairness, the evidence suggests they are not achieving it for the population most affected by economic abuse.
The reasons are structural. Economic abuse creates a negotiating asymmetry that the financial remedy process does not adequately correct. A survivor who enters proceedings financially dependent, with damaged credit, with coercive debt, without access to independent legal funding, and without knowledge of the true extent of the marital assets is not negotiating from a position of equality. Formal equality of process does not produce substantive equality of outcome.
3.2 The Resolution Survey
Resolution’s survey of more than 500 financial remedy practitioners found that approximately 80% believed domestic abuse, particularly economic abuse, is not sufficiently taken into account within financial remedy proceedings.
The practitioners identified recurring concerns:
• Inadequate financial support for survivors during proceedings.
• Inappropriate referrals to non-court dispute resolution in cases involving power imbalances.
• Continuing financial abuse through litigation — the use of proceedings themselves as a mechanism of ongoing control.
• Non-disclosure of assets — systematic and deliberate concealment of financial information.
• Breaches of court orders — maintenance orders made and ignored, enforcement absent or ineffective.
• Outcomes that perpetuate vulnerability — settlements that leave survivors financially dependent rather than financially independent.
80% of practitioners. This is not a minority concern or a specialist edge case. This is the mainstream professional assessment of a system that handles approximately 100,000 financial remedy applications per year.
When 80% of financial remedy practitioners believe economic abuse is not sufficiently addressed in the proceedings they conduct, the problem is not individual failure. The problem is systemic design.
PART 4 — THE SAFECHAIN™ CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK
4.1 The Participation Gap™
Financial remedy proceedings assume participants can engage on relatively equal footing. The adversarial model, even with its judicial discretion and section 25 factors, is built around an implicit assumption of comparable capacity to participate.
Yet survivors of economic abuse often enter proceedings with fewer financial resources, reduced access to information, greater psychological burden, increased caring responsibilities, limited ability to fund representation, and ongoing trauma responses that directly impair cognitive function and effective engagement.
Participation therefore becomes unequal before proceedings have even begun. The system records two parties. The reality may be two vastly different capacities to participate.
The Participation Gap™ is not merely the gap between legal representation and self-representation. It is the gap between the formal equality of the process and the substantive inequality of the position. It is the gap between what the court sees and what the survivor experiences.
The wider this gap, the greater the risk that procedural completion is mistaken for substantive justice.
4.2 The Shadow Ledger™
Economic abuse rarely disappears when proceedings begin. It often evolves. The mechanisms change. Direct financial control is replaced by procedural complexity. Hidden assets remain hidden. Liabilities are manipulated. Non-disclosure continues behind the formality of Forms E and witness statements.
SAFECHAIN™ calls this The Shadow Ledger™.
The visible financial record presented to the court — the disclosed accounts, the declared assets, the stated income — may not accurately reflect the true economic reality of the relationship or the marriage.
• Assets may be held through corporate structures that are presented as separate entities despite operating as extensions of the individual.
• Income may be understated through dividend manipulation, director’s loan accounts, and undisclosed remuneration.
• Liabilities may be shifted onto the survivor through coerced debt, inflated company expenses, and fabricated financial obligations.
• Control may continue through procedural complexity — generating correspondence, applications, and costs designed to exhaust rather than resolve.
The court sees documentation. The survivor experiences the consequences. The difference between those two realities can determine the outcome of a case and the trajectory of a life.
The Shadow Ledger™ is not a metaphor. It is a documented pattern. Companies House filings, HMRC records, furlough claim data, and internal accounting records frequently tell a different story from the financial picture presented to the court. The problem is not that evidence does not exist. The problem is that the court lacks the structural mechanisms to compel its production and examine it forensically as a matter of routine rather than exceptional application.
4.3 The Passport of Erasure™
Survivors frequently find themselves repeatedly explaining the same history to multiple professionals across multiple institutions. Solicitors. Barristers. Judges. Banks. Housing providers. Mortgage lenders. Support organisations. Healthcare professionals.
Each institution encounters only part of the story. Each creates a separate file. The context becomes fragmented. The abuse becomes diluted. The financial harm becomes disconnected from its origins. The pattern that explains everything becomes invisible to the institution encountering its latest consequence.
This is the Passport of Erasure™.
The survivor carries the complete history. The system repeatedly loses it.
The burden of institutional memory falls on the person least equipped to carry it — the person in trauma, managing multiple crises simultaneously, without legal support, without financial resources, and without the institutional continuity that would make repeated explanation unnecessary.
Every time a survivor is required to explain again, the system is demonstrating that it was not listening the first time.
4.4 Institutional Fragmentation™
Financial remedy proceedings do not operate in isolation. They affect housing, banking, mortgage lending, credit, benefits, employment, mental health, and child welfare simultaneously. Yet the institutions that govern each of these domains frequently operate independently of one another, without shared safeguarding intelligence and without coordination mechanisms capable of connecting the fragments of the survivor’s experience into a coherent picture.
A bank sees mortgage arrears. A housing provider sees rent debt. A court sees litigation. A healthcare provider sees trauma symptoms. A credit reference agency sees defaults. An employer sees absence.
Each institution sees a symptom. Few institutions see the system. The result is Institutional Fragmentation™. The abuse is divided across organisations. The consequences remain concentrated upon the survivor.
The systemic consequence of this fragmentation is that no single institution holds the complete picture necessary to respond effectively. Each makes decisions based upon incomplete information. Each decision, individually defensible, contributes collectively to an outcome that is neither fair nor protective.
4.5 The Economic Abuse Paradox™
The four concepts above combine to produce what SAFECHAIN™ calls The Economic Abuse Paradox™.
Financial remedy proceedings are designed to create financial fairness after the breakdown of a relationship. Their purpose is remedial. Their jurisdiction is broad. Their discretion is extensive.
Yet the evidence from the Fair Shares research, the Resolution practitioner survey, the Domestic Abuse Commissioner’s findings, and the direct testimony of survivors consistently demonstrates that survivors of economic abuse frequently leave those proceedings in a position of continuing or worsened vulnerability.
The system designed to remedy harm is, in certain conditions, reproducing it. That is the paradox. And it is not an accident. It is the predictable consequence of designing a justice system without accounting for the realities of the population it most frequently serves.
The paradox operates through four mechanisms.
First — the process assumes equality that does not exist.
Adversarial proceedings between a survivor of economic abuse and a perpetrator with superior financial resources, legal representation funded through concealed assets, and specialist counsel produce systematically unequal outcomes regardless of judicial discretion.
Second — the disclosure framework is inadequate for the concealment it encounters.
Form E and witness statement disclosure was not designed to penetrate sophisticated corporate structures, undisclosed company accounts, or long-term strategic financial concealment. The standard mechanisms are not equal to the task.
Third — economic abuse continues through the proceedings themselves.
Litigation as a mechanism of control is documented and recurring. Generating complexity, costs, and procedural exhaustion is itself a form of economic abuse. The proceedings designed to remedy the harm become the vehicle for its continuation.
Fourth — the outcome is measured by procedural completion rather than substantive fairness.
A case that produces an order is recorded as concluded. Whether the order reflects the true financial picture, whether it was obtained on accurate disclosure, whether it achieves genuine financial independence for the survivor — these questions are not systematically answered or tracked.
PART 5 — THE SAFECHAIN™ INDEX RESPONSE
5.1 Measuring Institutional Readiness
The SAFECHAIN™ Index was developed in response to the governance gap that the Economic Abuse Paradox™ exposes. Traditional safeguarding frameworks measure what institutions do. The SAFECHAIN™ Index measures whether institutions are capable of recognising economic abuse as a systemic justice issue and responding to it at the point of decision.
The Index assesses five dimensions of institutional readiness:
Institutional Coordination™ — Can organisations share safeguarding intelligence across boundaries? Can a court finding reach a mortgage lender? Can a housing vulnerability flag reach a court? Can the pattern be seen by the institution best placed to act on it?
Documentation Continuity™ — Can critical information follow the individual rather than remaining trapped in separate files? Is the Passport of Erasure™ designed out of the system or accepted as inevitable?
Trauma-Informed Practice™ — Can institutions recognise the operational impact of trauma on participation, disclosure, and decision-making? Not in policy. In practice. At the point of the collections call. At the point of the hearing. At the point of the housing allocation decision.
Participation Integrity™ — Can individuals participate effectively despite vulnerability? Is participation measured as a substantive reality or a formal appearance? Is the system asking whether justice was accessible or merely whether process was completed?
Accountability Architecture™ — Can responsibility be traced when outcomes perpetuate economic abuse? Can the system identify where and how the paradox operated in a specific case? Can learning be extracted and applied?
5.2 The Central Question
The SAFECHAIN™ Index asks one question above all others.
Can institutions recognise economic abuse as a safeguarding issue rather than merely a financial issue?
Until they can, survivors will continue to move between systems that see isolated problems rather than interconnected harm. Banks will continue to enforce against accounts where arrears were caused by economic abuse. Courts will continue to produce orders based on incomplete disclosure. Housing authorities will continue to assess applications without knowledge of the legal proceedings that will determine the applicant’s housing situation. Credit reference agencies will continue to record coercive debt as consumer default.
The paradox will continue to operate.
PART 6 — RECOMMENDATIONS
For the Family Courts
• Economic abuse must be treated as a material factor in the section 25 exercise, not a contextual backdrop. The conduct of economic abuse throughout the marriage and proceedings should be weighed as a relevant circumstance affecting the court’s discretion.
• Forensic financial examination must be available as a standard procedural tool in cases involving allegations of non-disclosure, not reserved for high-asset cases where the survivor can fund the application.
• The Shadow Ledger™ must be accessible to courts. This requires routine disclosure of internal company accounts, director’s loan account schedules, HMRC submission histories, and inter-company transactions as standard Form E obligations in cases involving company structures.
• Participation adjustments under FPR Part 3A must be proactively applied in all cases where economic abuse is alleged. The burden of requesting adjustments must not fall on the survivor.
• Litigation as a mechanism of economic abuse must be recognised and sanctioned. Where proceedings are used to exhaust, impoverish, or coerce rather than to resolve, the court has both the power and the duty to intervene.
For the FCA and Financial Regulators
• Consumer Duty obligations must be operationalised at the point of enforcement decision in every case involving a customer engaged in active family court proceedings.
• Coercive debt must be formally distinguished from consumer default in credit reference frameworks. A statutory domestic abuse flag, operable by consent, should be developed as a regulatory priority.
• Mortgage enforcement against survivors of economic abuse whose arrears arose within a documented abuse context must be subject to mandatory senior review and vulnerability assessment before any enforcement step is taken.
For Parliament
• The Domestic Abuse Act 2021 requires implementation regulations extending its economic abuse provisions into financial remedy proceedings with binding operational effect.
• Legal aid for survivors of economic abuse in financial remedy proceedings must be restored. The withdrawal of legal aid from the population most affected by the Economic Abuse Paradox™ is not a cost saving. It is a structural contribution to the perpetuation of harm.
• A cross-institutional data framework for domestic abuse safeguarding intelligence should be developed, enabling institutions to share relevant safeguarding information across boundaries without compromising data protection principles.
CONCLUSION
The evidence is now extensive. The Domestic Abuse Commissioner has quantified what survivors have been saying for decades. The Fair Shares research has demonstrated that survivors of economic abuse leave financial remedy proceedings worse off than other separating parties. Resolution’s practitioners have confirmed that economic abuse is not sufficiently addressed in the proceedings they conduct every day.
The Economic Abuse Paradox™ is not a theoretical construct. It is a documented reality. The system designed to remedy financial harm is, in certain conditions, reproducing it.
The mechanisms are structural. The Participation Gap™ exists because the proceedings were not designed for the population they most frequently serve. The Shadow Ledger™ persists because the disclosure framework is not adequate to the concealment it encounters. The Passport of Erasure™ operates because institutions were built without coordination mechanisms. Institutional Fragmentation™ continues because independence has been mistaken for isolation.
Fairness cannot be measured solely by procedural completion. Fairness must also be measured by outcome. And the outcomes are telling us something the system has not yet been willing to hear.
The question is no longer whether economic abuse exists within financial remedy proceedings.
The evidence is overwhelming.
The question is whether our institutions are capable of recognising it before they unintentionally perpetuate it.
And whether they have the institutional will to build the systems that would prevent them from doing so.
REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING
• Domestic Abuse Commissioner (2025). Everyday Business. Office of the Domestic Abuse Commissioner for England and Wales.
• Nuffield Foundation / Fair Shares Project. Research into financial arrangements on divorce and separation.
• Resolution (2024). Practitioner Survey on Domestic Abuse in Financial Remedy Proceedings.
• Surviving Economic Abuse. Research and policy work on economic abuse in family proceedings.
• Matrimonial Causes Act 1973, section 25.
• Domestic Abuse Act 2021, section 1 — definition of economic abuse.
• Serious Crime Act 2015, section 76 — controlling or coercive behaviour.
• FCA Consumer Duty (2023).
• Sharland v Sharland [2015] UKSC 60.
• Prest v Petrodel Resources Ltd [2013] UKSC 34.
• Family Procedure Rules 2010, Part 3A and Practice Direction 3AA.
• Equal Treatment Bench Book (Judicial College).
Samantha Avril-Andreassen FRSA
Founder and CEO, SAFECHAIN™ Ltd
Company No. 12038453
ORCID: 0009-0009-9479-0819
SAFECHAIN™ is a safeguarding governance framework designed to strengthen participation, accountability, institutional coordination, and vulnerability-responsive decision-making across justice, housing, healthcare, financial services, and public administration.
© 2026 Samantha JAvril-Andreassen. All rights reserved. SAFECHAINN Ltd (Company No. 12038453). SAFECHAIN™ is a registered trademark.