Controlling or Coercive Behaviour in an Intimate or Family Relationship

Coerced Debt: When Economic Abuse Leaves a Liability Long After the Relationship Ends

Applied carefully to your story, I would frame this around cumulative economic control, rather than simply saying that debt existed. The important question is how financial arrangements were created, who benefited, what freedom you had over them, what representations were made, and what consequences you were ultimately left carrying.

My Experience of Economic Control

For a long time, I thought financial abuse meant somebody taking money from your bank account.

I now understand that it can be far more sophisticated.

Economic abuse can operate through employment, income, property, borrowing, household liabilities, company finances and the gradual transfer of financial risk from one person to another.

That distinction matters when I look back at my own experience.

I entered the marriage with my own financial history, earning capacity and property resources. During the relationship, however, financial arrangements became increasingly entangled with decisions and representations that I would later have to spend years trying to unravel.

What concerns me most is not any single transaction.

It is the cumulative pattern.

I have subsequently had to examine employment records, payslips, tax information, company accounts, claimed liabilities, property documentation and financial disclosure in an attempt to understand what actually happened financially during the relationship and proceedings that followed.

That reconstruction has itself become part of the harm.

Coerced Debt Is About Control, Not Simply Borrowing

Coerced debt can arise where somebody is pressured, manipulated or deceived into assuming financial obligations for another person's benefit, or where financial liabilities are created or attributed to them without genuinely free and informed agreement.

But the wider concept of economic abuse goes further.

The central question is not simply:

“Whose name was the debt in?”

It is:

“Who exercised economic control, who obtained the benefit, who carried the risk, and what happened to the other person's financial independence?”

A financial arrangement may look perfectly ordinary on paper.

A mortgage.

Employment.

Household expenditure.

A loan.

A company payment.

A transfer.

But paper does not necessarily reveal the power dynamics surrounding the transaction.

That is why context matters.

When Your Own Home Becomes Part of the Control

One of the most profound financial consequences in my own story concerns my home.

I was the legal owner and mortgagor.

Yet the financial consequences surrounding that property ultimately became enormous.

The cumulative effect was not simply a dispute about an asset.

It affected housing security, financial stability and my ability to rebuild my life.

That is precisely why economic abuse cannot always be understood by examining ownership alone.

A person can technically own an asset while progressively losing meaningful control over the security that asset was supposed to provide.

And when legal processes subsequently interact with those circumstances, the economic consequences can continue long after the relationship itself has ended.

Employment and Financial Dependency Matter Too

My financial records also raised questions that required me to reconstruct what happened during my employment within the relationship's wider financial arrangements.

I have had to examine contractual salary information against HMRC records, payslips, furlough documentation and deductions.

Those matters require determination on their evidence; I do not need to overstate what individual documents prove.

The wider safeguarding question is nevertheless important:

What happens when an intimate relationship, employment relationship and financial relationship overlap?

The person controlling the business may also possess significant influence over another person's income.

Employment therefore stops being merely employment.

Income becomes connected to relationship power.

And losing the relationship can potentially mean losing income, financial security and professional stability simultaneously.

That concentration of economic power deserves far greater recognition when assessing coercive control.

The Creation of Debt Narratives

Another significant issue in my experience has been the characterisation of money as debt.

Where one party later asserts that historic payments, gifts, family assistance or other transfers constituted loans, those assertions can materially alter the apparent financial position.

This is why evidence integrity matters.

Where substantial liabilities are asserted, questions should follow.

Where is the contemporaneous loan agreement?

What were the repayment terms?

When was repayment first demanded?

What do the bank records demonstrate?

How was the transaction described when it actually occurred?

These questions are particularly important where an alleged liability emerges or materially changes during relationship breakdown or financial proceedings.

A claimed debt should not acquire legitimacy merely through repetition.

Financial liability requires evidence.

Economic Abuse Can Continue After Separation

Perhaps one of the greatest misconceptions is that economic abuse ends when somebody leaves.

It may not.

Post-separation financial harm can include disputes concerning property, liabilities, access to resources, maintenance, disclosure and the costs associated with prolonged proceedings.

And there is another cost rarely measured:

the cost of having to reconstruct your own financial history.

Hours become days.

Days become months.

Documents have to be recovered.

Accounts compared.

Transactions traced.

Statements reconstructed.

Correspondence located.

Figures reconciled.

The survivor is effectively required to become a forensic investigator of their own life.

That labour has a cost.

Financially.

Professionally.

Emotionally.

And physically.

This Is Where Cumulative Coercive Control Matters

Looking at each issue independently can obscure what happened to the human being experiencing all of them.

Employment is placed in one box.

Property in another.

Debt in another.

Legal proceedings in another.

Housing in another.

Health consequences somewhere else.

But I did not experience those consequences separately.

I experienced all of them in one life.

That is why the Cumulative Harm Model™ matters.

The correct question is not always:

“Can this individual financial event independently be classified as abuse?”

Sometimes the more revealing question is:

“What happens when we examine the cumulative effect of the entire pattern upon one person's economic autonomy?”

Did they become financially stronger or weaker?

Did they retain meaningful control over their assets?

Did their financial independence increase or diminish?

Who benefited from the arrangements?

Who ultimately carried the liabilities?

Could they realistically leave?

And what financial position were they left in when the relationship ended?

Those questions reveal something that an isolated transaction never can.

Controlling or Coercive Behaviour Is About the Pattern

This is why coercive control requires us to look beyond individual incidents.

A controlling relationship does not necessarily operate through constant physical violence.

Power may be exercised through money.

Employment.

Property.

Debt.

Information.

Access to documents.

Financial dependency.

And eventually through the practical consequences of trying to disentangle everything after separation.

One transaction may look ordinary.

One financial decision may appear explainable.

One disputed liability may look like an ordinary disagreement.

The pattern is where meaning emerges.

And when that pattern progressively deprives somebody of economic independence, security and freedom, we should be prepared to ask whether we are looking at something considerably more serious than a financial dispute.

The Question I Now Ask

I no longer look at economic abuse and ask only:

“Did somebody take her money?”

I ask:

Who controlled the financial architecture of the relationship?

Who controlled income?

Who benefited from assets?

Who determined liabilities?

Who possessed the information?

Who was financially able to leave?

And when everything was finally over:

Who was left carrying the economic consequences?

Because coerced debt is not simply debt.

Economic abuse is not simply money.

And coercive control is not simply a collection of unpleasant incidents.

It is about power.

It is about the progressive restriction of autonomy.

And sometimes the clearest evidence of that control is found not in what somebody possessed during the relationship—

but in what the other person was left with afterwards.

“Economic abuse can steal far more than money. It can take security, property, opportunity, independence and years of a person's future—and leave them carrying financial consequences long after the relationship itself has ended.”

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© 2026 Samantha Avril-Andreassen. All Rights Reserved.

Published by SAFECHAINN Ltd (Company No. 12038453)

This publication forms part of The Directive™, SAFECHAIN™’s thought leadership series examining coercive control, economic abuse, safeguarding, governance, evidence integrity, institutional accountability and systems reform.

All original written content, analysis, governance concepts, methodologies, frameworks and SAFECHAIN™ terminology contained within this publication are the intellectual property of Samantha Avril-Andreassen and SAFECHAINN Ltd.

This includes, but is not limited to:

SAFECHAIN™ • The Directive™ • The Cumulative Harm Model™ • Evidence Integrity™ • Participation Integrity™ • Disclosure Integrity™ • Process Integrity™ • Institutional Fragmentation™ • Institutional Capability™

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This publication combines lived-experience reflection with analysis of economic abuse, coercive control, safeguarding and institutional systems. It does not constitute legal advice or a judicial finding and should not be interpreted as determining disputed facts, criminal responsibility or civil liability concerning any identifiable person or proceeding.