“He never hit her. He merely made sure she had nowhere to go.”

There is a rather persistent idea of what an abused woman is supposed to look like. There ought to be a bruise somewhere. A broken object, perhaps. A raised voice heard through a wall. Something sufficiently dramatic that can be pointed towards and identified as violence. Without it, things become inconveniently ambiguous. What exactly has happened to her? Her husband earns the money and manages the finances. She asks him before buying things. He does not particularly like her working. The house is in his name. She does not know how much money is in their accounts. What of it? These are financial arrangements, surely, not violence. Except that sometimes the absence of a bruise tells us remarkably little about the presence of abuse.

Gender-based violence is frequently understood almost entirely in terms of physical and sexual violence, which are undoubtedly among its most devastating manifestations. Yet violence can also operate through coercion, deprivation and control. UNFPA describes gender-based violence as a violation that undermines a survivor’s health, dignity, security and autonomy, and emphasizes that it is sustained by inequalities and social norms which restrict the agency of women and girls. Economic violence belongs within precisely this framework because money, property, employment and access to ordinary material resources are not merely financial matters. They determine what a person is actually free to do. After all, independence is rather difficult to exercise without the means by which independence is made possible.

Economic abuse may involve controlling a woman’s income, preventing her from working, taking her salary, denying her access to a bank account, monitoring every purchase, withholding money for necessities, forcing debt into her name, disposing of her property or restricting her access to things such as housing, transport and technology. This is one reason it is useful to distinguish economic abuse from the narrower term financial abuse. Money is certainly involved, but money is not the whole of it. A person who cannot access the family car may be unable to get to work. A person whose phone has been taken away may find it considerably harder to contact friends, employers, banks or support services. A woman may technically own property while having no practical control over it. Economic violence concerns not only the possession of money, but control over the resources through which a person participates in society. This is where apparently ordinary behaviour becomes more difficult to dismiss. There is an obvious difference between two people deciding that one partner will handle household finances and one partner deliberately ensuring that the other possesses no financial information, no independent money and no ability to make decisions without permission. There is a difference between deciding together that one parent will temporarily stop working to care for a child and one partner making employment so difficult that the other eventually gives it up. There is a difference between discussing expenditure and requiring an adult woman to produce receipts for every rupee she spends. The difference is power.

Economic violence is therefore better understood not as an assortment of isolated disagreements about money but as a means through which one person can acquire and maintain control over another. Specialist organisation Surviving Economic Abuse describes behaviours that broadly operate through restriction, exploitation and sabotage: restricting access to money and property; exploiting someone’s income, credit or assets; or sabotaging their ability to acquire and maintain economic resources in the first place. Preventing a woman from earning is important here. If a partner takes her salary after she earns it, the abuse is relatively easy to understand. If he prevents her from obtaining that salary at all, the end result can be very much the same. He need not say, “You are forbidden to work.” Perhaps he repeatedly refuses childcare on the days she is employed. Perhaps he creates arguments before interviews. Perhaps he demands that she leave jobs which require interaction with men. Perhaps he insists that the household or children must come first while treating his own employment as non-negotiable. Perhaps the decision is presented as concern: Why exhaust yourself? I earn enough for both of us. Each individual act can be made to sound reasonable. It is the pattern, the distribution of power and the erosion of the other person’s choices that matter.

This is also why a feminist understanding of economic violence cannot begin and end with the question of whether an individual man happens to be particularly controlling. UNFPA identifies gender-based violence as connected to structural discrimination and gender norms that limit women’s participation in economies and decision-making. Economic abuse occurs within a world in which women have historically been assigned responsibility for unpaid domestic and care work while men have more often been positioned as earners and holders of economic authority. The familiar arrangement in which one person earns while another cooks, cleans, raises children and keeps a household functioning is not in itself abusive. The danger emerges when economic dependence is transformed into a mechanism of obedience. The old assertion that “I earn the money” can perform an astonishing amount of ideological work.For what exactly does it mean to say that the money belongs only to the person whose salary brought it into the house when another person may have spent years performing the unpaid labour that enabled that salary to be earned? If a woman leaves paid employment to raise children, manages the household, cooks, cleans and provides the care upon which family life depends, she has not ceased contributing economically simply because no employer deposits a sum into her account at the end of the month. Yet the invisibility of unpaid work can make it extraordinarily easy to translate earning the income into owning the power.

This is where economic violence and the politics of unpaid care work begin to intersect. The same gender norms that can render women’s domestic labour invisible can also make their financial dependence appear natural. He earns. She spends. He provides. She receives. Once those categories have been accepted unquestioningly, control can masquerade remarkably well as generosity. “I give her everything she needs” sounds rather different from “she is permitted access only to what I decide she needs.”

The latter formulation exposes the problem. Economic autonomy is not simply a question of whether somebody has enough food or clothing to survive. It concerns the ability to make meaningful decisions about one’s own life. A woman who must ask permission to buy basic personal items, who cannot access household accounts, who has no savings of her own and who knows that questioning her partner could mean losing access to money may be materially provided for while possessing very little economic freedom.

Leaving an abusive relationship costs money. There may be transport to arrange, somewhere else to live, children to support, documents to retrieve, legal assistance to seek and ordinary daily expenses to meet. A person who controls these resources consequently acquires considerable control over whether leaving is practically possible. Specialist research on economic abuse stresses that economic insecurity can trap victim-survivors in dangerous relationships and that economic harm can continue after separation through debt, damaged credit and interference with finances. The question so frequently directed at survivors, Why didn’t she just leave?, therefore manages to overlook one rather important detail: leaving is an action, and actions require resources. A locked door is not the only thing capable of keeping somebody inside a house.

There is an additional cruelty in the fact that the economic consequences can outlive the relationship which produced them. An abusive partner may accumulate debts in a woman’s name, misuse joint accounts, destroy property or interfere with employment. A woman may eventually leave the perpetrator and yet continue paying, sometimes literally, for the abuse long afterwards. Economic violence can therefore operate simultaneously in the present and the future. It can limit what a woman is able to do today while quietly damaging what she will be able to do tomorrow. Nor should economic independence itself be treated as some magical inoculation against abuse. A woman may have a degree, a profession and an income and still experience economic violence. Indeed, employment itself can become another site upon which control is exercised. Her wages can be appropriated; her work can be sabotaged; debts can be created in her name; joint assets can be withheld. The stereotype of the economically abused woman as someone who has never earned money misunderstands the nature of the problem. Abuse is not defined by the amount of money a woman possesses, but by the use of economic resources to restrict her autonomy.

India’s Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005 is particularly significant in this respect because it explicitly includes economic abuse within its definition of domestic violence. The Act recognises deprivation of economic or financial resources, including household necessities, maintenance and property; the disposal or alienation of assets in which the woman has an interest; and restrictions upon her continued access to resources or facilities to which she is entitled, including the shared household. This matters because it challenges precisely the assumption with which we began: that unless violence leaves a bodily injury, it somehow belongs outside our conception of domestic abuse. The law, in other words, understands something that society does not always find quite so easy to accept. A person can be harmed by what is withheld from her. Money withheld. Property withheld. Information withheld. Employment obstructed. Access restricted. Dependence deliberately produced.

Once economic violence is viewed through this lens, the question is no longer merely, “Does she have money?” but rather: Who controls it? Who decides how it may be used? Who has access to information? Who owns the assets? Who can earn? Who can leave? Who is required to ask? These are feminist questions because they are questions about power. They also prevent us from committing another common mistake, which is to interpret every survivor through the same neat little template. Women do not encounter economic abuse from identical social positions. Class, disability, migration status, employment, access to banking, family support and other inequalities may all shape both a perpetrator’s opportunities for control and a survivor’s available routes towards safety. A survivor-centred response must therefore resist the temptation to prescribe a single correct course of action. UNFPA places safety, confidentiality, non-discrimination and self-determination at the centre of responses to gender-based violence. The purpose of support should be to restore choices, not simply to replace the perpetrator as yet another person deciding what the survivor ought to do.

This is especially important when talking about economic empowerment. Giving women greater access to employment, education, banking and property can strengthen autonomy, but economic empowerment cannot be treated as though earning an income automatically abolishes gender-based violence. UNFPA and CARE have argued that women’s economic empowerment, freedom from GBV and sexual and reproductive autonomy are interconnected precisely because they all concern the distribution and exercise of power. A woman who earns money but is punished for controlling it has not achieved full economic autonomy. Neither has a woman whose increased earnings provoke retaliation from someone determined to preserve his authority.

The objective, therefore, cannot simply be to insert women into existing economic systems and declare the work finished. It must also involve challenging the social arrangements which teach us that male authority over resources is normal, that women’s unpaid labour carries no economic weight, that dependence is evidence of femininity, or that a man who “provides everything” is consequently entitled to determine everything. Economic violence is difficult to recognise partly because very little of it needs to look violent. It may wear the exceedingly respectable clothes of financial responsibility, marital duty, protection or concern. It can occur without shouting. It can happen through passwords, property papers, salaries, bank accounts, employment decisions and a thousand ordinary transactions. There may be no dramatic incident upon which an outsider can conveniently fasten their attention. There may only be the gradual disappearance of one person’s ability to choose.

It is time, therefore, to abandon the idea that the seriousness of abuse can be measured by what it leaves upon the body. Sometimes the most consequential question is not whether a woman has been struck, but whether she possesses the material means to live independently of the person controlling her. Does she know what she owns? Can she access her own money? Can she work if she chooses? Can she make an ordinary purchase without fear? Can she leave? A society interested in ending violence against women cannot afford to treat these as merely domestic financial questions. Economic autonomy is tied to safety because resources create choices, and choices are rather fundamental to freedom. When somebody systematically takes those choices away, the fact that he has managed to do so without leaving a bruise does not make the violence disappear. It merely makes it easier for the rest of us not to see it.