Describing Coerced Debt in Abusive Marriages

Coerced debt is an important but understudied form of intimate partner

violence. It occurs when abusive partners use fraud, coercion, or manipulation

to incur debt in their partners’ names. For the current study, we sampled

187 women who had recently divorced an abusive husband and their

combined 2,833 credit accounts to answer the questions: (1) On what types

of credit accounts and using what types of transactions (i.e., fraud, coercion,

and manipulation) did ex-husbands create coerced debt in their partners’

names? (2) How much money was spent and what items were purchased?

and (3) What reasons did ex-husbands give for pressuring participants to

open accounts in their names that resulted in coerced debt? We collected

data via an online survey and telephone interview. We analyzed quantitative

data with descriptive statistics and responses to open-ended questions with

inductive thematic analysis. The findings indicated that coerced debt is a

common and expensive problem with a wide variety of presentations. The

116 participants with coerced debt had a mean of 4.4 and a maximum of 24

such debts and owed a combined total of over 12.5 million dollars. The most

common types of accounts with coerced debt were credit cards, vehicle loans,

mortgages, personal loans, and student loans. Coercive transactions were much more common than debt created by fraudulent transactions. Coerced

debt was used for basic necessities, lifestyle purchases, transportation, the

ex-husbands’ personal interests, financial needs and obligations, and other

household members’ needs. The most common reason ex-husbands gave for

putting accounts in their partners’ names was personal resource adequacy.

This study indicates the need for future research on the effects of coerced

debt and the effectiveness of interventions to address it; screening tools

and practices for use in direct service settings; and laws that address debt

created by coercive transactions.