At its most basic, economic abuse is any form of abuse involving money. The classic example is in domestic violence situations, where one partner may make a point of controlling the family’s money so that nobody can leave. Besides neglect, economic abuse may be the least visible form of abuse. There are no public service announcements about it. There are no helpful pamphlets detailing signs that economic abuse is taking place. So let’s start out by naming a few here, in the context of an adult relationship.

If one partner is….

• not “allowed” to get a job or go back to school, or not allowed to choose their own job or area of study;
• kept in the dark about how much income their partner has;
• denied access to information like account numbers and payment arrangements;
• given no part in decisions about how the family’s money is spent;
• consistently dependent on their partner for their financial needs;
• loaning their partner money and never seeing it again;
• entirely responsible for their partner’s financial needs;
• unable to get credit because their partner has defaulted on household loans or expenses;
• losing or never seeing income or personal belongings that their partner is stealing from them, whether silently, openly, or through binge-spending;
• disturbed at work by calls or visits against their will from their partner;
• at risk of losing their job because their partner threatens to share inappropriate information or lies about them with their employer;
• required to ask for any money they need;
• required account to their partner for everything they spend even though their partner does not do the same;

…then they are being economically abused.

Like most forms of abuse, economic abuse is often but not always paired with emotional abuse. It is easy to say, “I would never let someone tell me I couldn’t take whatever job I wanted or keep me out of financial decisions!”, but rarely is the setup that blatant. It may even seem kind to begin with. Perhaps you don’t have as much income, and your partner generously handles all the bills. Maybe you naturally defer to them on big purchases because after all, it is their money. Maybe you start out on even footing but slide into this position of unequal power as one partner stays home to take care of children, becomes disabled, goes back to school, or is laid off. Perhaps you are the one who makes more, and extend your hospitality to your partner, covering their rent or their utilities or even food – “just for a while.” Or it may seem minor, even natural, next to the other abuse which has become an intrinsic part of the relationship.

The first step in ending abuse is to recognize it, and the effects it has. We will be examining the effects of abuse later on, but there is one which is important here: anger, which can manifest as defensiveness and even denial. If you feel angry and defensive when reading these lists, grumbling to yourself that I don’t know you or your partner, or that there were special circumstances that made everything on that list perfectly reasonable, or that you can’t call this abuse, you may want to be aware that that is not the reaction of someone who has never been abused.

Economic abuse can occur in adult/child relationships as well. Some simple examples of economic child abuse include:

• having to pay for your own food, clothing, housing, medicine, health care, or other basic needs;
• missing school in order to work;
• being required to work either in a family business or to earn outside income for the family;
• being unpaid or underpaid for such work;
• losing money as a result of broken agreements around chores, allowance, and other financial matters;
• being asked to loan money to your parents or other adults;
• never seeing that money again;
• not having your physical needs for food, clothing, housing, medicine, health care, or other basic needs met at all;
• losing money as a result of your parents or other adults stealing it;
• being forced into sex work to earn money for the family.

Many of us will look at that list and protest that sometimes parents simply can’t help not being able to meet their children’s needs. It is certainly true that sometimes parents feel trapped in low-income situations. Sometimes adults make a series of bad decisions, or find themselves thrust into bad situations as a result of natural disasters and other emergencies. Sometimes a government’s way of handling these situations seems to trap the victims or make things worse. However, placing the burden of these situations on children is always abuse and always wrong.

Handling traumatic situations is very much like writing a sonnet. In sonnets and other formally structured poems, the limits that we place on the situation paradoxically give us tremendous freedom. As we accept a few specific rules, we become able to see all the options that we are not restricted from using. At the opposite extreme, when writing free verse, poets often end up using the same few tricks and making the same sets of mistakes over and over; their apparent complete freedom can bewilder them. Having principles of our own choosing guides us toward experimentation, while having no set rules leaves us wandering in confusion and giving ourselves rules that don’t work.

It is the same with trauma. We always have a very large number of options available to us, but all too often we are sure that we are stuck in the situation at hand. We may even put tremendous amounts of energy into finding reasons that no other option will work. However, if we are determined to do anything to prevent our children from being adversely affected, we begin to be able to see that the choices we had rejected before might actually work. When we are willing to put our energy into preventing any harm to them, we start looking more closely at our options, gathering information on resources we never knew existed, pressing points that we had formerly given up on, and trying things we had never before been willing to consider.

If we have children, we must also be willing to put our energy into refusing abuse to ourselves. Abusive acts never happen in a vacuum. If we are abusing ourselves by not making sure our needs are met, whether physically, emotionally, or otherwise, then we are not fully available to support, nurture, and love our children. If we are staying in an abusive relationship at home, work, or elsewhere in our lives, we are not just teaching our children that it is reasonable to expect and accept abuse; we are also exposing them to abusive people and depleting the emotional resources that we have to offer them. In that spirit, let’s take a moment to look at another kind of economic abuse: abuse which occurs at work.

Abuse in the workplace may look like simple emotional abuse, but it carries one of the clearest hallmarks of economic abuse: the abuser has economic power over the victim such that they may seem to be unable to meet their needs if they leave the abusive relationship. Often it does not look so clear. Workplace abuse can come from co-workers at any level, from subordinates to CEOs, and might involve:

• performance pressure, in which the expectations for an employee’s performance rise as far as they can, without recognition or reward, until the employee is punished for not being able to exceed the final set of expectations;
• shaming or punishing employees who make mistakes;
• sexual harassment;
• discrimination on the basis of race, age, gender, sexuality, physical or mental abilities, et cetera;
• refusal to pay for work performed, including overtime;
• threats of violence, whether joking or serious;
• threats of any kind, such as using the threat of layoffs to demand that employees work harder or longer, especially without a commensurate increase in pay;
• pay that is below a living wage for its area;
• pay that is considerably below the standard for the work performed;
• refusal to communicate clearly about expectations;
• denial of benefits for any reason, including forcing employees to work fewer hours than they are able to in order to avoid paying them benefits;
• requiring employees to lie on behalf of the company or their supervisors or other co-workers;
• yelling or insults;
• outsourcing departments.

None of the items on these lists are options. If we are to truly face abuse, we have to accept that as our most basic premise. There is no situation which can justify any of the above acts. As adults, we have a double responsibility: we have to refuse to abuse others, and we have to refuse to condone abuse against ourselves.

It has only been perhaps twenty-five years since people began talking openly about any kind of abuse and sharing what they did to recover from it. We do not have a very large pool of information from which to draw. But one of the lessons that people have discovered over and over in that time has been that no matter how limited our options seem, no matter how little we know about what else can happen for us, it is not until we refuse to get involved with even potentially harmful acts that the cycle of abuse ends. It is only then that we are truly free to heal; it is only then that we can end abuse completely.

Faked or real animal sacrifice… electric shock… abusive religious and political systems… medical experimentation… forced prostitution… attempted brainwashing… forcing victims to consume urine and feces… programming… burying victims alive… drugging… destroying or perverting family bonds… forcing children to abuse others…. These are some of the hallmarks of ritual abuse.

Ritual Abuse

“Ritual abuse” is defined and used in many different ways. It first rose into the public awareness as satanic ritual abuse in the 1980s. Even now people often associate all ritual abuse with Satanism, even though any system of belief can be (and has been) perverted to justify and create abuse.

“I used to refer to this as “Systematic Repetitive Abuse” in SRA contexts, just to hammer home the point that it wasn’t all due to some bizarre conspiracy…. It’s a human thing to make rituals, we do it all the time. Abusive people make abusive rituals.” – Bob King

Ritual abuse should be distinguished from ritualized abuse. Ritualized abuse does not require a “systematic” component and is merely abuse that takes place in a repeated, formalized manner. It is the difference between the religious rituals associated with Easter, and the mundane ritual of brushing one’s teeth and going to bed. As well as including a political or religious justification, ritual abuse is generally characterized by extreme physical and sexual abuse, and often by taking place within a group of adults, whether it’s a family or a social organization of some kind.

Ritual abuse can be tricky; it often contains the seeds of its own invisibility. That is, a lot of ritual abuse seems designed to make sure the survivors will not be believed. An abuser may don a Mickey Mouse or alien mask because if their young victim ever tries to tell someone that Mickey abused them, they will sound delusional. There has been speculation that at least some of the alien abduction stories out there, especially with the bright lights and the probing, are connected to experiences of ritual abuse. As the Dominion Conquest puts it,

The purpose of ritual elements of the abuse seems threefold: 1.) rituals in some groups are part of a shared belief or worship system. 2.) rituals are used to intimidate victims into silence. 3.) ritual elements (devil worship, animal or human sacrifice) seem so unbelievable to those unfamiliar with these crimes that these elements detract from the credibility of the victims and make prosecution of the crimes very difficult.”⁶

Definitions of Ritual Abuse

It might be more apropos to call this section “Descriptions of Ritual Abuse,” because this kind of abuse consists of a group of characteristics which might not all be present in any given ritually abusive situation. For example:

• “Absolute control over the child
• Mind games
• Abuse of power
• Twisted words that say one thing yet mean another
• Insistence that there are certain right ways to do things
• Absolute thinking about worship
• Cruel savagery against children performed in the name of love.”⁵

According to Safeline, “One definition of ritual abuse is when one or more children are abused in a highly organized way, by a group of people who have come together and subscribe to a belief system which, for them, justifies their actions towards that child. This usually extends into family involvement and may have been practiced as a religion or a way of life for years.” ¹

The Ritual Abuse Task Force of the L.A. County Commission For Women (1989 report) takes a more extreme view, saying that “Ritual abuse usually involves repeated abuse over an extended period of time. The physical abuse is severe, sometimes including torture and killing. The sexual abuse is usually painful, humiliating, intended as a means of gaining dominance over the victim. The psychological abuse is devastating and involves the use of ritual indoctrination. It includes mind control techniques which convey to the victim a profound terror of the cult members…most victims are in a state of terror, mind control and dissociation.”²

By contrast, a similar project taken on in 1995 by The Canberra Women’s Health Centre focused on the purpose of the abuse as well as some political aspects: “Ritual abuse is organized abuse carried out by a group for the purpose of achieving power or making money. The abuse aims to break a person’s spirit and to gain the ultimate in power – absolute control over another human being. Religious or pseudo-religious beliefs are used as part of controlling others. It encompasses deliberate human and biological experimentation, technological mind control conditioning and criminal activity (eg prostitution, drug trafficking, arms dealing).”³

Healing Roads looks at the elements involved in cases of ritual abuse and compares them to similar situations on a larger scale: “In a broad sense, many of our overtly or covertly socially sanctioned actions can be seen as ritual abuse, such as army boot military basic training, hazing, racism, spanking children, and partner-battering…. The term ritual abuse is generally used to mean prolonged, extreme, sadistic abuse, especially of children, within a group setting. The group’s ideology is used to justify the abuse, and abuse is used to teach the group’s ideology. The activities are kept secret from society at large, as they violate norms and laws.”⁴

And Sanctuary Unlimited helpfully isolates some of the basic emotional elements of ritual abuse affecting children:

Controversy Read the rest of this entry »

Trish over at Hey Lady! Whatcha Readin’? shared this problem in her blog the other day. Basically, she has a tenant who said he couldn’t make April’s rent and that he would be out by the end of March, and “Instead, I come back to Reno to find his door locked (I don’t have a key) and his cell phone disconnected. GRRR!! So April 1st rolls around, he’s nowhere to be seen and I want his @#$% out of the room.” He came back for some of his things, but he still hasn’t fully moved out. So her burning question at that point was whether to give back his $200 deposit. I liked my answer and she kindly said I could share it all here.

We’ve talked about some of the tools of abuse and the tools of recovery, and I think the idea of principles before personalities is a really excellent tool of recovery. I wrote:

I am on the side of all your other readers who say not to return the deposit – with a caveat.

This strikes me as a situation where you need what people in 12-step programs call “principles before personalities.” Like, we tend to want to put personalities first, as in: I feel bad for him because he’s broke all the time, I want to be a nice landlady, I don’t want to get into a big confrontation…. All the stuff about what we feel and what we fear. But if we have some clear principles, clear boundaries, then we can avoid all the vagueness and the confusion.

So my first question would be, did he sign a lease? And if so, what does it say about:

1. what the consequences are when he doesn’t pay rent, or doesn’t pay it on time
2. what his deposit is used for and when he gets it back if it’s not all used up
3. how much notice he has to give you to move out

Some of the “principles” stuff is going to be in local laws, too. Like, my lease says that if I don’t pay my rent by the 10th then I have to pay a certain amount in late fees per day, but also, in California, if I don’t pay my rent on time the landlords can give me a Three-Day Notice To Pay Rent Or Quit. And if I do pay it within those three days, the whole thing is dropped and nothing more is said; if I don’t, and I don’t leave, then there is more legal action they can take to evict me.

Your local laws can probably tell you whether him saying that he was going to move out by the end of March is legally binding, and what to do now that he hasn’t. It seems to me that the question isn’t really what to do with the deposit, because he hasn’t moved out, right? Unless something has changed since you posted this (which would be nice!) your biggest problem is probably how to get his ass out of there….

I think in your position, this is what I would do:

1. Get a key to the unit! Probably by getting a locksmith to come make a second key for the lock.
2. Check the lease and the local laws and see what they say about all this stuff. If there are areas they don’t cover, figure out what my own personal rules as a landlady are going to be from now on.
3. Possibly call up a landlord organization or housing lawyer and ask a couple of free questions about what the appropriate next step is.
4. (Based on whatever they say, but this is what I am guessing): Hand the guy a three-day notice and a letter restating the situation, like: “On x date, you told me that you could not afford April’s rent and would be moving out by the end of March; it is now April 4th and you have neither paid rent nor moved out. As a result, the next tenant I have lined up cannot move in. Therefore, I am deducting the pro-rated rent from your deposit at a rate of $x per day ($x monthly rent divided by 30) until you have moved out. You have 3 days (until midnight on x date) to vacate the premises….” and consequences if he doesn’t, and so on.

(It’s also possible that the deposit wouldn’t cover any cleaning/repairs AND the rent, in which case I’d probably give him a bill for the rent, with late fees (if the lease allowed for late fees) and prepare to take him to small claims court if necessary, and take the cleaning/repairs out of the deposit by themselves.

I really identify with this whole question because it combines a lot of issues I’ve been working through myself in recent years… boundaries, challenges with landlords and housing stuff, and collecting debts, especially from other people I have lived with!

Here are some resources that I think are really powerful for this stuff:

• Codependents Anonymous http://coda.org … for anyone who wants better relationships with themselves and others. FABULOUS for boundary stuff.
• Debtors Anonymous http://debtorsanonymous.org … especially Business Owners’ Debtors Anonymous groups, because landlording counts for that… it’s good for all kinds of money issues, and BDA (or some people abbreviate it as BODA) has awesome guidelines/principles for use in business that I think can be really helpful with problematic tenants…. sometime in the next year I look forward to using them for that myself!
• NACA http://naca.com … it is a really great organization that helps people at all income levels buy homes, and it encourages them to become landlords and offers classes on dealing with all kinds of landlordly issues, so that you get to be fair AND safe.

In Alcoholics Anonymous, they often say that alcoholism is not the problem, it is just a symptom. Many people, especially in early recovery, enthusiastically cast aside drinking for another addictive behavior, and just about everyone in every twelve-step program discovers myriad other self-destructive behaviors they’re engaging in as they take inventory of their lives. These behaviors echo past trauma and abuse. The true problem is that these traumas have taught us that we deserve pain and chaos. We have learned to seek out and recreate our unresolved traumatic experiences even after the original harmful situations have passed. It is immaterial whether we perpetuate it by starving ourselves, berating ourselves, short-circuiting our bodies with harmful substances, underearning, choosing and staying with abusive people, cutting our bodies, or something else entirely.

So what’s the solution?

Well, don’t worry, we have our top psychologists, scientists, and therapists working on that around the clock… oh. We don’t?

Well. Here are a few pieces that might fit.

Every twelve-step program uses the same twelve steps, regardless of the behavior being addressed. And, I believe, part of the reason that this is done and that it works for all our addictive “symptoms” must be that it addresses this core problem. Let’s see what the steps ask us to do that might be vital to recovery from trauma and abuse.

The first step, of course, is to admit that we have a problem. It is a very profound step: it helps us begin to see what we are doing that is harming us. It shows us what is not working, what we want to change. It helps us begin to be honest with ourselves and others, instead of harming ourselves with denial and fear.

Step two gives us the opportunity to explore what we believe about the universe, and what parts of that have and haven’t worked for us. We get to see what has worked for others, too, and see that other people have found relief from these painful problems. In step two, we begin to experience hope that things can be different, which I think is crucial to any kind of recovery.

In step three, we learn to ask for help. We seek a willingness to seek out healing from outside, trustworthy sources – to stop trying to do it all ourselves – to realize that our methods have not been working for us. This is mindblowing for many people, especially for those of us who have learned not to ask for help because we are just a burden. Beginning to understand that that is not actually true, and to see ourselves as worthwhile human beings who deserve support and who deserve to get our needs met, is nothing short of a miracle.

The fourth step brings us back to that honesty. We take a long, hard look at our lives, being as honest as we can about our resentments, fears, and relationships in general. This has tremendous implications: it can lead to much deeper clarity about what things have been like and what is harming us; it can bring us back to the emotions that we’ve numbed for so long; it can teach us where our boundaries really are and what we need to do to take responsibility for them. It is an incredible and far-reaching exercise.

The fifth step is even more terrifying for many people than the fourth. It asks us to share everything we learned in the fourth step with another human being and with a higher power of our own understanding. But when we share this with someone who is trustworthy, we learn amazing things. We learn that we are not alone. We learn that our feelings and actions and experiences are not so horrifying that people will run from us if they find out the truth about them. We even learn that those feelings, actions, and experiences are not who we are. And with all of this this comes a greater ability to trust, and a step toward self-acceptance.

Step six builds on that fourth step work too. We get to look at all of the behaviors that are harming us and start thinking about the possibility of maybe someday not doing them anymore. We get to just be willing for things to change, and to know that for the moment, that is enough.

So with the first six steps, what do people get that helps them recover? The beginnings of honesty; hope; help; reality; feelings; boundaries; trust; the possibility of change; and a door opens toward self-acceptance and compassion. That compassion is not located in any specific step, but undergirds the whole process. It’s the motor that powers all our healing.

What on earth could be left for the last six to provide? Read the rest of this entry »