Financial Abuse and Coercive Control are some of the most frequently experienced, yet least understood aspects of domestic and family violence (DFV). They are also both forms of violence that have a devasting long term impact on the lives of women and children.
Financial abuse involves a pattern of behaviour that controls a person’s ability to acquire, use and maintain economic resources, in a way that threatens their economic security and potential for self-sufficiency.
Coercive Control involves behaviour designed to hurt, humiliate, isolate, frighten, or threaten another person in order to control or dominate them. Coercive control reduces a person sense of self agency and often inhibits them from being able to leave the violent relationship.
These two forms of violence are the most likely to continue post separation. In combination financial abuse and coercive control continue to impact women and children for many years. Leaving violence increase the victim’s risk of injury and death. It also dramatically increases the likelihood of long-term poverty.
Whilst the trauma impacts of DFV are now relatively understood there is very little knowledge of the growing evidence demonstrating the ways that family violence induced leads to many of the same physical, emotional and psychological responses created by other forms of trauma.
So, for too many women and children, they are living with compounding traumatic impacts of violence, coercive control and ongoing poverty.
It is vital that practitioners, law and policy makers, system designers and advocates ensure that family and domestic violence work includes the design and implementation of strategies that actively address financial abuse and coercive control, that challenge the existing normalisation of poverty following DFV separation and champion evolving practices that can and do make a difference

Governments in Australia have embraced the language of ‘rights’ and ‘recognition’ in responding to the scourge of domestic and family violence. The National Plan to End Violence against Women and Children 2022–2032 and its associated First Action Plan 2023–2027 identify the need to ‘recognise children and young people as victim-survivors of violence in their own right’. A focus on listening to, and learning from, children and young people – the ‘invisible’, ‘forgotten’ and ‘silent’ victims of family violence – strives to drive targeted policies, services and systems that respond effectively to their safety and recovery needs.

This presentation will engage with findings from the ‘Children’s Voices for Change’ research project, funded by the Victorian Government, Australia, which sought to understand the features of effective supports for children aged up to 13 years as family violence victim-survivors in their own right. The project analysed government data on children’s pathways into and through Victoria’s family violence service system; surveyed 320 practitioners; and engaged with 23 children and young people who have experienced family violence.

The presentation will expose three normative assumptions underpinning the government policy commitment to recognise children and young people as family violence victim-survivors ‘in their own right’. The first is visibility: that children must be ‘seen’ as having distinct safety and recovery needs to those of their protective parent. The second is victimhood: that children and young people must adopt the identity of ‘victim-survivor’ to be recognised as such. The third assumption is voice: that recognition is achieved by ‘elevating’ the voices and lived experiences of children and young people. This presentation will suggest how these assumptions of visibility, victimhood and voice may be reframed to support children and young people to fulfil their potential as ‘agents of generational change’ to end gender-based violence in Australia.

 

This paper will be submitted on behalf of UNICEF as part of its commitment to build a stronger evidence base to better inform policies and practices for FGM programming in humanitarian situations. This paper presents an analysis of the interconnected challenges in the nexus of conflict and Female Genital Mutilation (FGM). Drawing on data from crisis-affected regions like the Horn of Africa or displacement sites in other settings, this evidence-based synthesis explores how armed conflicts, displacement, adverse climate events and economic shocks can lead to variations in the practice, which may either increase or decrease depending on the circumstances.

Crisis can disrupt protective systems and result in altered social norms, potentially leading to the modification of the practice such as the medicalization of FGM or the resurgence of more severe forms of mutilation as some communities attempt to maintain social and cultural identity despite new social configurations. The findings reveal significant gaps in the research and programming on FGM in humanitarian settings and underscore the need for integrated, context-specific interventions that not only prevent FGM but also support the recovery and empowerment of affected children. By adopting an intersectional lens, the paper provides practical recommendations for diverse key stakeholders involved in the socio-ecological model of girls affected by diverse forms of crisis, highlighting the need to bridge the between humanitarian action and development goals to protect children from harmful practices.

The evidence-based synthesis provides an analytical framework for the implementation of the Humanitarian-Development Nexus (HDPN) approach which integrates immediate humanitarian needs with long-term development objectives and proposes a gender-transformative lens to engage local communities, youth, and girls in particular, in the design of interventions ensuring that they address the overlapping drivers of FGM and other harmful practices.