Illawarra project to look at how women can recover from financial abuse

The Women's Trauma Recovery Centre (an initiative of the Illawarra Women's Health Centre) will develop a financial security framework focusing on three groups: migrant women, especially those with children; women with disability; and older women.

Lula Dembele, the trauma recovery centre's director of lived expertise and advocacy, said these women all had different needs, but different supports they could access as well.

The 12-month project will consider the lived experience of these women to determine their needs, as well as the other services - such as financial institutions, the NDIS, or specialised providers - that are available to offer support, their criteria and any time limits.

Ms Dembele said an important part of the project was determining timelines around what was available to help these women, and when and how to access it.

"At the end of our 12 months of doing this project, we expect that we will have defined pathways that... we can use with our clients, but we will also make them available publicly, as well as capture the process that we use so that if other services want to do this with a different focus group of women to meet their needs, then they can hopefully learn from our experience and do that with their community or with their clients," she said.

Ms Dembele said older women were chosen as a focus group because they had a shorter working life, had less superannuation, and had often lost lifelong assets or their home at a time when they would be unable to earn the money again to find secure housing.

Migrant women might be in Australia on temporary visas and facing restrictions on work hours, she said, while women with disability were often preyed upon by people who sought to take their pension or other supports; their ability to earn might also be affected.

"[Financial abuse is] far too frequent and the thing about financial and economic abuse is that it is often a really key factor in entrapping women in abusive relationships, and many women don't realise that it's happening to them," Ms Dembele said.

For example, she said, in her experience it involved her former partner borrowing money and not paying it back, or relying on her to pay off his debts, meaning she did not have full access to her own income.

There were other services available to help women experiencing financial abuse, Ms Dembele said, such as the Centre for Women's Economic Safety and Good Shepherd's Financial Independence Hub, but this framework would measure the needs of specific groups of women and how they could become financially secure long-term.

"That's really important because we know that financial security is a mitigating factor against abuse and against re-victimisation," she said.

The project is funded through a $200,000 grant from the CommBank's Next Chapter Innovation initiative, which supports organisations helping the financial recovery of victim-survivors of domestic violence.

Nathan Barker, CommBank's head of community investment, said the program received a strong response but the bank was looking for projects that would make a meaningful, measurable impact.

"That's why we are partnering with Illawarra Women's Health Centre to support them in the co-design of a Pathways to Financial Security Framework, which will define what financial security means from a victim-survivor perspective, and what steps are needed to establish and build long-term financial security," Mr Barker said.