Spotlight on Economic Abuse: a Literature and Policy Review

Public Policies and Practices
There are a myriad of public policies that relate to and impact on economic abuse in addition
to those that have been formulated and articulated specifically with the aims of tackling
domestic and family violence. These range from primary influences acting at the societal
level (such as policies which relate to social inclusion and gender equality in society) to
much more narrowly targeted secondary and tertiary interventions (such as policies which
determine the specific nature and extent of public assistance provided to individuals at times
of crisis).
Key areas of Australian Government policy are those that determine support and services
available through family law, legal assistance and the social security system. Homelessness
policies are also critical due to the strong association between domestic and family violence
and homelessness. In some areas, including homelessness, policy responsibility rests with
both the Australian Government and the state and territory governments. States and
territories often have responsibility for human services program and service delivery,
including the delivery of justice, policing and legal assistance and the funding and
coordination of many services provided by the non‐government sector.
Areas of public policy which have a significant impact on economic abuse and which are the
focus of discussion in this section are:
family and domestic violence
social security and crisis support
homelessness
child support and family assistance
financial capability.
Significant public policy responses to domestic and family violence in Australia in recent
years in many of these areas demonstrate an increased awareness of the problem of
economic abuse. However this is not uniformly the case in all relevant areas of public policy
nor is it uniformly the case across Australia.
Employment is given a central and critical place in women’s economic independence in
current public policy—particularly at the federal level—and so many strategies directed to
increasing women’s economic security and achieving economic equality are concerned with
employment opportunity, reward and participation. These are discussed in Section 6 of this
paper.
Family and domestic violence policies
At the federal level recent developments in the area of domestic and family violence since
the election of the Labor Government in 2007 have generally been seen as positive with the
adoption of approaches that apply a gendered analysis to policy and because of the
government’s preparedness to work more closely with the domestic violence sector than its
predecessor (Murray & Powell 2011, p. 31). The three priority areas of the Australian
Government Office for Women (OFW)—which are all highly relevant to the issue of
economic abuse—are “reducing violence against women”, “increasing women’s economic
security” and “ensuring women’s equal place in society” (OFW 2012, , viewed 24
June 2012).
24