Money, Gender and Family Violence in the Australian Indian community

About the Webinar: The presentation draws on a qualitative and comparative study of financial abuse among the Indian and Anglo-Celtic community in Australia. Drawing on women’s past experience of family violence, Supriya Singh will describe how the gender of money, that is the way men and women perceive, use, inherit, manage and control money, shapes the experience of financial abuse among Anglo-Celtic and migrant Indian women in Australia. Men reinterpret gender stereotypes relating to money for coercive control. For instance, in the Indian community, men control money but without the accompanying traditional responsibility for family welfare. The husband uses the traditional family ownership of money to use his wife’s earnings for his own ends and extort money and property from the wife’s family. Financial abuse involves denying access to money, monitoring expenditure and appropriating property. As with coercive control generally, it involves a pattern of sexual mastery that isolates, degrades, exploits, and controls women. In the United States, coercive control accounts for 60-80 percent of family violence. Migrant women are more vulnerable for they are isolated from networks of kin, friends and community.