The Debt That Doesn't Leave When the Abuser Does

Some debt is a choice. And some debt is put there by someone else.

There is now a name for the second kind. It is called economic abuse, and in the UK it affects millions of people who never agreed to a penny of it. This is not a metaphor. It is a legal term. The Domestic Abuse Act 2021 was the first law in England and Wales to write economic abuse into the definition of domestic abuse: behaviour that has a substantial adverse effect on a person's ability to acquire, use or keep money or property, or to obtain goods or services. In plainer words, controlling someone's money is abuse, and the law recognises it alongside the other forms.

The most common abuse almost nobody can name

If it has a name and it has a law, you would expect most people to have heard of it. Most people have not.

Look at the scale first. In a single year, around four million women in the UK had their money and resources controlled by an abuser. That is about one in seven women, in just twelve months. Now look at the silence next to it. More than half of women in the UK say they know nothing at all about economic abuse. Another third say they know only a little.

The same gap shows up around debt. There is a specific version of economic abuse called coerced debt: being made, or pressured, to take on debt against your will. In a single year, around 1.6 million adults in the UK were pushed into debt this way. And almost seven in ten people have never heard the term coerced debt at all.

That gap matters more than it sounds. Something cannot be challenged while it has no name. The silence is not an accident; for a lot of people it is part of how the abuse works, and the person controlling the money is often counting on exactly that.

What it looks like inside an ordinary home

One survey of UK women put numbers to it. Around one in thirteen had credit taken out in their name without their consent, or their credit rating deliberately destroyed. Around one in eleven had access to their own bank account restricted by a partner. Around one in nine were stopped from reaching everyday essentials: food, toiletries, sometimes medication.

None of that needs raised voices. It can happen quietly, inside a relationship that looks fine from the outside. Coerced debt often builds the same quiet way. A card opened to tide the household over. A loan that only needed one name on the paperwork. A request that did not feel like a request, because saying no carried a cost. Each step can be explained away at the time. Only later does it add up to a balance in one person's name, taken on for someone else.

The debt does not end when the relationship ends

Here is the part most people miss. Among people who have lived through coerced debt, around 85% said it left at least one negative mark on their finances. Around half, 48%, found it had damaged their credit record: a score that fell, a default, a missed payment.

The abuse can be long over, and the financial record is still quietly punishing the person it was done to.

And a damaged credit record has a long tail. More than a third, 35%, were later turned down for something ordinary. A phone contract. A tenancy. A mortgage. In some cases, a job.

To understand why, you have to look at how the system reads a debt. A lender sees a signature and a name. It does not see the pressure behind them. So the debt is treated as that person's own debt, and the liability sits with them, no matter how it got there. That is the quiet injustice at the centre of this: the person who was harmed becomes the person the system sends the bill to.

The way out is not shared equally

Around 28% of people manage to get a coerced debt written off, in full or in part. But split that figure by gender. For men, it is 45%. For women, it is 11%. Women are far more likely to be left carrying it.

Most people never even start that process. Seventy per cent of those affected never seek help with the debt, and 45% say it was shame that stopped them. Shame is a strange thing to feel about something done to you, but it is one of the most common feelings survivors describe.

That shame is worth pausing on, because the wider public does not actually share it. When people are asked, 67% say a person should not have to repay a debt they were coerced into. The public instinct is clear. The rules around it just have not caught up yet.

A record of what was done, not of who you are

So bring it back to the start: the debt you didn't choose.

A coerced debt is not a record of bad decisions. It is a record of control that someone else exercised. If a debt was put there by abuse, then the credit file is not proof of who someone is. It is evidence of what was done to them.

That is not a small distinction. One version asks a person to feel ashamed of a choice. The other recognises that the choice was never really theirs. And that single shift changes what happens next: a debt that has a name can be questioned. A debt nobody can name just sits there in the dark, gathering interest and shame.

One conversation

If any of this sounds familiar, the move is not a plan or a spreadsheet. It is one conversation, with someone who deals with exactly this.

One thing first, though. If someone is controlling your money, they may also be watching your phone or your computer. If you can, use a device they cannot see.

The one call is the National Domestic Abuse Helpline: free, confidential, open 24 hours a day, on 0808 2000 247, run by the charity Refuge. Everything else can come later. When the time is right, there is a free Financial Support Line run by Money Advice Plus with Surviving Economic Abuse, on 0808 196 8845, and StepChange offers free, confidential debt advice. These are people who hear this kind of story often. It does not have to be explained perfectly to be understood.

The debt may still be there tonight. The credit file may still say what it says. But a debt that someone else chose for you was never a true record of you. It is a record of what was done. And that is not yours to carry alone, or in silence.