Ray Rice and forms of abuse more subtle than a left hook to the temple

In a bit of a belated follow up to coverage of the NFL’s handling of Ray Rice’s suspension for domestic violence, I wanted to bring a little more attention to types of domestic abuse that are harder to see and sometimes harder to escape.

Much of the NFL and the Ravens’ response immediately following release of the first video of the incident, which showed Rice dragging his then-fiancee's unconscious body out of an elevator, relied on Janay Palmer’s statements at the subsequent press conference in which she apologized for her own role in the incident.  When the full video of what had taken place inside the elevator later came out this month, the Ravens’ deleted a tweet they’d circulated back in May reiterating her line from the press conference, that Janay Rice “deeply regrets the role that she played the night of the incident.” 

Not only did the team and the NFL hide behind Janay Rice’s statements accepting complicity in her attack, there was also a backlash against her in the news and social media once the truth came out for having made those statements, now revealed to be misguided or misleading, and for standing by Rice, even marrying him after the incident.  Op-ed writers declared her in need of therapy, and stated she deserves what she gets from now on, because she knew what she was getting into when she married Rice two weeks after the left hook in the elevator.

In response, on September 9, writer and domestic violence survivor Beverly Gooden started the harrowing hashtag #WhyIStayed to give voice to survivors’ explanations of what kept them in abusive relationships.  #WhyILeft started soon after.  What emerged were stories of fear and physical violence, fear for the safety of children, descriptions of stalking behavior and no help from the authorities.  But increasingly, there are also stories about invisible kinds of abuse such as financial abuse and immigration abuse. 

I have seen a little of how these forms of abuse play out in my cases working with domestic abuse survivors, I want to highlight these, because currently there is still not enough awareness of these problems, or help available for women going through these issues who want to get out of abusive relationships.  Domestic relations law currently does not take enough stock of these issues either, such that a woman* trying to end an abusive relationship usually needs to be able to show physical abuse in order to get the support of the court in the form of restraining orders or to obtain an edge in custody determinations.  Even statutory factors allowing a judge to weigh evidence of abuse will often define that abuse as physical abuse of the spouse or the children, or the judge will not recognize other forms of domination and control.

Financial abuse can take many forms.  A person’s finances are not just the money she has in the bank, but rather are intricately bound up with her job, her assets, and her debt and credit.  More nebulous assets like reputation can also directly affect a woman’s finances – the way she left her previous job will impact her ability to get a new one, debts she has been forced to leave unpaid will affect her ability to get new loans, she will be less likely to be able to get help in smaller communities the more bridges she has burned over money in the past.  Abusers can wreak utter havoc on a woman’s finances, in a way that seems scattershot, but the general trend is that he will end up with the assets in his name or in his possession and she will end up with the debts (or responsibility for them). 

Sometimes financial control can be overt.  She may have to ask to use the debit or credit cards, even to pay for groceries.  She may not know how to use a debit card and he may set up all their funds for direct deposit so that only he can access their cash and then dole it out for her.  He may sabotage her jobs by telling lies about her in the community, to her boss, or to her coworkers.  His stalking behavior or physical abuse, if that comes with the package, can also make her work life untenable and either directly lose her job – if, for example, he comes into the office and breaks things – or indirectly, by making her miss work or come in late due to altercations at home (violent altercations or something as simple as stealing her keys) conveniently timed just before the start of the workday.  But sometimes financial abuse can be more subtle than getting her fired or literally controlling the cash.

He more than likely earns more money than she does (I would be interested to find statistics on how this plays out in gay male relationships because while women are statistically less likely to earn as much as their spouses, gay couples, by virtue of both partners being men, at least in a generalized statistical sense, start on equal footing in this regard).  If she earns more or they are equal earners, her money will be 100% dedicated to the care of the children and the payment of household expenses.  He will find ways to sock his money away or buy himself nice things, or things that hold their value (such as a gun collection, which serves the dual purpose of posing a constant threat), while getting her to use her money, or even rely on the food bank or other benefits, to take care of the family.  In this way, she can never develop enough savings to leave him comfortably, or to pay down the mountain of debt they seem to be constantly accumulating.

He will find excuses to put the credit cards, auto loan payments, rental agreement, etc. in her name.  Maybe he will say he is worried his crazy ex will find him, or he will say his credit is already shot (cannot tell you how many times I have heard that one from women whose husbands turn out to have totally decent, or credit at least as good as their partner’s).  At the lower end of the income spectrum, they won’t own a house together and she’ll be on the hook for the full amount of the rent if she leaves or throws him out because her name alone will be on the lease. 

When she owns the house before they get together, he always gets her to put his name on it “just to be nice,” or “as a birthday present,” which has very real, practical consequences when they have a fight and she wants him “get out of my house” the police have to politely explain that it is his house too, now.  Despite the huge value of essentially giving him an interest in her house, I have never seen a case where the husband or sometimes even boyfriend paid the woman anything for that interest and I have never seen it happen the other way around, where he put her on the title just to welcome her into the relationship.

Similar shenanigans go on with cars.  The couple will each own a vehicle with outstanding payments.  He will say he wants to get a new truck, she can have his old truck and her mom can buy her old car from them.  So they set up some payments with the mom and refinance all the vehicles in order to buy his truck…which then conveniently gets entirely paid off in the process so that the only outstanding loans are on the wife’s and the mom’s cars.  And he is still on the title so if she tries to leave him, there is this constant lurking threat he could just go pick up the car from the wife’s place or mom’s car from mom’s place and drive off with her only means of transportation.  Ladies: if he has a set of keys, learn how to temporarily disable your vehicle so you don’t come of your house in the morning, or out of the grocery store to find it gone!  Removing the distributor cap usually works on older cars.  Ahh, the things you learn in family law.

This idea of moving money around and setting up over-complicated systems of using payments from one thing to pay off unrelated other things is something else I have seen repeated over and over.  This helps create the impression that he is the only one that can keep their finances straight (especially since he usually keeps all their documents physically locked away and she doesn't know the passwords to their electronic accounts) and teaches her that the financial world is too complex for her to understand.  In reality, these systems of using the payments coming in on the sale of one car to pay off the payments on another car, or having social security money direct deposited into one account under the wife’s name “as beneficiary” for the child, supposedly to “keep track” of the payments, and then electronically transferring it into another account usually serves no actual purpose beyond creating a veneer of complexity to intimidate her into staying away from the finances.

Since he has access to her social security number and all of her identifying info, as well as all of their joint financial information, he can start a business in her name, as long as he is willing to apply her electronic “signature,” without her knowledge.  He can take out loans and incur tax liabilities using the business, and even engage in dealings that could trash her reputation and get her into criminal trouble. 

When there is financial abuse in a relationship, the couple is almost always years behind in filing their tax returns; often as many years as they've been together.  Or they have filed together in a way that decreases his tax liability (because he is counting the whole family as dependents), when he contributes nothing of his income to the support of the children and, as the lower income earner, she would owe less or nothing in taxes if she filed separately.  But she agrees to file jointly “to be nice” because it saves him money, and he promises he’ll take care of paying the taxes and never does and the state and the IRS are coming after them both because they filed together.  And this happens for like seven years in a row.  And now she is dealing with their marital taxes and business taxes and property taxes if the house is under her name too, because he certainly isn’t paying on those either.

In Oregon when a person files for divorce, an automatic court order goes into place restraining either spouse from stopping payment on regular bills and dropping each other from insurance policies, access to joint accounts and the like.  However, enforcement of this order can be costly and time consuming and spouses representing themselves pro se in court may not understand that they have these rights or how to ask the court to enforce them.  Women who try to leave may find their husbands have canceled their car insurance or quit the jobs that provided their health insurance, only to start a new job and not add them to the new policy.  Women who realize their husbands are using a complicated system of financial transfers to siphon money from accounts they have access to into accounts that they do not might later be sanctioned by the court if they close accounts or cut off his access, trying to protect their own funds, not realizing they have violated the automatic financial restraining order.

Women who try to leave may find themselves sucked back into the abusive relationship again and again because out on their own they realize their credit is destroyed, they can’t get job references, and creditors exert constant pressure, hounding them for debts they may not even have been aware of.  Meanwhile she may be driving a car that is in his name that he could come legally pick up and drive off with if he knows where she is, covered by insurance he has canceled or threatens to cancel at any time.

There is a lot of overlap between financial abuse and immigration abuse because recent immigrants often do not have the language skills, education, or familiarity with American financial institutions to take over the running of the family finances if their spouse insists on controlling these.  Immigrants, and limited English speakers in particular, may find going into a bank and asking for statements or for help from tellers in making changes to accounts very intimidating, and admitting they don’t fully understand the answers they receive can be embarrassing, so some may leave without a full comprehension of their financial situation.  This may also lead them to sign off on documents they do not fully understand with only their spouse’s assurance that “it’s fine.” 

As in financially abusive relationships, immigration abusers will often limit their spouse’s access to her identification and travel documents in order to limit her ability to prove her legal residency or travel freely to her home country.  He may destroy them, or threaten to.  Perversely, he may then tell lawyers, judges, and police that he is terrified she will leave the country with the children, even though he has all the identity and travel documents for all the family members in his possession.  An immigrant’s foreign citizenship is often enough to convince authorities not familiar with immigration and international travel rules that she is a flight risk (and therefore also an international kidnapping risk) and sway temporary custody and other decisions in her husband’s favor, despite the abuse.

Immigration abusers may sabotage the immigration process by lying in USCIS interviews or refusing to participate when the process requires that the couple co-petition, such as for the removal of conditions on residence permits to become legal permanent residents.  Often, merely the threat of sabotaging the immigration process in this way is a sufficient tool of control to keep immigrant spouses in an abusive relationship because they may not be aware of other options, such as the Violence Against Women Act “self-petition” process which allows abuse survivors to progress in the immigration process without their abusive spouse’s participation.  Threats to “send her back,” particularly without the children, can be terrifyingly effective in keeping immigrant women under the thumb of their abusers.

By now, everybody knows that Ray Rice had a $35 million contract with the Ravens.  What you might not know is that $15 million of that was a signing bonus, $7 million was paid out as another bonus in 2013, and $3 million has already been paid out in salary.  Which means he’ll keep about $25 million of the funds even though the team has now terminated his contract.  At the time Janay Palmer was deciding what to say in that press conference back in May, she was looking at two possibilities.  She could do what she’s been doing for years and accept responsibility for “the role that she played” in her abuse and, in the process, become Janay Rice and hang onto the financial security of the remaining $10 million of her new husband’s contract (minus the $530,000 value of the 2 game suspension he initially received as a sanction from the NFL).  Or she could very publicly walk out on her only source of financial security, a man whose jersey many people are still wearing even now that the full video has come out, at a time when very few people really knew what happened in that elevator.  Looking down the barrel of that choice, Janay Palmer chose to stay where she was, which may have been, as it is for many women, where she felt safest.

*According to this HuffPost op-ed by Sarah Prager, covering another angle on domestic violence springing out of the #WhyIStayed hashtag, a 2012 CDC study found that 1 in 4 men (gay and straight) and 1 in 3 bisexual men had experienced physical violence, rape and/or stalking by an intimate partner.  Also, 44% of lesbian women and 61% of bisexual women.  This, compared to 35% of straight women.  These stats regard physical abuse, rather than financial abuse, but I wanted to point out that men experience abusive relationships too (often, but not always, at the hands of other men) and I am using feminine pronouns and examples in this post because my experience in my previous casework is based predominantly on examples of women leaving heterosexual relationships.