Blog: Why punish domestic violence survivors with abusers’ debt?

When sorrows come, according to William Shakespeare, they arrive not as “single spies but in battalions.”

Old king Claudius in Hamlet wasn’t talking about the many ways poverty can sabotage the lives and life chances of young Scots but he could have been.

Of course, poverty is about just one thing, or the lack of it, but whole armies of related sorrows invade the space where money should be and, as Christmas approaches, march double time.

Child poverty has become a catch-all term for policy-makers, two little words that mean so much but, through overuse, risk becoming empty shorthand for a crisis so huge and intractable that it is impossible to know where to start.

Well, the scale of the crisis is certainly huge but it is absolutely tractable and we know exactly where to start.

In the applications to our charity’s Urgent Assistance Fund, for example, where families do not describe poverty in theory but tell, in dismaying detail, how a lack of cash risks children’s wellbeing, today, tomorrow and for years to come.

Seeking emergency support from a fund that has rushed millions of pounds to families in recent years, they simply do not have the money to buy clothes, food and heating desperately needed as winter bites.

Ill health, sudden redundancy, and poor quality housing recur in these accounts as the same issues inflict the same damage on families across Scotland.

Domestic violence also runs like a seam through the applications with physical abuse and coercive control force women to flee with their children to start safer but often, in the short term at least, more financially precarious lives.

The abusive control already endured is often linked to money and will continue after they leave.

Many survivors of abuse will have been allowed no control of cash coming into their home or knowledge of bank accounts, bills, or loans even if their name was needed to secure the borrowing. 

When women leave, many discover they are liable for debts run up by a partner continuing his abuse by insisting she alone is liable or simply vanishing and abandoning his former family to debt collectors.

MSPs on Holyrood’s Social Justice and Social Security Committee will soon investigate the financial pressures of women fleeing abuse but those pressures only escalate during the festive period.

Sadly, the way our public bodies pursue women for debts like rent and council tax - debts that were often run up and hidden by their former and abusive partners – helps sink any hope of a new start and financial stability.

There are better, more humane, and less destructive ways to collect – or even cancel – this public debt that is needlessly and unfairly trapping so many children in poverty.

Before demanding money from families who have none, our public sector should take a breath, step lightly and adopt the guiding tenet of doctors’ Hippocratic Oath: first do no harm.

Or remember, as old Claudius had it, “to do no evil is good, to intend none better.”

SallyAnn Kelly OBE
Aberlour Chief Executive 

This article was written for The Herald and published on Friday 20th December 2024.