“I Didn’t Even Know What Financial Abuse Was”

TO THE OUTSIDE WORLD, Meseret Haileyesus was living an immigrant success story. In 2012, she arrived in Edmonton from her hometown of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, with her husband and one-year-old daughter. “We came for a better future and better opportunities,” Haileyesus says. “My country was politically unstable at the time, and Canada was safe.”

A former midwife who had worked in public health, infectious diseases and global health projects, Haileyesus landed her dream job as a prevention coordinator for the Alberta Community Council for HIV about two months after arriving in Canada. Soon after, she picked up a second gig contributing to research about global newborn health for the University of Alberta.

Despite these career wins, Haileyesus says she was “the most unhappy person.” She alleges that her husband maintained financial control over their lives, taking money from the joint account that she solely contributed to, which made her depressed and anxious. Haileyesus was responsible for paying all the bills, but her husband criticized her spending and barred her from going back to school. Getting a second job was something he pressured her to do. “I was forced to work,” she says. (Haileyesus’s claims of financial abuse have not been proven in court.)

While her husband ran his own business, Haileyesus claims that he never disclosed how much he earned: “He said I didn’t have the right to ask.” Haileyesus says she learned to stay quiet instead. Meanwhile, she alleges that he pushed her to work more so that her earnings could support the family single-handedly. “I’m the one who paid for the groceries and day-to-day expenses,” she says. “All my salary went to the household.”

In 2013, Haileyesus started a business in addition to her two jobs: an agency for culturally sensitive personal support workers, using her background and knowledge in nursing. Her husband registered the business in his name, handled the agency’s finances and, Haileyesus alleges, took its profits: “He never paid me,” she says.

Despite working 13-hour days, Haileyesus had no savings of her own. Instead, she alleges that her husband would use the money she earned and deposited in their joint account on luxury purchases, like a BMW that she wasn’t able to drive because, she claims, he kept the keys. Even during Edmonton’s frigid winters, “I’d have to wake up at 5 a.m. to get the bus when the car is in the garage, locked up while he’s at home.”

In November 2014, Haileyesus qualified for a mortgage on a six-bedroom house in Edmonton. While the couple lived there together, Haileyesus was responsible for the monthly payments.

“Publicly, I lived a fancy life,” she says. “I was the most confident woman, charming and bubbly.” But at home, she felt trapped. “Trying to manage these two personalities was really hard for me. When you’re controlled, you don’t feel any self-worth.”

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AS WITH MANY forms of intimate partner violence (IPV), it can be difficult to recognize the signs of financial abuse. “There are no bruises,” Haileyesus says. But research from Edmonton’s MacEwan University, released in 2022, found that 36 percent of adults surveyed had experienced economic abuse from an intimate partner.

It’s a form of violence that’s lesser known and less frequently researched. “Financial abuse sits at the intersection of two things our culture treats as private: relationships and money,” explains Carly Kalish, CEO of the charity Victim Services Toronto. “Abuse at that intersection stays hidden almost by default.” While physical abuse often leaves tangible evidence, “financial abuse leaves a bad credit score, debt in a survivor’s name, gaps in employment history and a bank account she can’t access,” she says.

Financial abuse is generally categorized into different subsets. The first, economic control, occurs when an abuser prevents their victim from having access to or knowledge of finances. They might deny their victim access to necessities like food, clothing and medical care, track their spending, withhold jointly earned funds, lie about shared assets and prevent them from having access to a bank account.

Another subset of financial abuse is employment sabotage, where an abuser prevents their victim from obtaining or maintaining a job. An abuser might insist that their victim stay home to care for a child instead of putting them in daycare, or prevent their victim from going to their job until they lose employment. They might also hide documentation or IDs that would allow them to secure work.

The last type of financial abuse is economic exploitation—when the abuser coerces the victim to take out loans or credit cards under their name, fraudulently incurs debt in the victim’s name by forging signatures or spends joint money without consent.

Economic abuse is a powerful way for an abuser to exert control over their victim, Kalish says. “A survivor can be completely trapped, unable to leave, unable to retain a lawyer, unable to feed her children independently,” she explains. “When an abusive partner controls your money, they control every exit route a survivor might have.”

What makes financial abuse even more powerful is the lack of awareness around it—even among the very women who experience it. “Financial abuse is woven into ordinary transactions and routines: who pays the bills, who handles accounts, whose name is on a lease,” says Harmy Mendoza, the executive director of WomanACT, a Toronto-based charity that does research, education and advocacy to end gender-based violence. “These dynamics can appear, on the surface, like normal household arrangements.”

A 2020 report on financial abuse from WomanACT highlights the need for more awareness and action. “Many women don’t identify their experiences as abuse because what they’re living through looks ‘normal,’” says Mendoza. “For example, they might have a partner who ‘handles the finances,’ who gets angry when money is spent or who won’t allow a joint account to be accessed”—behaviours that can signal financial abuse.

It can be incredibly difficult for survivors to leave these relationships, Mendoza adds. “Money is tied to everything—shelter, food, mobility, safety and independence,” she says. “Financial abuse is often deployed by the abuser to increase the survivor’s dependence on them.”

And the often-insidious nature of financial abuse makes it difficult for survivors to feel comfortable sharing their stories, whether due to embarrassment, fear of retribution from their exes, fear for their children’s safety or the cultural taboos that continue to surround our relationships with money. Several women who wanted to share their experiences of financial abuse for this story, even anonymously, ultimately refrained because of these reasons.

Sadly, exiting an abusive relationship doesn’t necessarily mean an end to financial abuse. “Unpaid debts often leave survivors’ credit scores in tatters,” Mendoza says. “Survivors often don’t even attempt to challenge loans and credit cards obtained without their knowledge or consent. They simply resign themselves to slowly rebuilding their credit once they have left the relationship.”

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IT TOOK A MAJOR MEDICAL EVENT for Haileyesus to finally leave her husband. In 2014, a month after moving into their new house, she developed gastritis—inflammation of the stomach lining—which caused internal bleeding. “I couldn’t eat and I couldn’t sleep,” she says. She had surgery to stop the internal bleeding. Doctors presumed her condition was caused by stress, and she was told to take three weeks off from work to recover after surgery. Her husband, she claims, pressured her to return after just one week.

The following March, Haileyesus was still on medication to recover from her surgery. She also wanted to go to therapy to address the stress and anxiety causing her gastritis. The breaking point came when she asked her husband for money to refill her medication and for therapy. She alleges that he denied her both. “He told me: ‘Why do you go to therapy? It’s your attitude. It’s your fault,’” Haileyesus says. “That was the day I decided I had to leave.”

After her separation from her husband, Haileyesus continued to face financial abuse—even when she relocated to Ottawa from Edmonton with her daughter. Her ex-husband declared bankruptcy on their PSW business and fled to Ethiopia, leaving her on the hook for the mortgage payments on their Edmonton home. Her ex had also maxed out credit cards in her name and stopped making payments on them, prompting debt collectors to come calling. Her credit score was ruined—she wasn’t even able to get her phone plan reactivated because she needed a credit card in good standing.

(Photo: Jessica Deeks)

Because she was still the owner of the Edmonton property, Haileyesus was unable to access social housing in Ottawa. Instead, with the financial support of friends and family from back home in Ethiopia, she was able to rent an Airbnb short-term and eventually rent an apartment. She found a property management service to lease her Edmonton home, though the rental income wasn’t always enough to cover the full mortgage payment, leaving her on the hook for the shortfall. A friend offered to prepay three months of cell phone service to get her reconnected.

Still, Haileyesus didn’t consider her husband’s actions to be financial abuse until long after she left the marriage. “I didn’t even know what [financial abuse] was,” she says. It was only when she found a group of other abuse survivors online that she recognized the patterns.

Holding her husband accountable for the harm he caused, meanwhile, has been a dead end. Haileyesus tried to clear her name from the credit card debt that she claims her husband racked up, but she was only able to get the debt collectors off her back after friends lent her money to pay the outstanding bills.

That’s not unusual for survivors of financial abuse, says MacKay White, an associate professor at MacEwan University in Edmonton who researches economic abuse (and is the author of the 2022 research paper mentioned earlier). “Very few economically abusive behaviours are actually criminal,” says White, who previously worked as a lawyer. The exception is economic exploitation—if an abuser fraudulently obtains debt in the victim’s name by forging a signature or obtaining someone’s social insurance number, it could be considered identity theft. “There’s nothing that can address economic control if I’m being coerced or manipulated or prevented from being able to work, unless the specific means used are themselves criminal,” says White. That means that being forced by your spouse to jointly take out a mortgage or a credit card in your name might not be considered criminal in the eyes of the law. “Sometimes, it’s coerced and not so clearly fraudulent,” she says.

Some also believe the financial industry should have the duty to identify and prevent financial abuse. Five years ago, Jackie Porter, a certified financial planner and financial advisor based in Mississauga, Ont., changed her policies to better prevent financial abuse after an experience she had working with a couple. Porter had been working mainly with the husband for 10 years when the wife reached out and revealed she was worried about her husband’s spending habits. “He bought a business and property that she didn’t want to buy,” Porter says. “She was really afraid and wanted to move funds away from their general account.” Porter advised the woman to move funds from their shared account to another financial institution, and to start building a reserve fund to prepare herself for living independently. She also referred her client to a lawyer; eventually, the woman separated from her husband.

For this couple, Porter says, “everything looked good on paper,” but it was a different story behind the scenes. “As financial advisors, we can’t assume that just because one spouse takes care of the finances, that they’re good stewards,” she says. Now, when Porter is working with new couples, she asks to meet each partner separately so that they can ask questions independently.

Porter believes her industry should treat intimate partner economic abuse like elder financial abuse, which currently has more training around it. Major red flags of intimate partner financial abuse include not having access to certain accounts, not being included in financial conversations or frequent or unexpected withdrawals not discussed in joint financial plans. “If we see something and don’t say something, we could be held liable,” she says. While there isn’t any training specific to intimate partner financial abuse for her profession yet, Porter believes it’s long overdue.

More education and awareness are also needed in sectors that work with and support vulnerable women, according to Mendoza. Tools like online workshops and learning materials can help frontline workers identify red flags among their clients.

WomanACT, for one, is expanding access to training on how to identify and respond to economic abuse for frontline staff across the social services sector. Internationally, the Australian Banking Association released industry guidelines in 2021 for preventing and responding to family and domestic violence, while the British Treasury launched an economic abuse toolkit in 2023 that specifically addresses vulnerable women.

Survivors need more support for recovery, too—more government funding for access to credit counselling, financial empowerment services, free credit repair and debt remediation and more emergency funds for women to flee violence. “Financial independence is not a secondary goal in the anti-violence sector: it is central to safety,” says Mendoza. “You cannot be truly safe if you cannot afford to leave, afford to stay gone or afford to rebuild.”

In 2023, the Government of Canada announced funding for Victim Services Toronto’s Reclaim program to work with financial institutions and eliminate fraudulent debt incurred by victims of human trafficking. But there’s currently no equivalent program to assist victims of intimate partner financial abuse. “It would be a dream for banks to have an understanding of what coercive control looks like,” says Victim Services Toronto’s Carly Kalish.

A bigger societal shift is also needed when it comes to financial norms in cisgender, heterosexual relationships, says White. “Historically, we come from a very patriarchal culture where it’s generally accepted that a husband controls the finances,” she says. “That type of structure naturally sets up for male partners to exploit female partners. And while society has slowly been eroding that structure, a lot remains.”

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NOW THAT SHE’S ON THE OTHER SIDE of the experience, Haileyesus wants to support fellow survivors of financial abuse. In 2018, she created a non-profit dedicated to addressing economic abuse and injustice, the Canadian Centre For Women’s Empowerment (CCFWE). It’s the first organization of its kind in the country, offering financial literacy training workshops for survivors of domestic economic abuse (including programs specific to refugee survivors and visible minority women), conducting research on financial abuse and doing advocacy work to increase awareness.

Getting the organization to where it is now meant that Haileyesus had to share her painful experience over and over again with decision-makers. But she felt it was worthwhile.

“It’s not only my story,” Haileyesus says. “It’s thousands of women’s stories that look like mine.”

Last year, the organization collaborated with the Canadian Bankers Association (CBA) and Interac to develop educational resources and a new Interac feature that allows survivors to opt-out of receiving personalized, often harassing messages attached to money transfers they receive from their abusers. “We came up with a fairly unique made-in-Canada solution that allows the survivor to turn off that functionality,” explains Laurie Lupton, senior vice president of marketing and communications strategy for the CBA. It has also published resources on its website for its industry members and the general public to learn more about financial abuse.

One of the CCFWE’s greatest accomplishments to date was getting Minister of Finance and National Revenue François-Philippe Champagne to commit to developing a voluntary Code of Conduct for the Prevention of Economic Abuse in October 2025. The code is still being written, but the government says it will “set clear expectations for how financial institutions can identify, prevent and respond to economic abuse to better protect Canadians.”

There are reasons to feel hopeful that the government is recognizing the harms of financial abuse, too. In May, the Supreme Court of Canada created a new tort of intimate partner violence. While it’s not a criminal law, a tort allows survivors to sue for damages from physical or psychological injury, manipulation, humiliation, surveillance and economic abuse. It’s a small but meaningful step in the right direction.

More than a decade after leaving her ex-husband, Haileyesus is now financially stable. In the early years after her separation, she recalls buying a second-hand Kia Sportage on Kijiji for $2,000. “I felt like a million bucks,” she says. “The freedom I had, you can’t imagine.” She rebuilt her credit score and savings and was able to purchase a home in Ottawa in 2022. “It’s for my daughter,” Haileyesus says. “She deserves better.”

Haileyesus says she would be more cautious around money if she were to enter a new relationship. “If someone comes into my life, I will do a prenup,” she says. “I learned it the hard way.” She is teaching her now-teenaged daughter to become financially independent. “She should feel okay to talk about money with a man,” Haileyesus says. “I’m someone who cares about the next generation. I don’t want the cycle to continue. I want to start the conversation.”