No-fault divorce removed the need to prove who was responsible for the breakdown of a marriage. That was an important change. But it left another question sitting there: what happens when abuse has left one person financially ruined?
In the family cases I support, economic harm rarely looks dramatic. More often it is someone leaving a marriage with debts in their name, no savings, or very little idea what the family actually owns because their former partner controlled the accounts.
Leaving the relationship does not suddenly undo any of that.
What does economic abuse actually look like?
The Domestic Abuse Act 2021 recognises economic abuse as a form of domestic abuse.
In everyday life, it can involve one person using money, work or access to assets to control the other. That may include:
• blocking access to joint or personal bank accounts;
• preventing someone from working or interfering with their career;
• creating loans, arrears or credit-card debt in the other person’s name;
• refusing agreed mortgage payments or obstructing the sale of the family home.
The difficulty is that this kind of damage is often hard to put a figure on.
If an assault leaves someone unable to work, there may be medical evidence and a fairly obvious loss of earnings. Years of financial control can be much less visible. Someone may have lost career progression, pension contributions, borrowing ability or simply years of experience managing their own finances.
By the time the relationship ends, the disadvantage is already there.
Does domestic abuse affect a divorce financial settlement?
Under the current law, a finding of domestic abuse does not automatically mean a larger financial settlement.
When deciding finances after divorce, the court looks at the whole financial picture: income, housing, available assets, needs and earning capacity. Conduct can also be considered, but the threshold has traditionally been very high. Some of the best-known examples involve extremely serious violence, including attempted murder.
There is an obvious reason judges are cautious. Financial proceedings would become almost impossible if every argument, betrayal or piece of bad behaviour during a marriage could be used to demand a larger share of the assets.
But I think there is a real difficulty at the other end.
If one person has spent years damaging the other person’s ability to work, save, borrow or understand the family finances, it is hard to say that history has no relevance simply because the loss cannot be calculated down to the penny.
Where should the line be?
The Ministry of Justice has recently looked at whether the rules on divorce finances should change, including the way domestic abuse is treated.
I do not think financial proceedings should punish someone simply because they behaved badly during the marriage. That would take us straight back towards fault.
The better question is whether the abuse has actually changed the other person’s financial position.
If someone has been left with debt, weaker earning power, a serious housing problem or years of financial dependency, that is more than an argument about who was the worse spouse. It is part of the financial situation the parties are dealing with at separation.
At the same time, domestic abuse should not become an automatic route to a bigger award. The evidence still matters. So does the connection between the abuse and the financial consequences.
That is a harder approach than simply saying abuse either counts or does not count, but real family finances are rarely that simple.
The hidden problem: negotiating without equal information
People going through financial remedy proceedings rely heavily on financial disclosure and negotiation.
That sounds straightforward until one person has spent most of the relationship controlling the money.
They may know every account, pension, investment and debt. The other person may know almost none of it.
After separation, that imbalance can carry straight into the case. Paperwork arrives late. Information is incomplete. Questions have to be asked repeatedly. Even where nothing improper is ultimately proved, the person who starts with less knowledge is already trying to catch up.
In my day-to-day work, the biggest hurdle for self-represented people is often not the percentage they may eventually receive. It is getting enough information to understand what they actually own, what they owe and what the other person has disclosed.
That can be exhausting in an ordinary divorce. For someone who has already spent years being controlled through money, it can feel like the same problem continuing in a different setting.
What should reform actually achieve?
The law does not need to put a price on every wrong committed during a marriage. Nor should financial remedy hearings become another trial of the relationship.
But economic abuse can leave consequences long after the relationship itself has ended.
If reform is going to address this properly, it needs to look beyond obvious losses. A debt is easy to see. A missing pension contribution, a damaged career or years spent financially dependent on another person can be much harder to measure, but no less real.
For me, that is the part of economic abuse that financial remedy reform needs to take more seriously.