GBV (Gender-based Violence) may affect women from all socioeconomic positions. Gender-based Economic Abuse (EA) consists of the control over the women’s access to economic resources, diminishing the woman’s capacity to support herself, her sons and daughters and her previous life-habits depending on the perpetrator financially and undermining her possibilities to escape from the loop of abuse.
While EA during cohabitation has been formulated, it also might start after a separation, remaining understudied and not being specifically considered as abuse in Spain.
After divorcing, EA seems to be a mere formality or disagreement, as long as the woman did not denounce a previous GBV situation during the cohabitation.
Nowadays, comprehensive research into co-determinants and a regulatory or legal framework for preventing and managing EA as GBV are lacking.
ECOVIO project (Economic violence: opening pathways to guarantee women and children’s fundamental rights) is funded under the Rights, Equality and Citizenship of the European Union, whose purposes include preventing all forms of violence against women and children, as well as other groups in risk, and protecting victims of such violence.
The ultimate aim of ECOVIO is to make visible hidden gender-based violence for the society as a whole: EA is subtle and complex violence which requires in-depth research for guiding action and institutional change.
The objective of the project is to analyse gendered causes and co-determinants of the EA within the GBV context and:
- To research into how to ensure and guarantee the access to economic-financial rights for women and minors, making visible the economic abuse as an unexplored side of GBV
- To trace a route map for preventing and managing EA during and after the separation and influence decision-making bodies and entities, judges, prosecutors, lawyers, social workers and any other leading figure able to sustain change
- To purpose measures and actions for empowering women and educating girls
- To drive institutional change, addressing the EA within the context of the GBV but also facing challenges such as wage gap and women’s unemployment and sub-employment
- To establish a system for capacity building for preventing EA at macro, meso and micro levels