At a Martha’s Vineyard town hall, advocates and survivors broke down how money gets weaponized in abusive relationships and what communities can do about it.
Domestic violence leaves marks that courts and hospitals can document. Financial abuse rarely does. No visible injury results from a partner who drains a bank account, tanks a credit score or calls an employer until someone loses their job. The damage shows up later, when a survivor tries to leave and finds the exit has been quietly bricked over for years.
That specific dynamic was at the center of a recent town hall in Martha’s Vineyard, hosted by Ujima, the National Center on Violence Against Women in the Black Community, in partnership with The Allstate Foundation. The event drew together survivors, advocates and organizational leaders to address what financial abuse actually looks like inside Black households, and what it costs the people trying to get out.
Why Black women face this at disproportionate rates
The statistics framing the conversation are not new, but they remain stark. More than 40% of Black women will experience domestic violence at some point in their lives. They are three times more likely to be killed by an intimate partner than women of other racial backgrounds. These numbers reflect something structural, not incidental, and the town hall treated them accordingly.
Financial abuse accelerates the danger by narrowing options. When a partner controls all income, monitors every transaction and destroys the professional relationships that might fund an exit, leaving becomes a logistical crisis on top of an emotional one. Survivors often stay not because they want to but because the financial architecture of the relationship has been built to make departure feel impossible.
The panel and what they brought to the conversation
Essence Senior Editor Kimberly Wilson moderated the discussion, which featured three panelists with direct experience in this space.
Kimya Motley, a survivor herself and Chief Communications Officer of A Call to Men, an organization focused on promoting healthy masculinity, spoke to the psychological dimensions of financial control and what recovery from it requires. Karma Cottman, CEO of Ujima, brought the policy and community infrastructure perspective, centering the particular vulnerabilities Black women face when seeking institutional support. Sharisse Kimbro, Relationship Abuse Program Officer for The Allstate Foundation, noted that the foundation has committed more than $100 million over the past two decades toward domestic violence support and survivor resources.
What communities can actually do
The town hall moved past awareness into specifics. Financial literacy programming aimed at survivors, not just general audiences, came up repeatedly as an underfunded gap. Legal assistance that addresses the financial aftermath of abuse, including credit repair, debt liability and asset recovery, is another area where most communities fall significantly short.
Job training programs that account for employment gaps caused by abusive partners sabotaging work were also named. Survivors frequently leave relationships with résumé holes they cannot explain to a hiring manager without disclosing circumstances they may not be ready to share.
Resources for people who need them now
The National Domestic Violence Hotline operates at 1-800-799-7233 and at thehotline.org around the clock. Ujima provides resources specifically designed for Black women navigating violence, with particular attention to the cultural and systemic factors that shape those experiences.
The town hall closed with a straightforward position: financial abuse is not a secondary concern within domestic violence. It is frequently the mechanism that makes everything else possible for an abuser and everything else harder for a survivor. Naming it accurately is the starting point.
