Angela Littwin of Texas, Adrienne Adams of Michigan State University, and Angie Kennedy, also of Michigan State have written Ineffective Relief for Coerced Debt: The Failure of Divorce and Debtor-Creditor Law to Address Debt Created by Domestic Violence. Here’s the abstract:
Coerced debt occurs when the abusive partner in a relationship characterized by domestic violence (DV) uses fraud, coercion, or manipulation to incur debt in the DV survivor’s name. Prior research has shown that coerced debt may be a common problem that negatively impacts DV survivors’ lives by damaging credit scores and imposing barriers to leaving abusive relationships. Anecdotal accounts suggest that the legal remedies for addressing coerced debt are ineffective, but that intuition has not been systematically tested – until now. This article presents data from the first in-depth study of coerced debt, Debt as a Control Tactic in Abusive Marriages, funded by the National Science Foundation. A key aim was to evaluate the effectiveness of legal relief for coerced debt. We analyzed participants’ experiences with divorce and studied three options under debtor-creditor law: unauthorized use in the Truth in Lending Act, the statute of limitations, and bankruptcy. We found these options for legal relief for coerced debt to be highly ineffective. For example, only one percent of participants received assets in the divorce to pay coerced debt, and debtor-creditor laws were effective for 0.3 to 11% of coerced debts. The failure of existing options underscores the importance of on-going advocacy for legal reform, such as pushes for laws that block the collection of coerced debt.
