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New Report: Women's Experiences of Coerced Debt and Recovery in Scotland
Created: 14/05/2026
News/Events Category: General News
This item will show under the following categories: Children and Families Health and Social Care
A new report explores coerced debt in Scotland and the impact this has on women and children.
With the support of the Scottish Illegal Money Lending Unit and Trading Standards Scotland, Scottish Women's Aid (SWA) set out to research coerced debt to better understand its scale, impact, and systemic gaps, and to build the evidence needed to improve responses for women and children affected by domestic abuse.
Domestic and economic abuse in Scotland
Domestic abuse is a widespread, gendered harm in Scotland. In 2023–24, 63,867 incidents were recorded by Police Scotland, with 83% involving a female victim and a male perpetrator.
Abuse often continues after separation through economic abuse, including coerced debt, where perpetrators build debt in their partner’s or ex-partner’s name through coercion, control and fraud.
Across the UK, 4.2 million women experienced economic abuse in the past year, and an estimated 1.6 million adults were affected by coerced debt in 2024.
In Scotland, this largely unrecognised harm drives housing insecurity, poverty and prolonged control, leaving survivors without adequate protection or redress.
Key findings
Coerced debt is a hidden but widespread form of economic abuse
- It's a common and deliberate tactic of coercive control to trap women financially, restrict their choices, and undermine their ability to leave or rebuild their lives.
Economic abuse disproportionately affects women and children
- Gendered inequalities such as lower and insecure incomes, caring responsibilities, and engagement with public services mean that women are more likely to be left with debt, enforcement action, and financial insecurity created by perpetrators.
Abuse and debt continue long after separation
- Survivors and advocacy workers describe post-separation economic abuse where debt, joint finances, mortgages or rent, child-related costs, and legal proceedings are used as tools to continue to control.
Public debt is especially punitive and system-driven
- Coerced debt linked to council tax, rent, energy, and other public debts emerged as particularly damaging. Survivors face aggressive enforcement, legal action, and barriers to housing for debts accrued through abuse. These impacts arise from systems that fail to recognise economic abuse and continue to treat survivors as liable and responsible.
Survivors are forced into impossible financial choices to survive
- In the absence of effective support, women adopt financial survival strategies to manage coerced debt, such as relying on family, going without essentials, selling possessions, taking on further debt, returning to abusive partners or engaging in unsafe or exploitative work.
lllegal money lending is used as a last-resort survival strategy
- A small but significant number of survivors described being pushed towards illegal money lenders, often due to extreme financial pressure.
Current systems compound harm rather than enable recovery
- Survivors encounter fragmented, inconsistent, and often re-traumatising responses. Repeated disclosures and a lack of understanding of economic abuse leave women carrying the burden of proof and the debt.
- Rather than enabling recovery, existing systems often compound harm, leaving women and children children with the long-term consequences with no meaningful route to resolution or justice.
Survivors want economic justice, not just crisis management
- Systemic change must include understanding of economic abuse, recognition of coerced debt, survivor-centred debt relief, trauma-informed public services, and accountability for perpetrators.
Recommendations
The report sets out a range of recommendations, including:
- Prevention and awareness raising, including the delivery of a national public awareness campaign
- Early intervention
- Support for survivors
- Systemic and institutional change
- Embed economic abuse within Equally Safe
- Develop a Scottish Financial Inclusion Strategy
- Recognise economic abuse across the justice system
- Scottish Coerced Debt Relief Scheme
- Embed accountability through standards and audits
The report
Read the report summary here.
Read the full report here.
If you are affected by domestic abuse and coerced debt in Scotland and need support, contact Scotland’s Domestic Abuse and Forced Marriage Helpline: www.sdafmh.org.uk/en/
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