TITLE:
Economic Abuse, Compared to Emotional Abuse and Physical Abuse, Is Minimized More, Victims Are Blamed More, and Victims Are Provided with Less Legal Advice
AUTHORS:
Alice Nuo-Yi Wang, Niwako Yamawaki, Yuki Nohagi, Rachel Umphress, Jane Green, Catalina Valdez
KEYWORDS:
Economic Abuse, Emotional Abuse, Physical Abuse, Intimate Partner Violence, Gender Role Ideology, Moderated Mediation
JOURNAL NAME:
Psychology,
Vol.16 No.11,
November
21,
2025
ABSTRACT: Economic Abuse (EA) is an understudied phenomenon experienced by Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) victims. The purpose of this study was to examine how participants minimized IPV, blamed IPV victims, and offered legal advice to IPV victims based on IPV type (i.e., EA, Emotional Abuse (EmoA), Physical Abuse (PA)). One hundred and sixty participants were randomly assigned to read a scenario depicting one of the three types of IPV and answer questions about minimizing, blaming, and offering legal advice. We examined participants’ Gender Role Ideology (GRI) and how GRI mediated the effect of IPV type and moderated the relationship between minimizing, blaming, and offering legal advice. We found that EA was minimized more than EmoA and PA, EA victims were blamed more than EmoA victims, and participants offered the least amount of legal advice to EA victims compared with EmoA and PA victims. We also found that men minimized IPV more than women did across all IPV types. GRI played no mediating role as hypothesized, but GRI did moderate the relationship between the EA scenario and minimizing—participants who read the EA scenario and had less traditional GRI minimized the IPV more. These results indicate that EA is not perceived as a severe issue nor a serious form of IPV even though the prevalence of EA is a serious concern. We discuss the need to raise public awareness of EA and the importance of extending more social resources to EA victims.