Some Domestic Violence Survivors Are Still Paying Abusers’ Student Loan Debt

Angela Littwin, Ronald D. Krist Professor in Law at the University of Texas at Austin School of LawAlmost 30 years ago, a federal law let married couples consolidate their federal student loan debt through a short-lived U.S. Department of Education (ED) program. Couples who took part in the now-defunct program, which ran from 1993 to 2006, became jointly liable for repayment. Yet today, domestic violence survivors who participated in the program could still be on the hook for their abusers’ loans. A proposed bill in Congress could change that.

“When people think about domestic violence, they often think about physical violence mostly because the physical safety dangers are very real,” said Monica McLaughlin, director of public policy at the National Network to End Domestic Violence (NNEDV), a nonprofit organization that advocates to stop domestic violence. “But one of the ways to secure control over a survivor is through economic abuse.”

More than 14,000 borrowers took part in the ED program. But disentangling from consolidated loans can be especially difficult for domestic violence survivors when the other borrower is their abuser. Domestic violence advocates and experts point out that consolidated debt can be a form of economic abuse. Financial abuse occurs in about 99% of domestic violence cases, according to a study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Financial Security.

“A colleague of mine would say that survivors used to show up at shelters with just the clothes on their back, but now they show up with the clothes on their back and crippling debt with low credit scores,” said McLaughlin. “That is often the situation. And that can devastate the rest of their lives.”

She pointed out that an average of three women a day are killed by a current or former intimate partner across the country. The National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, which the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) developed, also found based on 2010 data that people who face housing or food insecurities are more vulnerable to abuse. McLaughlin stressed the links between physical violence and economic precarity.

Angela Littwin, who is the Ronald D. Krist Professor in Law at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law, studies consumer debt and domestic violence with Dr. Adrienne Adams, assistant professor of ecological / community psychology at Michigan State University. She explained that economic abuse can come in two forms: financial restriction (i.e. not being allowed to work) and financial exploitation.

“The behavior of consolidated student loans would fall under economic exploitation to make you liable for debt that is not yours,” said Littwin. “Partners can do this via coercive control. And bankruptcy is not even an out because student loans are very hard to discharge in bankruptcy.”