Bystander Reactions to Economic Abuse: The Role of Moral Evaluation and Victim Blaming

Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) is a worldwide public health issue. While most research has focused on victims’ experiences and the consequences of physical and sexual IPV, less is known about how laypeople perceive and interpret episodes of IPV, particularly economic abuse, or how these perceptions shape their responses, such as moral evaluations, victim-blaming, helping behavior, and support for collective action. We address this gap by applying the bystander approach to examine the factors that influence social evaluation of economic abuse, including the role of contextual information about the victim, and specifically to investigate reactions, such as hiding financial information, to economic abuse. In Study 1 (correlational, N = 204) participants read a fictitious newspaper article in which a woman was verbally assaulted by her husband after he discovered she had secretly saved money in a separate bank account. We provided preliminary evidence that the less people represented economic abuse as a form of violence, the more likely they were to perceive the victim as immoral and blame her: Consequently, they were less inclined to help and support her and to engage in collective action to tackle the IPV more generally. In Study 2 (experimental, N = 274), participants who read that the victim saved money for self-oriented (vs. family-oriented) motivation evaluated her as less moral, blamed her, and were less inclined to help her and to engage in collective action. In Study 3 (experimental, N = 376), participants who read that the victim saved money as a reaction to previous economic abuse evaluated the victim as more moral, and as a consequence they blamed her to a less extent, and were more inclined to help and support her and to engage in collective action. We discuss potential implications for IPV policies and campaigns, which often overlook economic abuse and how moral biases shape public reactions.