Systems Abuse

How Perpetrators can use Systems to Enact Abuse

Kate Bishop, Learning Experience Lead, WIRE 

Perpetrators of family violence including financial abuse are often highly skilled at manipulating systems to enact abuse and avoid accountability. When they successfully do this, they are engaging in systems abuse, and this typically forms part of a broader pattern of coercive control.  

Systems abuse is not confined to criminal justice or child protection systems. It also occurs across financial and essential services, including banking, superannuation, taxation, Centrelink, insurance, energy, and telecommunications. Evidence from Tasmania demonstrates that these systems can extend abuse through “multiple, often opaque pathways,” enabling systems-based tactics that are “inconsistently visible” (Engender Equality, 2025).  

When systems respond in ways that align with a perpetrator’s narrative, objectives, or interests, whether unknowingly or, in some cases, deliberately this is described as systemic collusion. The consequences of systemic collusion are profound, often leaving victim‑survivors unsupported, discredited, and further disadvantaged, while perpetrators retain control. 

WIRE’s work with women and gender diverse victim‑survivors consistently highlights that help seeking itself can become fraught when institutions misunderstand the nature of family violence. This is particularly evident when services that have a role in responding to family violence: 

• Fail to recognise the gendered nature of family violence  

• Conceptualise family violence as incident based rather than patterned 

• Do not adequately train staff, including leadership  

• Prioritise procedural completion over a trauma-informed & intersectional approach 

It is particularly important for staff to apply an intersectional lens – to consider how aspects of a victim survivors’ identity may be used against them by a perpetrator. We know that women and gender diverse people from culturally and linguistically marginalised groups, First Nations women and gender-diverse people, those who are disabled, or living rurally are targeted in unique ways with perpetrators often leveraging racism, ableism, and other forms of discrimination to strengthen their control. 

Supporting Safety

In addition to robust and evidence-informed training, such as that provided by WIRE and our counterparts, guidance is available for businesses who have a role in supporting safety for customers experiencing family violence and financial abuse. Guidance for energy and water businesses, including safety by design considerations is provided in the Essential Services Commission Better Practice in Responding to Family Violence Handbook Much of the information within the handbook is relevant to other essential services, beyond energy and water. WIRE sat on the Better Practice Working Group who contributed to the updated version of the handbook, released in 2025. 

Catherine Fitzpatrick, Founder and CEO of Flequity Ventures, argues that safety should never depend on ‘luck, courage, or who speaks up first.’ Instead, she asserts, ‘safety should be designed in’ (Fitzpatrick, 2025). Inspired by the Australian eSafety Commissioner’s Safety by Design framework, the Designed to Disrupt® series documents the common ways perpetrators weaponise services, products, and digital platforms across sectors including banking, insurance, and telecommunications. https://designedtodisrupt.au/ 

At WIRE, we hear from victim survivors about excellent experiences within the system when they are seeking safety and support, but we also hear about responses that inadvertently retraumatise victim survivors by making them repeat their stories to multiple people.  
 
Worse still, their abuser may have already contacted the provider, manipulated account settings, or accessed information to maintain control (P. 19 Fitzpatrick, 2025). 

Systems can become instruments of harm when they fail to anticipate misuse. As Professor Cathy Humphreys has observed: 

“The most effective strategy for a perpetrator is to get the victim named as the perpetrator.” 
(Humphreys, 2021, as cited in Family Violence Reform Implementation Monitor) 

When a perpetrator ‘gets in first’ and successfully convinces a worker that he is the victim, systems may direct resources, protections, and credibility towards him while withdrawing support from the person actually experiencing harm. This is known as misidentification. Within the context of the ongoing effects of colonisation and systemic racism, Aboriginal Women are misidentified at higher rates than non-Aboriginal women. “Aboriginal women seeking safety are too often treated as criminals. They are misidentified, criminalised and incarcerated.”  Antoinette Braybrook AM, Yorta Yorta woman, CEO of Djirra (Victoria’s Aboriginal Community Controlled family violence prevention and legal service) as cited in Cross, 2024. 

Often, the ramifications of this remain invisible to the system itself, but the impacts of a system further facilitating perpetrator control can be devastating for the victim survivor, particularly when layered with intersectional disadvantage.   

Gender and patriarchal power 

The uncomfortable truth is that systemic collusion is often underpinned by gender bias. The Tasmanian systems abuse report from Engender Equality highlights how male privilege often aligns with dominant norms of authority, rationality, and credibility, rendering it invisible to those who benefit from it. This graphic outlines a casual layered analysis of systems abuse. (Engender Equality, 2025).  

It is important that staff working in roles where they may have contact with both parties, the victim survivor and a perpetrator, have some understanding of the ways that perpetrators may attempt to invite them into collusion.  

However, it is critical that staff working in non‑specialist roles understand the limits of their engagement with people who are known or suspected to be using family violence. As Rodney Vlais (2019) cautions, agencies that do not specialise in perpetrator intervention must carefully consider: “what parameters or limits to engagement should be kept in mind for a particular situation and a particular agency.” 

All engagement with perpetrators including accountability mechanisms can create immediate or long-term risks to victim‑survivors. Agencies must therefore assess whether to engage, who should engage, when, how, and in what context, with victim‑survivor safety as the central consideration (Vlais, 2019).  

Although some men do experience family violence and deserve appropriate support, national and international evidence consistently demonstrates that women and gender diverse people are overwhelmingly the primary victims of family and domestic violence, including financial abuse (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2023; ANROWS, 2023). Despite this, public misunderstanding persists, with many Australians incorrectly believing that family violence is perpetrated equally by men and women. 

An understanding of the gendered nature of family violence, and issues of inequity are essential for staff tasked with responding to victim survivors of family violence and financial abuse. Without this lens, these roles become vulnerable to collusion. 

Why it is important to invest in getting it right

The long-term impacts of family violence and financial abuse are considerable. They frequently result in entrenched poverty, housing insecurity, and lifelong disadvantage.  

WIRE’s CEO Jade Blakkarly shares, too often ‘But at least she and the children are safe’ becomes the justification for victim survivors facing long term negative impacts of family violence. High levels of trauma, reduced life opportunities and ongoing poverty should not be the acceptable price paid by women and children pay to achieve safety.  

Anne Summers (2022) also describes this starkly as the terrible choice faced by many women: violence or poverty. 

The harrowing account included below from Evans (2007), cited in Summers’ work, illustrates the material devastation that can be inflicted through financial abuse, power and control and patriarchal entitlement, leaving survivors to rebuild entire lives with almost nothing while perpetrators retain wealth and assets.

Terri, a 29-year-old Victorian woman who was interviewed for the 2007 Monash University study on domestic violence survivors, left her abusive relationship of four years with little more than the clothing she and her two children were wearing: ‘I asked my ex if we could have sex for the washing machine and stereo,’ she told the interviewer. ‘He agreed, and that’s all I got … no photos, clothes, old school reports, personal effects … this had a huge impact on my life and still does. I had to establish an entire household on one wage, with a baby and a three-year old … he now owns a business, has two new cars and owns his own home, he cleared out the savings the day I left.’ 

As Rebecca Glenn, CEO of the Centre for Women’s Economic Safety, notes, while the most determined perpetrators may always seek new tactics, there are many opportunities for systems to create friction, generate evidence, and interrupt harm (Parliament of Australia, 2024). Non‑collusive responses are a point of friction for perpetrators. 

Frontline staff must be supported to understand the scope of their roles—to neither overstep into specialist intervention, nor miss critical opportunities to apply their internal family violence procedures and to refer to specialist family violence support. These opportunities can be missed when staff feel undertrained and under supported. Robust, trauma-informed training, tailored to organisational contexts can reduce the risk of systemic collusion and increase safety, dignity, and agency for victim‑survivors.  

Addressing systemic collusion and systems abuse requires institutions to recognise that their responses cannot be ‘neutral’ in the context of unequal power.  

References 

Australian Bureau of Statistics. (2023). Personal Safety Survey. https://www.abs.gov.au 

ANROWS. (2023). National Community Attitudes Survey: Personal Safety Survey fact sheet. https://www.anrows.org.au 

Cross, J. (2024, April 30). “Misidentified, criminalised and incarcerated”: Calls for action to support Aboriginal women facing domestic violence. National Indigenous Times. https://nit.com.au/30-04-2024/11106/misidentified-criminalised-and-incarcerated-calls-for-action-to-support-aboriginal-women-facing-domestic-violence [nit.com.au] 

Essential Services Commission Victoria https://www.esc.vic.gov.au/media-centre/updated-handbook-help-water-and-energy-businesses-respond-family-violence  

Engender Equality. (2025). Systems abuse and family violence in Tasmania: Evidence and recommendations for action. 

Evans, I. (2007). Battle scars. Monash University. 

Fitzpatrick, C. (2025). Designed to Disrupt®. https://designedtodisrupt.au 

Humphreys, C. (2021). Consultation with the Family Violence Reform Implementation Monitor. 

Parliament of Australia. (2024). Financial abuse: Safety by design and industrywide options for reform. https://www.aph.gov.au 

Summers, A. (2022). The choice: Violence or poverty. https://www.violenceorpoverty.com 

Vlais, R. (2019). Foundations for family and domestic violence perpetrator intervention systems. Centre for Innovative Justice. 

WIRE Victoria. (n.d.). Family violence information and support resources. https://www.wire.org.au