Welcome to Getting Curious. I'm Jonathan Van Ness and every week I sit down for a gorgeous conversation with a brilliant expert to learn all about something that makes me curious.

On today's episode, I'm joined by Sonia Passi, where I ask her, what is the cost of intimate partner violence?

As a sensitivity warning, this episode does discuss intimate partner violence in detail.

We hope that centering an episode on this important topic helps to bring awareness to survivors experiences and the incredible work that Sonia and other advocates are doing through organizations like Free From.

Welcome to Getting Curious. I'm Jonathan Van Ness. I'm so excited to welcome our incredible guest this week, who I learned about from one of my very favorite people in the entire world of Locke.

Sonia Passi, who is the founder and CEO of Free From, a national organization working to dismantle the nexus between intimate partner violence and financial insecurity.

Sonia, that's like a major paragraph.

I also want to be one of my favorite people in Locke. I think most of the best things I know about the world have been Vesavilla Locke.

I'm not at all surprised that I found your incredible work and your incredible mission through talking to a locke.

So our kind of overall theme here is, what is intimate partner violence? I think so often people kind of take for granted what intimate partner violence like even is because it has so many different ways that it can show itself from physical, verbal, financial, emotional, like your space, sexual.

There's so many different ways that we can that people can experience this abuse. And so I kind of want to break down even just to start. What is it?

It's such a great question because the way that our states define intimate partner violence is so limited.

So basically every state just defines intimate partner violence as physical and psychological abuse. And within psychological it includes emotional within physical it includes sexual.

But there's all these other kinds of abuse that are not included. So you mentioned financial abuse. Financial abuse is essentially controlling another person's finances or their access to finances.

And financial abuse occurs in 99% of all cases of intimate partner violence. So that it is not included in our state's definitions or our federal definition is extremely problematic.

So let's say for example you go and you get a restraining order against the person that is harming you. And that person is checking your bank accounts every day as a way of tracking you and physically locating you.

Your restraining order doesn't cover that person not being able to check your bank accounts because that's financial abuse. And the courts wouldn't recognize that as being covered by your restraining order because the definition that they're following is physical and psychological.

Now of course you can we can very easily say tracking my physical location through my bank accounts is psychological abuse or is physical abuse in a form.

But courts are not that nimble in the way that they interpret the law.

Another big form of intimate partner violence is litigation abuse. It happens all the time. And in these situations, harm doors particularly where there is family courts involved. Maybe there's a divorce. Maybe there's custody issues.

We'll use the courts to terrorize you. Whether that is filing motions on every single part of the process forcing you to come to court. We work with a survivor wants to.

Her arm to it was tracking her through her through her technology technology abuse another form of abuse. So he always knew what was going on always knew her emails always knew when she had a job interview.

...