Sonya Passi: “The number one obstacle to safety for survivors is economic insecurity”

At Pivotal, we believe firmly that social progress is only possible when women have power and influence in the workplace. But millions of U.S. women can’t reach their full potential because of violence—which our research has found is one of the biggest barriers standing in the way of women at work.

It’s not just the physical and emotional effects of violence that are harmful. There’s also an enormous economic cost. Experiencing violence at home makes it far harder to get a job, and keep a job. People experiencing physical abuse often face economic abuse too. No matter how resilient survivors are, financial insecurity can be extremely difficult to rebuild from.

That’s where FreeFrom comes in. Founded in 2016, the survivor-led organization builds safety and economic freedom for people who have experienced gender-based violence, advocating for supportive public policies, equipping employers and other institutions with tools to help survivors thrive financially, and providing opportunities for survivors themselves. FreeFrom also works to reframe the narrative by sharing survivor stories centered in joy and power rather than tragedy. All its work is powered by the conviction that gender-based violence is a systemic economic problem that demands systemic, long-term solutions.

Sonya Passi, the founder and CEO of FreeFrom, spoke to Pivotal about the unique economic challenges survivors face, what employers and policymakers can do to address them, and how doing so benefits all of us. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Can you tell us how you got into this work, and why it was so important to you?

Sonya: When I was 16 years old, I thought that I wanted to be a human rights lawyer. I started an Amnesty International group at my high school in the UK. So I’m reading this pamphlet they sent on global violence against women, and it says one in three women in the world will be subjected to gender-based violence. I just remember being so confused as to why this wasn’t on the front page of every newspaper—why I was learning about this for the very first time in a pamphlet that I had gotten in the mail. It was very clear to me that this was a global human rights crisis. I grew up in and around different kinds of abuse, and yet I didn’t know it. I didn’t have words for it, but in that moment, reading this, I really committed my life to ending gender-based violence. It became what I lived and breathed.

You’ve said that while your passion is ending gender-based violence, your skills are innovating and building strategies to end systemic problems. What does that mean for FreeFrom’s approach?

Sonya: When you think about how we’re addressing gender-based violence in the U.S., we really address it almost like we do a humanitarian crisis. “Oh, this terrible thing happened. Here’s a hot meal and a warm bed.” And then, “Good luck to you.” We do that over and over again, as if these are a series of isolated incidents, when in actuality the number one obstacle to safety for survivors is economic insecurity. So right now we have two problems. One, we’re putting Band-Aids on the problem. And two, we’re only offering short-term support. What we’re offering isn’t enough, and how long we’re offering it for isn’t enough.

What FreeFrom is saying is, this is a systemic economic problem with economic causes and economic consequences. We have to address it with solutions to the economic problem: cash for survivors, building a savings safety net, changing policies and laws that allows survivors to protect and build their financial security. And we need a continuum of support that begins long before a moment of acute crisis, and continues long after a moment of acute crisis.

We know that this is a generational problem. This isn’t something that happens over weeks and months. This is something that happens over years and lifetimes—so our solutions have to meet the scope of the problem. For FreeFrom, innovating means really transforming the entire way our society understands the problem and then addresses it.

Let’s unpack violence as an economic issue. You’ve said that abuse has a high cost, and you’ve said that healing is expensive.

Sonya: The CDC estimates that intimate partner violence will cost a female survivor an average of $104,000. We think that’s an underestimation. That number includes medical costs, lost productivity, property damage, and costs related to the criminal justice system. But it doesn’t account for lost wages and coerced and fraudulent debt, which survivors have reported is about $16,000 a year. Money stolen. Having your ability to spend money restricted. And long term, if you’re forced out of the workforce, on top of lost wages, what does it look like to miss out on promotions and career growth? And having to take lower-paying jobs because you’ve been in and out of jobs in a way that you can’t explain to prospective employers.

Plus, so many survivors have disabilities—we put out a call for applicants to a safety fund for survivors, and 56% of the women who responded said they had a disability. The national average is 10% of the population. That data suggests a causal relationship between gender-based violence and disability. That also is incredibly expensive—it has huge repercussions for your ability to gain and maintain employment. So gender-based violence is at the intersection with everything else, and exacerbates all of the other obstacles to financial security for women.

That statistic about survivors and disability is really disturbing. If you’re a workplace that cares about having people from all backgrounds, or if you’re just someone who cares that people of all backgrounds have economic opportunity, it’s important to understand who’s disproportionately affected by violence.

Sonya: It's 54% of Black women, 57% of bisexual women, and 40% of lesbian women. When you compound the gender, racial, LGBTQ, and disability wealth gaps with gender-based violence, survivors are sitting at all of those intersections. And we know that survivors of gender-based violence are in the bottom 10th percentile for economic well-being in this country.

Can you talk about the research that suggests women are less likely to experience physical violence in the home when they earned close to what their partners did? That correlates with our research showing that women with the lowest incomes are four times as likely as women with high incomes to say that violence has held them back at work. Do you have thoughts on what might explain the link between income and gender-based violence?

Sonya: Abuse is about power. You cannot disentangle money from power. So it makes complete sense that where there is an imbalance of financial independence or agency or control, there is an imbalance of power. And where there is an imbalance of power, the conditions are ripe for abuse.

And the myth is that every survivor wants to leave an abusive situation, or can leave. But so often, leaving would mean giving up their children. It would mean giving up their entire community. We have seen that where we are able to support survivors in reducing that income gap and building financial security, they are often able to stay in the exact same family situation and no longer experience violence.

So as we think about how we end gender-based violence, we’ve got to be more creative in our thinking than simply getting survivors out of situations. Our solutions are limited to those who can leave, but if we broaden our solutions to think about economic security, we’re able to actually build solutions that work for every survivor.

So many survivors report losing their jobs as the result of their abuse. What makes it harder for survivors to get jobs, and keep them?

Sonya: Our research has found that 90% of survivors have had their ability to obtain or maintain a job disrupted by a harm-doer. They’re preventing them from going to work, getting access to the training that they need to get a job, going to job interviews. Refusing childcare. And very often threatening to contact or actually contacting their employer to disclose sensitive or false information about them.

We’re coming out with a report next month that details all this. We surveyed survivors who didn’t have a job, and only 2% of them said that it was their choice not to have a job. And 84% of survivors told us that the violence has negatively impacted their job performance. While 81% said it would help them to have workplace policies and support specifically for survivors, only 2.5% said their job offered that.

How do you convince employers that this matters?

Sonya: Primarily we’ve focused on getting employers to implement paid and protected gender-based violence leave for survivors. Survivors are, on average, depleting about 11 days paid sick time and 12 days of vacation time—going to the doctor, going to the hospital, getting a rape kit done. Of course, if you are doing any of the above, you are neither sick nor on vacation. And we also know that many survivors don’t have paid sick and vacation days. So they are often losing their job. Since gender-based violence is a systemic problem, our entire society is responsible for it—the cost cannot fall solely on survivors. Implementing specific leave for survivors is a way for employers to say, “We understand that we have a responsibility.”

How do you explain to corporate leaders why it is not expensive to support survivors?

Sonya: I believe you are either paying upfront or you’re paying after the fact. You’re either paying to keep an employee—which means you’re keeping that expertise, you’re keeping that training, you’re keeping those relationships—or you’re losing that employee and losing productivity and having to spend money to rehire and retrain. My own math, my own experience tells me that it is cheaper to spend the money upfront to support the staff that I do have.

At Pivotal, we think paid leave is really important. Can you tell me why it’s important for employers to have leave policies specific to survivors, in addition to other leave policies?

Sonya: There are two reasons. The first is that as employers, we have the power to change culture. When we take a definitive stance on an issue through our policies, we’re signaling to other employers, to employees, and to society that this is something that we should be paying attention to. Second, this is an issue that is so shrouded in shame. What we know from employees we have talked to and companies we have worked with is that having a policy that specifically names this issue supports staff in not feeling shame in their experience.

What policies at the federal or state level do you think would make the greatest difference in supporting survivors’ economic well-being and ability to work?

Sonya: Tennessee has added economic abuse to their state’s definition of domestic violence. If your harm-doer is preventing you from getting a job by dragging you into court every time you have a job interview, or taking money out of your bank account, or tracking your physical whereabouts through your debit card spending—technically, that is neither physical nor psychological abuse, so in most states you cannot get a restraining order against such conduct. In states where economic abuse is included in the definition, it can go an extraordinarily long way toward not just protecting survivors’ physical safety, but protecting their financial safety too.

Are there other policies you would love to wave a magic wand and see implemented?

Sonya: You know, we’re still fighting for paid leave. Across all 50 states, we’re still fighting for affordable child care. We’re still fighting for parental leave. People are not survivors in a silo. To really build a very robust infrastructure of care at the state and federal level means survivors are supported.

And then, we’re still fighting to get states to implement policies that allow you to break a lease in a domestic violence situation without facing penalties, that don’t hold you responsible for fraudulent debt incurred by your harm-doer, that let you repair your credit after having it devastated through economic abuse.

So if I had a magic wand, there’s no one policy—it’s actually this very intricate web of 50 to 60 policies that you knit together to build a safety net. That takes the burden of the cost of harm off survivors, and it is instead held by our society.

What makes you hopeful about the potential for progress?

Sonya: One of my life-saving abilities is that I am able to break a problem of any magnitude down into the sum of its parts. If I think about the enormous challenges that we face right now, it’s incredibly overwhelming. Instead prefer to think about what needs to be laid brick by brick in order to create progress. I just need this one win here, and another win there—then you look back and it adds up to an extraordinary amount of progress.

Can you tell us about a recent win that made you happy?

Sonya: At FreeFrom, we have a program where we match survivors’ savings dollar for dollar until they get to $1,440 in savings. So far, we’ve supported survivors in saving over $823,000. I just got an e-mail from a survivor who said that they just bought their own house, with seed money they saved through FreeFrom’s savings matching program.

One last question: What do you think about the next generation’s potential to carry on this work?

Sonya: As someone with a two-year-old old daughter, I think about this a lot. With younger generations, what I’m seeing is a lack of shame. I look at them and I'm like, God, imagine what I could have accomplished by now if I didn’t have shame!

And historically, we have looked to individuals to be our leader. We have put certain people on pedestals as having the answers, as being the ones to follow, and I think we’re seeing that shift with younger generations to collective power-building—and that in and of itself gives me hope. Because as soon as you put someone on a pedestal, it’s just a matter of time before you kick them off. And then we end up spending our time and our resources in that fight, instead of the actual fight. If 2025 has taught us anything, it’s that it’s going to take absolutely every single one of us, all of our talent, all of our resources. No one of us is going to save us. The younger generations really understand that. And they’re very good at building collective power.