Banks and utilities can help stamp out the economic abuse of women in violent relationships, research says.

A report, Restoring Financial Safety: Legal Responses to Economic Abuse, ha been released by Good Shepherd Australia New Zealand and Wyndham Legal Service.

It examined the legal cases of 25 people who had taken out intervention orders against their partners, and found men in these relationships often restricted access to money, cars and mobile phones to exert control over women.

Researchers found that such economic abuse was difficult for both victims and service providers to identify and remedy.

Secondly, it said legal professionals often did not recognise the controlling behaviour as abuse.

“Women find themselves caught up in problems with everyday issues like electricity supply, mobile phone contracts, access to the car, and access to bank accounts and, say, credit cards,” Wyndham Legal Service manager Denis Nelthorpe told ABC reporters.

“The inability to resolve those problems can either exacerbate the impact of the family violence and in the worst cases can actually force them to stay in violent relationships.

“We believe that the service industry such as banking, finance, the energy industry and telecommunications, can actually play a role by recognising in their processes that both family breakdown and family violence are an everyday part of life.”

The report gave several recommendations for reforms that could allow essential service providers to “minimise economic abuse on customers”.

One suggestion was for regulations to help women get out of utility contracts if there is evidence of family violence.

The report found women in outer-urban areas were vulnerable to restrictions on transport.

In one case study, a woman named was forced to sign a $16,000 loan for a car in her name, but here husband then the car gave to his mother and did not allow the owner to drive it.

When the woman later separated from her partner, she was pursued by debt collectors because he had fallen behind on the repayments.

The report recommended road authorities make it easier to transfer the ownership of a car between spouses.

It also said that a “small claims tribunal” should be set up to deal with property disputes outside the Federal Family Court.

“Being forced to resort to the Family Court for everyday aspects of life is impractical...prohibitively expensive and slow,” Mr Nelthorpe said.

The full report is available in PDF form, here.