by Jess Hill
†Women partnered with insecure reactors will recognise some but not all of these techniques. That’s because their abuser is not seeking to dominate them entirely, and thus doesn’t use all the techniques of a coercive controller. Others who recognise only a few techniques, however, may be living through the early stages of coercive control – even if they have been with their partner for years.
§In 2016, legislation in Queensland was changed to make non-fatal strangulation a standalone offence, punishable by up to seven years’ imprisonment. In the following twelve months, almost 800 people were charged with it. (AAP and staff, ‘Almost 800 charged with strangulation in Queensland domestic violence crackdown’, The Guardian, 7 May 2017.)
2
THE UNDERGROUND
She wandered the streets, looking in shop windows. Nobody knew her here. Nobody knew what he did when the door was closed. Nobody knew.
BETH BRANT, WILD TURKEYS
In a Sydney cafe three women sit in close conversation. Two of them lean forward, their forearms on the table, looking intently at a woman who looks to be in her late forties. ‘He beat me, he beat me until I had bruises everywhere,’ she says, in a Russian accent. ‘And he put her in a cage!’ The ‘her’ is their daughter; after the marriage was over, she explains, her ex took their young daughter to the zoo and photographed her inside an animal enclosure. ‘She came home with three bruises, here, here and here.’ ‘This is terrible,’ says one friend. The woman shakes her head. ‘That is nothing. You know nothing,’ she replies, direct but not unkind. ‘You’ve got pain after pain after pain, you know, but …’ The woman pauses, and the table falls quiet. ‘Then his new wife – she took everything,’ she says. ‘Good on her, good on her,’ the friends chorus.
Another cafe, this time in Kings Cross. As I write, a young woman nervously leans across and asks if I’m connecting to her computer by Bluetooth. When she sees my confusion, she apologises. She’s paranoid about being hacked because she’s being stalked by her ex-boyfriend, who’s a cop. She had to move interstate to get away from him, but she’s terrified he’ll use his connections to find out where she is.
I go to court with a friend who needs protection from her partner; he held her and their young kids hostage for hours one night, taunting her and demanding she become his slave. She is later devastated to discover that the father of her beautiful children has been violent with other women.
Another old friend flees her family home with her mother after being attacked by her father and stays in hiding with us for a week. Turns out her father has a gun, and he blames her for making his wife leave him. We make sure the doors are locked at night.
I used to think I didn’t know anyone who’d been through domestic abuse. Now I know that was never true. Now, I see its traces all around me.
*
The women who are degraded and dominated in this country occupy a deep underground. They walk on isolated paths – on the street, at the office, in the school playground and the shopping centre – unseen and alone. They are us – our sisters and mothers and friends and colleagues – and they are the women we’ll never meet, whose lives we cannot imagine. Statistically, we all know at least one woman who’s lived in this underground, because it has been home to a shocking number of Australian women. According to Australia’s National Research Organisation for Women’s Safety (ANROWS), almost 2.2 million women alive today* have, at some point, lived underground.1 Some will never leave.
We think of domestic abuse as something that happens ‘behind closed doors’. But it’s actually happening all around us – we just don’t know what it looks like. Louisa, a 45-year-old with three children under ten, had her abuse paraded in front of strangers regularly at the supermarket. On the weekend, her partner would tell her where she could shop, and then tell her to wait there while he watched his nephews play football. Louisa would do the shopping, then wait in the supermarket with a trolley full of items. When he arrived, he’d start going through them one by one, pulling out everything she wasn’t ‘allowed’ to have, like baby wipes. ‘He’d say “What do we need this for?” in front of people, and I’d be so embarrassed, humiliated – in fear all the time,’ she says. ‘I was so frightened, because his behaviour was so erratic and controlling. You want to run but you don’t know where to go, and you are thinking, this is just completely ridiculous. Like, it’s not normal, is it? Is it normal?’2
Sometimes the most brutal acts of domestic abuse happen right in front of us. Detective Superintendent Rod Jouning, a former head of Victoria Police’s family and sexual violence unit, told me about a particularly shocking assault at a football game in rural Victoria. A man who was there with his wife and child had spent the day watching the footy with his mates. When it started getting late, his wife walked over to let him know it was time for them to go home, so they could get their kid ready for bed. ‘He turned around, said, “Don’t you dare disrespect me in front of my mates”, and then laid into her,’ said Jouning. ‘He broke her eye socket, fractured her jaw, then picked her up by the hair and one leg and dragged her to the car. Not one person intervened.’
People do intervene, of course – often at enormous risk to themselves. One night in 2017, around midnight, off-duty police officer Stephanie Bochorsky was watching television in her pyjamas when she heard a ‘bloodcurdling’ cry coming from the property next door. When she ran outside, she found a woman in the driveway standing in a pink dressing gown, screaming. When Stephanie asked her if she was okay, the woman cried, ‘No, he’s setting my kids on fire!’ Stephanie told the woman to call the police and not let anyone else inside, and then rushed into the house. Inside, it was eerily quiet and reeking of petrol. Seeing an unusual glow coming from one of the rooms, she entered to find three-year-old ‘Mikayla’ standing in her cot, her head entirely engulfed in flames – not screaming, just moving her head with a ‘shocked look on her face’. Stephanie grabbed a blanket and threw it over the toddler’s head to extinguish the fire. Suddenly, behind her stood the girl’s father, Edward John Herbert – a towering figure covered in tattoos, naked, eyes vacant, in a drug-induced psychosis – pouring petrol on his seven-year-old daughter, ‘Tahlia’. When he saw Stephanie, he said just one thing to her: ‘Why don’t you take your fucking clothes off.’ Stephanie reacted immediately. ‘Get the fuck away from her,’ she said, and with Mikayla in her arms, reached forward and grabbed Tahlia by the back of her pyjama collar, and ran out of the room.3
Unbeknown to Stephanie, Herbert was carrying a butcher’s knife and his six-year-old son was also in the house. Later, Herbert told a neighbour that he set his daughter on fire because she was ‘too fucking beautiful’. ‘Don’t worry,’ he added, ‘I wouldn’t have lit my boy up.’ Thanks to Stephanie and neighbour Daniel McMillan, who managed to fight Herbert off, all three children survived. Mikayla suffered burns to 13 per cent of her body. Herbert was sentenced to seventeen years in jail for two counts of attempted murder. His insanity defence was rejected by the court.
I don’t share these stories to be gratuitous or shocking. I share them because they illustrate everyday horrors. The #MeToo movement jolted us out of our stupor by showing us what sexual harassment looks and feels like. If we’re to get that same visceral sense for domestic abuse, we need to doubly steel ourselves.
*
Most of what happens underground stays underground. But in courthouses around the country, the public gets to glimpse the shocking reality of domestic abuse.
Every second Thursday on the outskirts of Sydney, the underground spills out onto the sidewalk. At these fortnightly domestic violence hearings, people cluster on the footpath in twos and threes around the tiny colonial-era Camden Court House. Some pass the time with a cigarette, some on their phones, others locked in solemn conversation with the roaming advocates of the Women’s Domestic Violence Court Advocacy Service (WDVCAS). Scanning the crowd, I feel something like anxiety rise in my stomach. Everybody looks so normal. Aside from a few neck tattoos,
there’s virtually nothing that distinguishes these men from others. If you went on a date with one of these guys, how would you know?
Camden is one of Sydney’s fastest growing areas, but it still feels like an old country town: it’s farmland right up to where the Cowpasture Bridge crosses the Nepean River into town, and the streets are lined with nineteenth-century heritage buildings. This, as a roadside sign announces, is the ‘Birthplace of the Nation’s Wealth’; here, early European settlers massacred and banished the Dharawal and Gundungurra people from their abundant hunting grounds and brought in lucrative sheep, wheat and grapes. Today, it’s still rich and mostly white. As the population grows, so does the domestic abuse: between 2017 and 2018, reported assaults increased by nearly 45 per cent.4
Today the magistrate has more than sixty matters to deal with. I’m here shadowing the head of WDVCAS in Macarthur, Camden local Tanya Whitehouse, as she does her rounds. She and her overworked staff act like lanterns in the dark for victims: they help them navigate the forbidding maze of courts and social services and do whatever it takes to make them feel safe and supported. ‘Oh, Camden’s a lovely little town, there’s no DV here,’ Tanya says sarcastically, shaking her head. ‘There’s definitely a whole world of shit here.’
A policeman walks out of the court and calls for a ‘Mr Pearson’. A heavyset man in a long black coat looks up, nods and follows him in.
Inside, it’s a full house: advocates and police stand just below the bench, clutching folders and scanning the faces of the sixty or so seated men and women. Mr Pearson sits alone in a chair at the front of the court, shoulders hunched and head bowed. The magistrate looks at the pile of notes in front of him and reads from the police incident report.
‘Mr Pearson came home from work,’ he starts, his tone matter-of-fact. ‘He went upstairs to his wife’s bedroom, and went into the room without any clothes, placing his hand between her legs while she was laying face down, asleep. She then woke up and turned to face him. He then pulled her underwear away and attempted to open her legs by pushing her knees apart with his hands. She then kicked him and screamed for him to stop. He then continued to push her legs apart. She then covered her genitalia with her hands while continuing to scream at him to stop. As a result, one of his children entered the room, after hearing the alarm from the child’s mother.’
At this, it’s as if the entire courtroom is holding its breath. Did the man sitting in front of us hurt his own child? How bad is this going to get? I feel my jaw clench, and am overtaken by a momentary illusion: if we sit absolutely still and quiet, maybe we can alter the course of these events and protect this child.
The magistrate goes on. ‘The son asked, “What’s wrong?” And he then said to his son that everything was okay.’ Exhale. ‘He then asked his wife, “What’s wrong? Why didn’t you let me?” She was crying and upset and said, “I don’t want to do this, I don’t want you, just leave me alone.”’
This feels too personal, too intimate, to be read out to a room full of strangers. Mr Pearson is still, immovable, as the magistrate reads out what happened next.
Mr Pearson accused his wife of ‘having someone’, and said she was just using him. When she got up to pack a bag, he snatched it from her and left the room to get dressed. When his wife came out of the bedroom, he was waiting for her. Again, he accused her of using him for money, and when she told him to leave her alone, he slapped her twice across the face. She dropped to the floor, screaming for help and crying, ‘Call the kids!’ Mr Pearson stood over her and warned, ‘Don’t do something silly, I will kill you.’ When she tried to run for the front door, he grabbed her from behind, pushing her to the ground. Mr Pearson then paced back and forth above her, berating her for lying, and accusing her and her family of damaging his property. She managed to scramble outside, where she lit a cigarette. She told him to leave. He warned her to keep her voice down, because ‘the neighbours can hear you’.
The magistrate continues in terrifying detail. ‘He then pulled a knife from his side pocket, and waved the knife towards her. The knife was a 30-centimetre black-handled kitchen knife. He told her to be quiet – “I don’t want to hear you talking. This is what I’m going to do to you” – and he pointed the knife towards her stomach. She said, “Please don’t do this. I don’t want the kids to suffer. What you’ve already done is enough.” He then told her, “Shut up, I don’t want to hear from you.” He called out to one of the children: “Where are you going? Why are you opening the door?” She said, “Don’t do this, I want to hear my kids’ voices, I want to see my kids.” She walked upstairs with him behind her, he grabbed the back of her shirt, holding her as they walked up the stairs, holding the knife in his hand. They entered his room, he closed the door, and said, “If the cops come, I will chop you in half, I will slit you and let the cops do whatever they do. If they shoot me, I don’t care.” He kept looking out the window, holding the knife, saying, “I have a gun, I can kill us all. If you run away, I will find you, I will kill you.” His wife was crying, thinking she was about to die. He kept pointing the knife at her. The police arrived and knocked on the door. He said, “What is it?” Police told him to open the door. He told her to keep quiet by putting his fingers to his lips. He then pulled the mattress of the bed up and hid the knife underneath. When the police spoke to him, he said, “I was just trying to have sex with my wife. She was asleep. I got home from night shift, I was trying to have sex. I’m a man, you know.”’
There’s a pause as the magistrate puts the report down. He looks across the rows of solemn faces in the courtroom. These are serious offences, he says – enough to warrant a period of imprisonment.
But nothing brings home the awful practicalities of domestic abuse – and the vexed position of the court – like the letter the magistrate reads from Mr Pearson’s wife. They have seven children, she says, and have been married for twenty-two years. She is a stay-at-home mother, and he is the only financial provider for the children. He has ‘treated her like a queen’ until this incident; not once has she been disrespected. He is a ‘loving, respectful and hard-working man’ who always helps anyone in need. He’s been working two jobs, often has very little sleep, and yet she has never heard him complain. She came from a broken family – she knows how much it hurt, and how hard it is when families separate. Her children are now ‘confused and sad’, and some of them are suffering from eating disorders. ‘There is a clear wish,’ says the magistrate, ‘for the family unit to stay together.’
What is the ‘right’ thing to do in this situation? Despite what the magistrate says, nobody can say from that letter alone that Mr Pearson’s wife has a ‘clear wish’ to keep the family unit together. It’s also impossible to know, from this one incident, just how dangerous this man is. Did he really switch, out of nowhere, from treating her ‘like a queen’ to beating and threatening to kill her? That seems unlikely. Did she write that letter with him looking over her shoulder? Maybe. But in this moment, it’s impossible to know. More to the point: what choices does she have? If she leaves, how will she provide for her children? Would he make good on his threats? How would they ever feel safe?
In this situation, what should the magistrate do? Lock up Mr Pearson, and leave his wife and seven children with no income? If he were jailed, would that protect her? Or would he come out in a few months or years looking for revenge?
The magistrate takes a deep breath. ‘Taking into account that he has no prior criminal convictions, he is engaged with a psychologist, he is engaged in mental health diversion programs, he is in full-time work, and his wife expresses the need for financial assistance for her seven children, ultimately I am determining it is appropriate for him to serve his term of imprisonment by way of an intensive correction order.’ He asks Mr Pearson to stand up. ‘You are to be of good behaviour,’ the magistrate tells him. ‘You will be regularly tested for drugs and alcohol, you will undertake thirty-two hours of community services for each month of your imprisonment,
and you will engage in activities to address your offending behaviour. Do you understand the terms of your imprisonment?’
In a quiet voice Mr Pearson says, ‘Yes, sir.’
*
What is wrong with all these women? Why don’t they just leave? If anyone ever did that to me, I’d be out of there in a heartbeat. When most people hear stories of domestic abuse, this is their kneejerk response. We like to believe we would act immediately, that we would see what was coming. We think we’re better than the women who end up in abusive relationships. We think we’d be smarter, stronger, quicker to act. We would never get trapped. Not like them.
But think back to the times you forgave a lover for wronging you, or trusted them against your better judgement. To do that, you had to believe that the better part of them – the part you were in love with – was dominant, and their wrongdoing an aberration. Maybe you did break up with them, but got drawn back by their pleading and promises, or simply because you missed them. Maybe you were right to trust them; maybe you weren’t. It’s the same for victims of domestic abuse. The only difference is, their perspective isn’t just obscured by love and sexual attraction. It’s been scrambled by the forces of degradation and control.
We’re quick to judge women underground because we think their behaviour is irrational. It doesn’t make sense that a smart, independent woman would insist on staying with a man who brutalises her. It doesn’t make sense that after she leaves, there’s a good chance she will go back to him. It doesn’t make sense that a woman who is raped by her partner can continue to crave his affection. It doesn’t make sense that a mother would stay with an abusive father and put her children in danger.