by Jess Hill
Of course, sometimes the catalyst for change is straightforward: she may just get the money, accommodation or protection she needs to leave. Others simply reach a point of despair: the promises to change finally ring hollow, and there is no faith left that things will get better. At this point, they may – finally – allow themselves to admit that they are a victim of domestic abuse.
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Some women recognise their abuse, leave their abuser and go on to lead happy lives. Some may even go on to live happy or at least peaceful lives with their abusive partner, if he does the extraordinary emotional work required to change his behaviour. But if an abusive man is determined to keep abusing her, nothing she does will guarantee her safety. Whether a woman stays or leaves is irrelevant to a man determined to punish and control her.
‘Sarah’ knew exactly what domestic abuse looked like. As a doctor in a trauma hospital, she dealt with injured victims of abuse every other day.‡ One memory in particular stands out. ‘A woman came into ED who had just had a baby. She was in her twenties, and it was thought that her partner had attacked her with the back of a hammer. She had multiple entry wounds all over her head, and I remember just struggling to compute the reality of so many deep and intentional puncture wounds to her face and skull. It was heartbreaking – her prognosis was grim. I don’t think she was expected to regain consciousness.’
Sarah’s own fiancé, ‘Carl’, turned violent the day after he found out she was pregnant. ‘Suddenly my charming, charismatic partner – a man who often made fun of himself – turned into someone I didn’t recognise,’ she says. ‘The anger, the entitlement and the vitriol – it seemed to come out of nowhere.’ What made it even more bewildering was that up until then, Carl had been an avid supporter of female empowerment. ‘He really respected the fact that I was well-educated and independent,’ she says. ‘But after I got pregnant, that all changed – he expected all of my focus to be on him. He tried to control what I wore, what I did, where I went, how tidy the house was, and when I saw my family and friends. He became obsessed with the minutiae – from what I ate to what time the blinds were drawn.’
After Sarah gave birth to their daughter, ‘Alice’, the situation became even more dangerous. Alice had a medical condition that put her in hospital multiple times in her first year, and meant that her breathing required constant monitoring. ‘It was an incredibly stressful time. I was walking on eggshells, trying to keep him calm, while also managing a baby who found it hard to breathe.’ As Sarah made repeat visits to intensive care, Carl grew increasingly erratic and malevolent. ‘At times, he stopped me calling an ambulance for Alice; another time he insisted that she wasn’t really unwell and disconnected her breathing monitor. He photographed me if he thought I wasn’t supporting her head properly, as evidence of my inadequate parenting, and would purposely squeeze my breasts so that I wouldn’t have enough breastmilk for her. Life was very difficult and I tried to make sure Alice would cry as little as possible when he was home, because when she cried he reacted like there was an air raid siren going off.’ Sarah knew she was being abused and sought help straightaway. ‘I was very vocal about what was going on for us. He assaulted me a number of times during the pregnancy, which I told my GP and the obstetrician,’ she says. ‘The maternal child health nurse knew, the social worker at Alice’s hospital knew, even our friends and families knew. Everyone knew. I told everyone. He was seeing a domestic violence specialist psychologist and we went to a relationship counsellor. I was trying to get him help. But while these professionals pointed to small improvements he was making, his behaviour actually just kept escalating.’
When I ask Sarah to describe some of the things Carl did to her, her tone is matter-of-fact. ‘You know, he did awful stuff to me. He raped me twice while I was in labour, and ripped my episiotomy stitches because he wouldn’t wait for me to heal after the birth. After Alice was born, he would ejaculate in my face in the middle of the night while I was asleep, and I would wake up choking on his cum. I was still breastfeeding Alice, so I would just quietly go and wash the semen off myself, out of my hair and nose, before the next feed. It was too dangerous to protest because there was always a baseball bat beside the bed.’ As is common in coercive control, Carl’s violence was just part of his broader campaign to dominate Sarah. ‘He’d tip expressed breastmilk down the drain and control how much I was “allowed” to give her. He threatened to “crush the dog’s skull”. He cut off Alice’s private health insurance, and while I was at Alice’s bedside in hospital, he engaged a sex worker to come to our house, then demanded that I change the bedsheets as my first priority when I got home.’
Despite all this, Sarah was still determined: she was going to do everything she could to return Carl to the man she had known before she was pregnant. Like a psych nurse with a patient, she managed his routine to ensure he encountered minimal stress and had all the help he needed. ‘He went to the gym every day, he had all his meals cooked for him,’ she says. ‘I thought if I did all of the parenting, if I encouraged him to see a psychologist, that things would get better.’ But no matter what Sarah did, Carl’s abuse just got worse.
One night, the ABC’s Q&A broadcast a special program on domestic violence, and Carl exploded. ‘He watched that episode and got very angry, storming around the house, swearing and insisting that the women that had died that year all deserved to be killed, and that the men in their lives were the real victims.’ The next day, Sarah went to the police for advice, and called Carl’s psychologist – a specialist in domestic violence – to tell him how Carl had reacted. ‘He basically said that he thought lots of men would have struggled with that episode, and that Carl’s behaviour wasn’t that abnormal.’
But over the next week, Carl continued to escalate, until one night, when seven-month-old Alice was unusually difficult to settle, Carl lost it at Sarah. When Alice suddenly started crying again, Carl jumped out of bed and ran into the nursery. ‘I heard the baby gate open, and then I heard a thud,’ says Sarah. ‘I looked at the baby monitor next to my bed, and I could see that he had jumped completely into the cot – he was crouched and had his hands around Alice’s torso, and he was shaking her from above his head to the base of her cot very, very rapidly while yelling, “Shut up, shut up, shut up!” I ran into the room and grabbed Alice away from him.’ Carl sheepishly got out of her cot and admitted that he had ‘made a mistake’ before returning to bed. Sarah, petrified that Alice had suffered an intercranial haemorrhage, secretly called Triple Zero. As she would later write in her victim impact statement, the minutes before the ambulance arrived were ‘long, arduous, and terrifyingly slow’. ‘One of my greatest fears was that these would be the last moments that I would spend with Alice before she succumbed to potentially fatal intracranial bleeds. I said a private goodbye to my baby, telling her that everything would be okay and that whatever happened I loved her with all my heart.’ As Sarah held Alice, she steeled herself for another attack from Carl: he would be furious if he discovered she had called an ambulance, and might try to injure or kill them both. This was no idle fear: Sarah knows in her bones that if she hadn’t stopped him shaking Alice, Carl would not have let go until she lost consciousness.
By the time Carl attacked Alice, Sarah had endured his abuse for sixteen months. While Sarah was giving a statement to the police, Alice was being examined in the hospital, undergoing procedures that left her with temporarily impaired sight. ‘Alice was left alone in a hospital cot, in a loud room, unable to see. When I realised and found her, she was crying hysterically and very difficult to console. She was desperately rubbing her eyes and trying to feel my face with her hands. It took some time for her to recover from this, and she stopped crawling for a period.’ After twenty-four hours of heart-stopping uncertainty, Alice was found to have no intracranial injuries. ‘In that moment, the sky was brighter and I felt a rare surety of an omniscient, omnipotent, benevolent god.’
For his assault on Alice, Carl was charged with several
offences, including conduct endangering life, serious injury and unlawful assault. The sentence he received was typically mild. ‘He was offered a diversion program** … and all he had to do was be of good behaviour for nine months and complete a men’s behaviour change program. He broke the good behaviour part within months, and he got expelled from his first behaviour change program.’ After breaking the conditions of the diversion program, Carl pleaded guilty to the charges and was found guilty without conviction. He received a $350 fine.
Now out of the relationship, Sarah continues to suffer ongoing abuse from Carl, only now it is utterly unpredictable. ‘When I lived with him, I knew what level of risk he posed to me. Or I had at least more ability to predict it, because I could see him and make a risk assessment. Now I don’t know.’ Sarah lives in constant fear of what Carl might do. He’s been considered such a threat to her and Alice, they had to be moved into crisis accommodation five times in just twelve months. Today, they live in a location Sarah keeps secret. Even still, police have told Sarah she should presume Carl knows where they live.
When she isn’t working, Sarah spends almost all her time and money managing Carl’s ongoing abuse. ‘These days my entire life is keeping my daughter safe. When I leave Alice at daycare, there is a safety plan in place that the centre has discussed with police. I’ve also got five concurrent court cases running, and every day there is a new legal letter or something that has to be sent, or a new affidavit.’ The ongoing abuse from Carl has left Sarah – formerly a successful doctor – living in virtual poverty. ‘I have a list of all the places in my suburb that give out grocery vouchers or free food, and over the month I go around to each one of them in turn. That’s how I save for legal fees. I don’t qualify for Legal Aid, because I still work. I would actually be much better off exclusively on welfare.’
Despite this extraordinary situation, Sarah still gives Carl access to Alice once a week, supervised by her parents in a public place. As she did during their relationship, she manages every detail of their interaction to make sure her daughter is as safe as possible. ‘I stay outside, and I monitor the one exit. It’s only an hour, she’s got a clean nappy, she’s fed, slept – everything is positioned so that there will not be a problem.’ From the supervised access visits, Carl is able to present himself as the perfect parent. ‘For Alice’s birthday, Carl brought a cake, a tablecloth, lots of presents and all the trappings of a party to the access visit. Carl changed Alice’s clothes a couple of times, so it looked like he had seen her on more than one occasion, and he took lots and lots of photos. It’s all about maintaining the facade of being an excellent parent to Alice for the outside world.’
Sarah is trapped in this dangerous situation because if Carl were to apply for legal custody, things could get even worse. ‘I have been advised that if he does a short parenting course and a period of professionally supervised access visits he’ll likely be granted unsupervised access to Alice by the Family Court.’ Carl presents well; he is charming and looks like a doting father to Alice in public, but in private, she knows he could snap at any moment.
Faced with the threat of having to leave Alice alone with Carl, Sarah has seriously considered going back to the relationship, because she feels it’s the only way she can reliably protect her daughter. ‘He would need to get through me to get to her. If he gets unsupervised access, and there’s just nothing …’ She trails off, as though the end of that sentence is too horrible to utter. ‘I am seriously concerned that Alice will be killed if she is left alone with Carl. I know that he is capable of life-threatening violence towards Alice – I’ve seen and felt his impulsive aggression firsthand. It may not happen the first time, but there would be a trigger – she’d cry, she’d impose her will against his, something would happen and he’d lose it. My fear is that she could be thrown off the Westgate [Bridge] like Darcy Freeman,’ she says. ‘No parent should be asked to hand their child over to someone who almost killed them.’ Sarah is even more vigilant now because she feels the true danger Carl posed to Alice was a blind spot for her. ‘I did not ever predict during the relationship that he would attack her … I knew that I was going to be the victim of his horrendousness, but I never thought it would be her.’
Despite all of this, Sarah is remarkably upbeat. ‘Look, I’m really grateful to him for some extent that I have Alice. I don’t spend a lot of time being angry towards him or hating him, because there’s just not a lot of point. I’m a really good mum, and I love being a mum. That’s basically the only thing that matters to me anymore … So in lots of ways I’m incredibly lucky, but my life is now all about surviving. There’s no end in sight to this. And there’s a significant concern that it can only get worse.’
Sarah wants people to understand how difficult it was for her to leave. ‘I would never have left unless Carl had assaulted Alice,’ she insists. ‘And he was assaulting me sexually almost every day. I used to leave work and I would be scared to go home … I couldn’t even put a finger on what I was scared of some days. In the months before leaving Carl, Alice and I were assessed by [family violence helpline] Safe Steps as “in need of immediate protection” and [national family violence hotline] 1800RESPECT told me to leave, but still, [leaving] would have felt like giving up, and I don’t give up. No matter what he did to me, I was fighting for my family. I’m very stubborn. I thought, I can do this, I can put up with this. Because I was expendable.’
For now, Sarah remains on edge, and the car is always packed with an emergency bag. ‘We live in the moment, without an obvious future, but with a plan to stay as safe as we can. It is empowering for me to know that I have managed for as long as I have. The person who gets me by is ever-present; she is at my side, hugging my legs or sitting on my shoulders. She is the most beautiful soul I have ever known. She loves pink, painting with her fingers, play-dough pretend cookies, dinosaurs, Thomas the Tank Engine and Peter Rabbit. I live in fear every day that her future will be taken away from her by her own father. I cannot imagine my life without her.’
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The underground does not discriminate – but for some women, it is deeper and harder to escape. In this deep underground, women are not only oppressed by their abusers, but also by the compounding oppressions of racism, poverty, stigma, transphobia, insecure residency and disability.
Advocates in the domestic violence sector have fought long and hard to make people understand that domestic abuse can happen not just to poor women, but to anyone. In shifting this view – which they started to do back in the 1970s – they’ve had stunning success. The image of a ‘typical’ victim is now a middle-class white woman. She is someone policymakers are urged to imagine as their friend, sister or daughter; someone they might be willing to spend money on to protect.## But since creating this ‘respectable’ victim, it’s become almost taboo to suggest that domestic abuse does not affect all women equally. As Professor Leigh Goodmark writes, ‘the movement’s “every woman could be a victim” rhetoric [has] pushed the concerns of marginalised women further to the sidelines of debates about how to address domestic violence’.35
Yasmin Khan knows the deepest sections of the underground like the back of her hand. As the director of Eidfest Community Services, Khan is a lifeline for women from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds living in Queensland. When we speak, she’s in the middle of a frantic mission to get a residential visa for ‘Vivian’, a Fijian woman who is being coercively controlled by ‘Neil’, her older Australian husband.
Everything was going well, says Khan, until one of the residency tribunal members questioned the validity of the relationship. Khan was incensed. ‘I said, “Do you mean to say that after arriving here in 2015 and living in the same bloody house, there’s not a relationship? There’s a child that’s come out of it – how can you deny that there’s a relationship?”’ But the tribunal wasn’t satisfied. ‘And what was really disappointing,’ says Khan, ‘was that this woman – privileged, well-paid, blonde-haired, blue-eye
d – turned to this applicant, a covered Muslim woman, and said, “Why did you think this relationship would last if he’s of a different religion and culture to you?”’ Khan was having none of it. ‘Did she ever say that to the white fella? Like: why are you going overseas as an old man to get a forty-year-old Fijian woman? Just to look after you in your old age?’ Apparently no such questions were posed to Neil, because when Vivian got home, Neil said, ‘That woman was really nice to me on the phone. I’m going to tell her to cancel your visa and your passport.’
Neil – a sixty-something white Australian who’s lived on worker’s compensation since injuring his back – has kept Vivian a virtual prisoner for four years. He didn’t let her leave the house and gave her no access to money – when she needed pads or underwear, she had to ask him to buy them. After Neil assaulted her, Vivian made the incredibly brave move of calling the police; then Yasmin was called, because she’s the woman people ring to handle cases like this.
Getting residency for Vivian will be an uphill battle: Neil burned and deleted any photographs of them together, and destroyed every bit of paperwork she will need to verify her claim. ‘He’s Australian – he knows the system, and how to exploit it,’ says Khan. Doctors have assessed their young child as likely having a serious medical condition, but Vivian has no record of that assessment, because Neil tore it up. Now Khan has to persuade the hospital to provide her with the records, and she’ll have to lean on her connections at the Australian Federal Police to get proof of the three trips Vivian and Neil made overseas. Going home is unthinkable now for Vivian: ‘The child is an Australian citizen. He’s never going to get the medical attention he needs back in Fiji. They have to stay in Australia.’