by Jess Hill
Khan has been helping Muslim women like Vivian and others, primarily from the Indian sub-continent, escape domestic abuse for the past five years. This is not a small community: over 600,000 people living in Australia today were born in the countries of the Indian subcontinent.36 No data is available on the rates of abuse these women suffer in Australia, but we know it’s a serious problem: in 2017, the head of 1800RESPECT told SBS Punjabi they received the second-highest volume of calls from women with Indian backgrounds (after women born in Australia).37
Five years ago, Khan and her organisation moved into a Brisbane City Council community hall to offer domestic abuse support services. The organisation is run entirely by volunteers, including herself, and funded by piecemeal donations. A church group pays $150 a month to use the hall every Sunday, which keeps the electricity and the phones on. Everything else, they pay for themselves.
Khan talks a mile a minute and has a finely tuned radar for bullshit. On her dad’s side, she comes from four generations of Australian cane farmers; on her mum’s side, she has a direct lineage back to Pakistan. She knows the system here back to front, but also has a deep understanding of the cultural issues confronting the women she helps. ‘Many of [the perpetrators] don’t use much physical violence,’ she says. ‘The women might get a cup of hot tea thrown on them, but they’re not getting a smack in the mouth. A lot of it is threatening behaviour and restricting them from socialising.’ These women may earn their own money – ‘they’ve all done beautician courses, so they’re doing a bit of eyebrow threading at home’ – but it all goes to him. The standard script for husbands is a porn addiction and a girlfriend on the side.
Religious abuse is common too: ‘It could be “you can’t wear the hijab” or “you have to wear the hijab”.’ And then there’s the issue of getting a ‘religious divorce’ – a separate process to a civil divorce that has to be approved by an imam or a religious body. ‘She has to go and ask an Imam who she has no connection with, and who probably has a connection with her husband, and she has to explain everything. Imams have no idea. They’re more voyeurs than anything: “Oh, tell us all the details. Did he do this to you, and how many times did he do that to you?” And then they’ll say, “Well, we have to ring him now and hear his side of the story.” Actually,’ says Khan, ‘you don’t need to listen to his side of the story, especially if there has been ongoing abuse and neglect. Islam is quite simple. God says in the Qu’ran, if two people don’t get on, then part amicably and equitably.’
But it’s not just husbands abusing these women: it might also be someone in his family, whom she and her husband are usually living with. In Indian communities, dowry abuse is considered such a big problem it warranted its own Senate inquiry in 2018. This is a particularly chilling type of family-perpetrated violence, in which the groom’s family demands additional payments after the initial dowry. Often, the new wife is essentially held for ransom: payments have to be made to stop the husband from beating her.38 In Australia, dowry abuse has been connected to a series of suicides and murders. The Senate inquiry recommended that dowry abuse be designated as a form of domestic violence (under the broader category of ‘economic abuse’), and that Australia’s migration program be changed to protect women on temporary visas, with a new class of visa created specifically for women at risk.
These are the delicate and complex issues Khan deals with every day, using her clout and connections to help women navigate a Byzantine system. ‘I’m in a position of privilege. I use it sparingly, but for the ones who are genuine, I make sure that I pull out all stops. Yesterday, I had a long talk with the state manager of immigration and I said, “These are a couple of cases that have fallen through the cracks.” Now we’re working through some of them. I’m not a psychologist, and I’m not there to counsel. But I’ve got networks and support mechanisms available to help women work their way through the system.’
*
Living deep underground are another group of women we don’t like to talk about: those in serious disadvantage, many of whom have lived their entire lives surrounded by violence, neglect and abuse. While the domestic violence sector rejects the idea that violence is born of poverty, studies do indicate that women living in poverty are disproportionately affected. The British Crime Survey – a nationwide computerised survey that has provided ‘the most reliable findings to date’ on interpersonal violence in England and Wales†† – found that women in poor households were more than three times as likely to be living with domestic violence.39 The British researchers who analysed these results resurrected explanations that have long been rejected by feminists: ‘namely, the possibility that … where perpetrators are frustrated by an inability to establish power in an employment context, or where tensions and frustrations around a lack of money are already present, [that] may increase the propensity for some men to use violence.’40
For the women these men target, it can be very hard to find a place of safety, or to even imagine that such a place exists. Goorie (Aboriginal) author Melissa Lucashenko demonstrated this in her searing essay on women living in Brisbane’s ‘Black Belt’ of Logan City, which is home to more than 150 ethnic groups.41 Poverty for the three women she interviewed had been entrenched in large part by ‘the violence and mental illness of parents and partners … All three – either openly stated or by strong implication – [had] been molested in childhood and/or raped at least once.’
Selma – ‘twenty-seven years old, dark-haired, doe-eyed and slender’ – had four children under ten. The man she still called her partner (the children’s Indigenous father) had done several stints in jail and was now in rehab for his addiction to amphetamines. Selma’s family were refugees from the war in Yugoslavia, and she grew up around severe domestic violence. She was ‘deeply humiliated at finding herself a victim’ as an adult, and isolated herself to prevent her family finding out, and to protect her mentally ill brother from intervening and getting himself hurt. One day, heavily pregnant, she went to see her mum, forgetting ‘he’d flogged me with a stick of bunya pine the day before. I had big black welts across the back of my legs and two black eyes. I was at least eight months pregnant – I protected the belly – and I’d forgotten the bruises were there. It was like, that was yesterday and this is today. And I remember the look on my mum’s face. I felt huge shame, like I was piss-weak. Because I always felt like I had nobody and was nobody since I came here [to Australia].’ Like many women who have fought to survive poverty, alienation, addiction and abuse, Selma drew power and strength from her experience of being a mother. ‘In the end I just had no more fear, because what else could he do to me that he hadn’t already done?’ she told Lucashenko. ‘He was chasing me with an axe this day … And then I just had enough. I said to him, “Just do it cunt, ya dead dog. If ya gonna be a big man, just do it and put me outta my misery.”’ It shocked Selma’s partner enough to stop him in his tracks that day, but not enough to stop him beating her.
Despite the crushing pressures of poverty, violence and raising young children, Selma overcame an addiction to marijuana and enrolled in TAFE. She kept resisting her husband’s violence and protecting her boys as best she could until, one day, the school reported that her eldest, at seven years old, had said he wished he was dead. For the next three days, Selma rushed frantically to finish her assignments, then ‘jumped in the car and fucked off with nothing. No money, car on its last legs, no house, nothing.’ When Lucashenko spoke to her, Selma was living in poverty with her kids. She regularly went hungry, and often survived on bread and butter for dinner: ‘terrified of having her Aboriginal children removed by authorities, she [fed] the four growing boys chicken and rice’. ‘I don’t think people realise how hard it is, not being able to provide,’ she said. ‘If I have to put my phone into hock so the kids can go on excursions, then I will. Nobody rings you anyway, there’s no petrol to go anywhere and no money to do anything, so you just sit home.’ Still, Selma had hope. When Lucashenko asked her if she
had any dreams for the future, Selma surprised her by quoting Martin Luther King Jr: ‘If you can’t fly, run. If you can’t run, walk. If you can’t walk, crawl.’ She wanted her boys to complete high school, and she wanted to go to university and then work in the domestic violence sector so she could help other women.
For those like Selma, the lived experience is clear: violence is directly compounded by poverty. ‘Poverty breeds hate to the other side; it breeds hate in your own little life. You are “free” but you’re not really free. You have no options.’
*
Even the wealthiest victim of domestic abuse, however, may not have access to money. Abusers commonly control bank accounts, and often women flee their homes with little but the change in their pocket. Many middle-class women, like Sarah, spend so much on the process of leaving that they are left practically destitute. On average, leaving a violent relationship is estimated to take around 141 hours, and cost around $18,000.42 If the abuser wants to keep controlling her through the legal system, that amount can blow out into the tens of thousands. If there’s children involved, the costs can be astronomical: family law cases easily run into the tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars, and even if you ‘win’, you still have to pay your own costs.
In a recent survey of domestic abuse victims in Victoria, fear of destitution was the leading reason women were afraid to leave their abuser,43 polling well ahead of fear of physical violence. This comment from Sophie, a mother of two girls, was typical: ‘I ended up leaving the relationship scared witless in terms of the financial abuse with a one and a two-year-old [and] with $1.57 in my bank account. A friend had to put $150 in my bank account … I think the week before I left I had $15 and he cancelled the credit card.’44
The vast majority of domestic abuse victims – between 80 and 90 per cent45 – have experienced financial abuse: an often vicious type of control and exploitation that leaves many impoverished. ‘Erin’, who had two children to her abusive husband ‘John’, worked so hard juggling childcare and full-time work that she almost had a nervous breakdown, and ended up in hospital. Determined to give John the freedom to build his business, Erin paid for everything – the mortgage, the groceries; every expense came out of her wage. But after witnessing one person suicide and a second person attempt to at work, Erin needed to take leave, which meant the family had to struggle on John’s apparently meagre income. Erin had to beg John for money, even for essentials: she had to write shopping lists for him to approve, and when she developed an abscess in her tooth he refused to pay for the dentist, forcing her to go to her parents for money. When Erin finally worked out how to leave John safely, he refused to pay child support. When Erin went to formally challenge this, she was astonished by what she found. The entire time she had been working herself into the ground, John had been earning $250,000 a year from his business. He was still on that income when he was making her write shopping lists, denying her money for the dentist and forcing her to beg for petrol money.
Women encountering financial abuse describe three kinds of abuser: controllers, exploiters and schemers. Controllers and exploiters – the two most common types – ‘use financial abuse as one of a range of behaviours to control their partner and get their needs met within the relationship’. Schemers, on the other hand, don’t enter a relationship for love: they focus purely on stripping the woman of her money and assets. When they’re done, they leave. Emma, a 38-year-old hairdresser, spent seven years with a schemer and lost all her savings and her hairdressing business as a result. ‘I was completely financially secure and living the life I had always wanted to … until about seven years ago I met a guy and began a relationship … it got to the point where if I asked about his situation he would just blow up. In that time he was siphoning money; he gambled … he just dismantled me in every way … I ended up with nothing but financial debt. I lost my home, my business, most of my friends.’
The instinct most of us have to avoid conflict is the cover financial abusers need to hide what they’re doing. In many cases, women just stop talking about money, for fear it will end up in a fight, or worse. ‘Jennifer’, a forty-year-old police investigator, explains: ‘A lot of the time I wouldn’t end up having the conversation about finances because to me, he was a volcano ready to erupt and God knows what he’d get up to.’
The damage wrought by financial abuse can profoundly alter the course of a life. ‘Susan’, a 53-year-old with four children, was told by her partner in no uncertain terms that in return for her leaving him he intended to ‘destroy’ her through the legal system. ‘He has got all the assets and he is saying to friends that he is not going to stop,’ she says. ‘He has said … that he is going to use everything in the court system to destroy me financially because I cannot afford the legal fees. I have paid $65,000 so far.’
Despite hoary old gender stereotypes about men being ‘naturally’ better with money, women in these relationships are not only able to manage a household on an abusively rationed budget, they are often incredibly resourceful money managers once they leave – even in the face of torturous and costly legal abuse from their partners.
*
No matter how clearly we depict what domestic abuse is like for women living underground, most people will resist understanding it. This resistance is deep and instinctive: we don’t want to know that the same forces that so blissfully draw us together can also become our single greatest threat. We need to believe in love, and we need to believe that any threat to our wellbeing would come from someone unknown to us. We persist with the question ‘Why doesn’t she just leave?’ because it’s easier to separate ‘us’ from ‘them’ if we can frame ‘them’ as illogical. It is too frightening to believe that this could happen to any of us.
As we’ve seen, however, it’s not so hard to understand the behaviour of victims. In the years I’ve spent writing this book, I’ve found that it’s the questions we don’t ask that are the most confounding: Why does he stay? Why do these men, who seem to have so much hatred for their partners, not only stay, but do everything they can to stop their partner from leaving? Why do they even do it in the first place? It’s not enough to say that perpetrators abuse because they want power and control. Why do they want that?
These are questions that take us down a much deeper rabbit hole.
*This statistic – the best we have on the rate of domestic abuse – counts women who have experienced at least one act of violence from a current or former partner since the age of fifteen. It doesn’t tell us how many of these women were subject to ongoing abuse.
#Pitiful creatures who were, nonetheless, commonly reprimanded by the courts for ‘provoking’ their husbands.
†Enmark’s savviness in establishing a personal connection with the bank robbers was confirmed after the siege by Olsson, who said that in the early days of the siege he could have ‘easily’ killed the hostages, and that they survived because they’d not only been cooperative, but had gotten to know each other.
§For women who’ve been abused by male partners in the past, the realisation that it’s happening again is sickening – a feeling that there are no good men in the world, and that they are fated to endure the same experience over and over again.
‡As a female health professional, Sarah was part of a group with an astonishingly high prevalence of domestic abuse. A recent study in Victoria found that a staggering 45 per cent of female medical staff had experienced violence from a partner or a family member during their adult lifetime. (Elizabeth McLindon, Cathy Humphreys & Kelsey Hegarty, ‘“It happens to clinicians too”: An Australian prevalence study of intimate partner and family violence against health professionals’, BMC Women’s Health, 2018, 18, p. 113.)
**Diversion programs are typically offered to minor offenders. This literally ‘diverts’ them away from the criminal justice system, on the proviso that they commit to a plan that may include counselling, community service and other requirements. If they comply with the conditions of the
diversion program, they won’t end up with a criminal record.
##This tactic – foregrounding the virtuous oppressed – is common in human rights activism, notably the ‘respectability politics’ of the US civil rights movement.
††In this survey, domestic violence included non-physical abuse and threats, which are common features of coercive control. However, the body responsible for it – the Office for National Statistics – conceded it was still not an accurate measure of coercive control, which was criminalised in the UK in 2015. The ONS has since started trialling ways to measure the prevalence of coercive control more accurately. (ONS, Developing a Measure of Controlling or Coercive Behavior (online), 18 April 2019.)
3
THE ABUSIVE MIND
I lived through hell at the hands of this man. I want people to understand how easy it is to feel trapped. I was immobilised through terror, through hopelessness, through absolute powerlessness. I want people to stop asking ‘Why does she stay?’ and start asking ‘Why does he do that?’
SURVIVOR, QUEENSLAND
There are some things that, once read, we wish we could un-read. Each time I’ve gone to write a graphic account of violence, I have hesitated. I don’t want to disturb readers unnecessarily, and I am painfully aware that many will have experienced horrors of their own. So I don’t write these accounts lightly. But I do write them, because as long as we conceal domestic abuse under umbrella terms like ‘rape’ and ‘assault’ we will never fathom its true, visceral horror. We need to look this phenomenon square in the face. The bare facts of a violent incident – a hit, a slap, a threat, a rape – tell us very little. The real devil of domestic abuse is in the details.