by Jess Hill
#No evidence was tendered to support this view.
†Interim orders are usually made in urgent cases and are valid until other orders or final orders are made.
§There was no reason for Erin to expect this hearing – there had been another interim hearing just a month earlier, and given the long delays in the family courts, parents usually have to wait several months between hearings.
‡Independent Children’s Lawyers are appointed by the court to represent the ‘best interests’ of the children, especially in complex cases featuring allegations of abuse. ICLs do not represent the child, per se; they are put in place to provide an independent perspective on what kind of arrangements will serve the child’s best interests. The role of ICLs in custody disputes – especially those involving family violence – is controversial: a 2013 federal government report found that most young children surveyed ‘conveyed feelings of disappointment and even betrayal in relation to their experiences with the ICL’.
**Carly’s letter had not yet arrived.
##Mandatory reporters are professionals who are obliged to report suspected cases of child abuse and neglect to government authorities.
††Since the PSS is an incident-based survey, we don’t know if the violence was one-off or ongoing.
§§This shocking statistic was cited by the South Australian Minister for Child Protection, Rachel Sanderson, in March 2019, when she announced a new system of intensive support services to disrupt patterns of child abuse and neglect. She went on to say: ‘This problem is not unique to South Australia – it is very similar in other states and countries – but we have an obligation to respond in a way that disrupts the intergenerational transmission of trauma and mistreatment.’
‡‡That’s not to say that the impact of experiencing domestic abuse as an infant is necessarily a life sentence. The science of brain plasticity shows that we’re not irreparably hardwired by trauma, but for many, healing their trauma-affected system will take years of intense work and counselling.
***This risk factor is the reason why many domestic violence shelters do not accommodate boys over the age of thirteen.
###If a psychiatric condition isn’t in the DSM, it basically doesn’t exist. In his book Shrinks, Jeffrey A. Lieberman, former president of the American Psychiatric Association, describes the DSM as having ‘unparalleled medical influence over society’: in America, only DSM-listed conditions are covered by government rebates and private health insurance, in turn guiding which academic research grant gets funded and which drugs get developed and released.
†††Complex trauma is not, however, a life sentence. Its impacts on the self can be resolved with effective treatments.
§§§In 2018, complex PTSD was, however, officially recognised by the World Health Organization in its International Classification of Diseases, 11th revision (ICD-11).
7
WHEN WOMEN USE VIOLENCE
Once she got me to a place where she could see that I wouldn’t talk back or question her … this was when the physical stuff started. Just a slap or shove to start with, and then that slowly increased to full-blown and terribly violent and repeated beatings, often in front of the children, and often with leather straps, fists, knees, kicking, kitchen utensils. She would tell the children, ‘This is what happens when you don’t do as you are told or if you upset Mummy’ … She forbade contact with family and friends … I was allowed no money … I felt trapped and alone, frightened and very intimidated. I felt it was important to stay there to protect my children. The hardest part of all this was – and still is – that no-one believes or accepts that domestic violence against men exists.
SURVIVOR, QUEENSLAND1
On the first floor of Southport Magistrate’s Court, there is barely a spare chair. It’s quiet, save for the whispering of those leaving the two courtrooms, shaking, steady, exhausted, relieved, crying. Against the back wall sits one work-bronzed man, his t-shirt bearing fierce animals long-faded, with his head craned back, mouth open wide, lightly snoring. Beside him, an impeccably dressed woman waits patiently in a tight blue business dress, Gold Coast bling and strappy suede heels. Here at Queensland’s only specialist domestic violence court, people wait hours before being called. Occasionally, the torpor is broken by the voice of a clerk over the loudspeaker; dozens of glazed eyes focus, register an unfamiliar name, and glaze over again. Knee to knee, the seated stare at the floor or their phones, waiting to be called in for a protection order hearing, a criminal trial or a breach. Behind two closed doors, in a ‘safe room’ secured from the public and staffed by support workers, women wracked with fear and anxiety also wait. For them, boredom would be sweet relief.
But not all the women here are applying for protection. In Court Four, a woman who looks about forty-something with lank blonde hair and desperate eyes leans into her lawyer’s ear, giving incessant instructions and weeping. As the magistrate reads aloud the details of her case, the woman shakes her head, pleads with her lawyer. She is accused of verbal abuse, and of threatening physical harm and suicide. At the other end of the bench sits an older man with grey, stringy remnants of long, curly hair, his eyes resigned and exhausted. He’s seeking protection from this woman, his daughter. He wants her evicted from his apartment, and her care transferred to the state.
She is almost inconsolable. ‘I yell more than I hit, because I’m stressed,’ she insists, crying. ‘I’m not violent – I’ve got cerebral palsy on one side!’ It may be a frontal lobe brain injury that makes her like this, the court hears; that may also explain her three distinct personalities and itinerant lifestyle. Her father wants her to get help; he can no longer manage. He’s cared for her since she was fourteen, after a childhood spent in a string of foster homes. ‘He promised he’d always look after me!’ she wails.
The magistrate, a no-nonsense woman with a stern demeanour, listens patiently to the woman’s outbursts, then issues a protection order. She’ll have a short grace period to collect money and essentials, then she will be forbidden to come within 100 metres of her father’s home. The magistrate sets out provisions for crisis accommodation, to keep her off the street – for now, at least. The final condition of the protection order is explicit: the respondent must not commit domestic violence. If she breaches this order, she can end up in jail.
With that, the crying, quivering young woman joins a significant minority: women who’ve had protection orders issued against them. Here on the Gold Coast, that’s no small club. Almost a quarter of protection orders granted by Southport Court in the first half of 2016 were made against women.2
When I first saw this statistic, I was astounded. Southport isn’t just any old court: it’s a specialist domestic and family violence court. If there’s anywhere magistrates would understand domestic violence and deal with it fairly, it would be here. So why, if domestic violence is perpetrated mostly by men, are so many women getting protection orders issued against them? That’s what I was in Queensland to find out.
I also went to run an experiment. On the subject of women’s violence, I was determined to build my conclusions from the ground up. What if the gender narrative on domestic violence was narrow and out of date? It was possible, I thought, that women really had become more violent towards their male partners in recent years. Most of all, I wanted to interrogate an uncomfortable question: could it be true, as men’s rights groups insist, that women’s violence is minimised and ignored because it doesn’t fit the gender inequality narrative?
*
‘Patrick’ arrived at my front door with a ziplocked bag of farm-bought cherries and a bottle of port. In large wire-rimmed glasses and a checked flannelette shirt, he looked like someone who found the city to be a fast and foreign place. He was visibly nervous. Patrick had agreed to this interview on one condition: that his family not be identified, for the protection of both his ex-wife and their three children. His twenty-five-year marriage had ended with him being forced into early retirement, too damaged by his w
ife’s abuse to keep working. Recently he had been diagnosed with PTSD.
The first act of physical abuse Patrick could remember from his wife was when he walked in on her violently shaking their infant son, who would not stop crying. Weeks later, she advanced on Patrick with a knife in the kitchen. ‘This is really dumb,’ he says, ‘but when she put it away, I just carried on like nothing had happened.’ While Patrick doesn’t remember fearing for his own safety, he was afraid for his children. That’s why he stayed. ‘It was my greatest vulnerability,’ he says, ‘and my wife exploited it to the full. “Do this or I will take the children and go” – this mantra was repeated several times a day, reinforced by draft letters from solicitors setting out her demands.’ Her temper was as volcanic as it was unpredictable. Sometimes she would seethe in silence for hours on end. Other times she would hurl objects; once, when a vase smashed above his shoulder, glass shards cascaded onto their youngest daughter, who was sitting at his feet. ‘That was the worst,’ Patrick recalls. When he turned up to work one day with a black eye, his boss asked, ‘Did you forget to duck?’
Patrick says he was not ‘entirely blameless’. On two occasions, he struck his wife: once when he momentarily grabbed her by the throat, and a second time when he struck her almost by accident, during what he now recognises was his first major panic attack. As Patrick recalled this history of violence, I watched him oscillate between downplaying the effect of her abuse and going quiet and remote, as if the true extent of his ordeal was something he was still coming to terms with. It was as though, in the telling of it, the magnitude of his experience was becoming all the more real.
In chronic abuse, incidents are just fragments: they rarely give precise shape to the whole. It’s the atmosphere victims live in that keeps them in a state of high alert. Over time this climate of constant abuse and threat can end up shredding the nervous system. ‘The circumstances were always changing,’ says Patrick, ‘and I was always trying to adapt. I found it harder and harder to keep up.’ Towards the end of the marriage, Patrick was so exhausted he had to find places to nap at work. ‘After I’d finish a class, I couldn’t walk all the way back to the staffroom. I’d go halfway, to the common room, and I’d literally go to sleep on some chairs.’ He began to take his frustration out on his students, which ended up being a factor that led to his early retirement. ‘If a kid did the wrong thing in the classroom, I’d go off,’ he says. ‘To do that with Year 12 kids is just crazy.’
Patrick didn’t make a formal report to police – not because he didn’t think he’d be believed, but because he worried about the consequences for his wife. (When he finally did discuss the abuse with police, he received a ‘sympathetic hearing’.) When he looks back on the relationship now, Patrick can see why he stayed. ‘Fear became the dominant emotion, and the desire to protect. I would do anything to attempt to protect my children and even my wife. I hesitated to go to the police because of the impact it would have on my wife and her career.’
Most of what we know about male victims of domestic violence comes via anecdotal reports from men like Patrick. There is little credible research on female perpetrators. This is not a feminist conspiracy; it’s a matter of priority. Male victims of women’s violence rarely flee the relationship fearing for their lives, and they are almost never killed. However, we do have a few excellent studies on female perpetration that portray a vivid picture of how abuse is experienced by male victims, such as ‘Karl’:
I remember one night when she got really out of control. I had accidentally left the toilet seat up before going to bed. Well, when she went in to use the bathroom, she fell into the toilet. She started yelling and screaming and stomping around the apartment. Then she came into the bedroom. I was pretending to be asleep, but I could see her shadow. She had something in her hands, raised above her head. I figured it was a wooden spoon or a rolling pin or something like that because she had hit me with those before. So I waited until she came around to my side of the bed, then rolled over to the other side. When I turned back over, I saw that she had stuck two of the biggest steak knives into the bed up to the handles exactly where I had been lying. I grabbed my pants, ran out of the apartment and jumped into the car. She followed me, screaming, and jumped on the hood. I reversed the car and she fell off. Then I drove away. Later, when I called her, I told her, ‘If I have to live like this, I don’t want to live.’3
In this same study, ‘Ben’ said he became so convinced he deserved his wife’s abuse that he gave her permission to do it. ‘She would say, “I am so pissed off that I want you to let me be violent to you.” I would get down on my knees so she could slap me or hit me in the head. And she would do whatever. She would pull hair. She would pinch me hard until I bruised. She would kick me in the balls … Scratching. Hitting. Slapping in the face.’4 Six out of the twelve men in this study reported hitting their wives back in self-defence, usually with one slap or a punch. But this raised a new fear: that their wife would call the police on them.
While we can see some elements of coercive control in the accounts of male victims, there is typically one element missing: fear. This is the lynchpin of coercive control – it is what robs the victim of their sense of self. An abusive woman may bring a kind of fear to a male victim: one that may centre on what she might do to the children, for example. But rarely does this fear become the kind of deep, existential terror that engulfs female victims of coercive control.
Still, while it is extremely rare for men to be subject to coercive control, it’s certainly not unheard of. The diary extracts of a white, middle-aged professional known as ‘NH’, featured in a study by British sociology professor Jacquelyn Allen Collinson,5 portray the chilling, unmistakable hallmarks of coercive control. Written over two years in the life of his twenty-year marriage, NH ‘initially composed the entries in the third person, finding it too emotionally charged and embarrassing to write in the first’. One reads:
He closes the bedroom door slightly in order to get undressed. His wife interprets this as slamming the door in her face … She delivers a full force blow to his face … His vision becomes blurred. He pleads to her to stop. She hits him again. He goes down to the kitchen, hoping that she will calm down. She is there immediately. She pushes him into a corner and takes a kitchen knife with an 8” blade from the block. She is now holding this over-arm, above him, threatening to stick it in him.
The abuse from NH’s wife is not just physically violent, but degrading:
He finishes work by 11:30. Phew. Rings three times from the office and twice from the mobile to see if he can bring anything home in preparation for Christmas. She tells him off for having been at work. He brings home the turkey but gets into trouble because there is not the right stuffing at the butcher’s. Once home, she tells him to ‘get out of the house’ until 17:30, when her parents are coming round. How does this fit with him never doing anything to help? He sits in the car on the common for three hours, getting more cold and more tired. What a way to spend Christmas Eve, he thinks.
She is also seen to ‘induce debility and exhaustion’:
She will often come into his bedroom after he has gone to bed (sometimes after he has gone to sleep) for ‘a chat’. This is often acrimonious and intrusive and sometimes lasts until 2:00 in the morning.
The abuse NH suffers renders him traumatised and exhausted:
She picks herself up and fists him in the face … He goes upstairs to get out of the way. She follows, scratches, pokes, thumps and what he hates most now, puts both of her hands inside his mouth and pulls it open further than it will naturally go. By midnight he has a blood blister on the inside of his upper lip, a black eye and scratches to his face. By 3:00am she wakes him to complain of her ‘blindness’ as a result of hitting her head on the sofa. She is violent with him again and he goes to sleep on the floor in the next room in only his dressing gown … He hears the 5:00 news on the radio before he falls asleep. She wakes him again at 7:15. He has had five hours sleep,
his face is stinging and he has to go and face an audience of 1,000. He cries on his way to work. He hates his life.
Why did NH – ‘a physically fit, well-built and muscular man’ – not retaliate or defend himself? Collinson suggests a range of reasons: for a start, his father had raised him to abhor physical violence, especially the most ‘deplorable’ kind – violence against women. NH also knew that if he showed anger, his wife would only attack him harder, or worse – accuse him of being the violent one. This was a claim she made frequently:
He holds his arms up against his chest to defend himself. She loses her balance and falls back, hitting her head on the sofa. She accuses him of hitting her. This is significant as he is now [deemed to be] the violent party in the relationship. He has been waiting for this moment – that she will injure herself as a result of him defending himself and then he will become the guilty one … Throughout the rest of the evening, she is saying that he is the violent one in the relationship or at best he is as violent as her.
NH stayed with his coercive controller for twenty years. Why? For a reason common to male and female victims – he was afraid his abuser would harm their children.
There are many factors that differentiate the experiences of male and female victims: male victims generally have the financial resources to leave, and they are not usually afraid of being killed. But, just like women, they will hide the abuse from themselves with a set of similar rationalisations: they believe they can ‘fix’ her, for example, and will excuse her behaviour as the result of substance abuse or mental illness. Just as it is for women, the process of recognising that they are a victim of domestic abuse can be achingly slow and personally devastating.