by Jess Hill
The other kind of domestic violence – the kind that dominates the statistics collected by police, hospitals and shelters – is what Johnson calls ‘intimate terrorism’ (more commonly referred to as coercive control). As we saw in Chapter 1, this is the kind of domestic violence that women, exhausted and terrified, described when they started fleeing to the first women’s refuges in the 1970s. Today, when the domestic violence sector says ‘domestic violence’, they are usually not even thinking about situational couple violence. They deal primarily with coercive control: abuse from which women and children need ongoing protection, even long after they have left. Coercive control dominates police and hospital data precisely because it inspires the kind of violence and fear ‘that leads victims to turn to such agencies for help’, writes Johnson. ‘Thus, researchers who work with such agency data see violence that is primarily male in perpetration.’21
As we’ve seen, coercive control is not a product of frustration or poor anger management skills. It is a systematic campaign – either strategic or instinctive – by one person to dominate and control their partner, enforced with the threat of physical and often sexual violence. Intimate terrorists are almost exclusively men, but Johnson acknowledges there are rare exceptions (like NH, whose account we read earlier). ‘I’ve worked with men who are being terrorised by their partners,’ says Johnson, ‘and the pattern looks very much like the pattern that is perpetrated by men against female partners. One man I worked with was married to a police officer, who terrorised him in all the same ways that male intimate terrorists terrorise their female partners. She used her weapons, she beat him, she threatened him. He couldn’t go to the police because the police were all her buddies. He had children, so he couldn’t escape without leaving the children with this intimate terrorist. So he was struggling with all the dilemmas that female victims of intimate terrorism struggle with. But,’ he adds, ‘I want to emphasise that the vast majority of this happens, in hetero relationships, from men to women.’22 This cannot be stressed strongly enough: coercive control is a particular kind of violence that is almost always perpetrated by men against women.
Distinguishing between intimate terrorism (coercive control) and situational violence, something else occurred to Johnson. Few women living with an intimate terrorist would agree to answer a stranger’s detailed list of questions about violence in her relationship. Sure enough, when he checked the number of respondents who refused to answer the National Family Violence Survey, the percentage was high – over 40 per cent. (A similar rate of non-response applied to Australia’s Personal Safety Survey in 2012 – around 43 per cent.) Within that group of non-responders, Johnson concluded, are the vast majority of victims of intimate terrorism.
Johnson had figured out how both research groups could be right and wrong at the same time: ‘[VAW] researchers using agency data cite FBI statistics that men are the violent ones in intimate relationships, while [family conflict researchers] using survey data can show that women are as violent as men. In fact, they are talking about two completely different phenomena – intimate terrorism and situational couple violence – but both are using the same term – domestic violence – to describe what they study.’23 Another researcher, the clinical psychologist Neil Frude, who belongs to neither camp, describes the difference between male and female violence like this: ‘both husbands and wives may be said to be “aggressive”, but many more husbands are “violent”’.24
So, if we can agree that a significant percentage of women are using violence in relationships – and not just in self-defence – why don’t we hear more about this from the domestic violence sector? Because a hit is not a hit, says Di Mangan, who spent many years at the helm of Queensland’s statewide helpline, DVConnect. ‘There is dysfunctionality within families, and there are gradients of that,’ says Mangan. ‘Some of that leads to mutual combat … But there is a big difference between having a row – a slamming row, a slapping row even – where you can walk out of the room and know you’re not going to be king-hit.’ DVConnect answers almost 100,000 calls per year,25 many from women who need immediate protection from men who have seriously threatened or attempted to kill them. Mangan is adamant: women’s violence may cause distress to men in abusive relationships, but men are almost never in danger of being killed. That is the key difference, she says: the sector is overflowing with women who are facing very real threats of homicide, who have been tortured nearly to death, who are living with traumatic brain injury, who have been made homeless as a result of the violence of men.
For advocates like Mangan, domestic violence involves the imposition of a system of power and control held in place by violence or the threat of violence. Anything else is, well, something else.
*
Back at the domestic violence court in Southport, everybody wants to help but nobody wants to talk. The two magistrates politely decline my interview requests. Court support staff – though generous with their time and happy to show me around – can’t speak on the record.
Up the road from the court, lawyers and prosecutors mingle with courtgoers at Verdict Espresso, a classic low-rent cafe that sells hot snacks and fluorescent pastries to weary patrons seated at aluminium tables festooned with pots of tiny fake flowers. Down this street winds a worker-ant trail of suited men and women, taking lattes and cappuccinos back to the dozens of criminal defence offices that surround the court. Every other door on this street is emblazoned with a double-barrelled name and bullet-pointed with legal services that range from family law to traffic infringements. Many are no-frills shopfronts, in which lawyers usher clients into windowless rooms and seat them on pine furniture direct from a factory outlet. This is exactly what I’m looking for: lawyers too busy with quick and dirty cases to have any interest – or investment – in the red-hot gender politics of domestic violence.
In the foyer of one such office, Howden Saggers Lawyers, I meet Dave Garrett, a solemn criminal defence lawyer. Around a third of Garrett’s work is domestic abuse–related, mostly protection order breaches, for which he represents both men and women. ‘Everybody thinks males are the main perpetrators,’ he says, ‘but it’s very balanced.’ Garrett has one female client on his books when we talk – a woman in her sixties who has been violent towards her stepmother. Another client is a one-armed man accused of strangling his female partner. It’s fair to say he has a varied caseload.
Among his female respondents, I ask, does he notice any common characteristics? ‘It’s more of a one-off heated incident,’ he says. Unlike his male clients, the women aren’t likely to be accused of prolonged violence.
Garrett’s experience squares with data from Women’s Legal Service NSW, which shows that the majority (68 per cent) of protection applications taken out against women related to a single incident. Only 6.1 per cent of the women they represented in 2010, for example, were accused of a prolonged pattern of violence. The most common violence alleged was a threat (47.6 per cent), followed by physical violence (39.8 per cent). Physical violence was punching and slapping (66.7 per cent) or scratching and biting (23 per cent each). As the study noted, bites were almost always on the arm or hand – an injury most likely to come from women defending themselves against an attack (particularly a headlock or strangulation).26
Once women are named on protection orders, I ask, what kind of breaches do they generally commit? ‘They would be more of a low-level, technical breach,’ says Garrett, ‘sending emails or text messages that are prohibited by the order. Unfortunately, guys are more likely to breach an order physically.’ This is one of the most significant differences between male and female perpetration: an abusive man who has been left is far more likely to violently stalk his ex-partner than an abusive woman. ‘Most women are engaged in “expressive” violence – tension builds, bang! Shit flies everywhere, they feel better,’ says Mark Walters, the manager of MensLine Australia, a national phone counselling service for men. ‘It’s typically a “push-away” motion. “Piss off, you�
�re a hopeless lover”, all that. It’s all horrible, all hurtful. But the intention is to drive him away.’ The men perpetrating coercive control, on the other hand, are using what Walters calls ‘instrumental’ violence. ‘Instrumental violence means, you get up in the morning and you start to plan ways to stuff the other person up. I’m hiding your keys, messing with your phone, letting your tyre down – anything to stop you getting to work. The message these perpetrators constantly send their victims is, “You’re mine, you can’t get away. If you try to run away, I’ll come and get you.”’
Overwhelmingly, MensLine callers aren’t victims; they’re usually dealing with their own anger or violence. Still, the vast majority – ‘probably 90 per cent’ – of male callers introduce themselves as the victim. ‘By the end of the call,’ says Walters, ‘only 10 per cent [of men] still hold that perspective.’ I ask Walters, of that 10 per cent, how many describe situations of intimate terrorism? ‘That is as rare as hen’s teeth’, he says. ‘You ask them about fear – like, “Did you have to leave your job?” No. “Okay, so what have you had to change to keep yourself safe?” “Oh, well, not a lot.” It’s a different lived experience. I’m not trying to minimise it. But when we ask, “What do you need in terms of protection?” they generally say something like, “I just need her to fucking stop.” There just aren’t the same vulnerabilities.’ The exception to this rule is men with physical and intellectual disabilities, who are at much greater risk. ‘Often, exploitative women will be taking their payouts, or using them as a drug mule, or for housing,’ he says.
Walters commonly sees perpetrators attempting to present themselves as victims. ‘Just the other day in court, there was a guy who had the child, and he was sending her harassing texts through the day. His defence was that, when he opened the door, she had a raised baseball bat, that’s why he punched her in the face and dropped her to the ground. That’s what he was trying to tell the magistrate was reasonable force in response to her. Now we’ve got to look at the pattern over time – he was harassing her, he had her child, he put her into a state of fear. She knew he was SAS-trained and he’d returned from Afghanistan.’ Perpetrators can be particularly adept at using selective evidence to frame their victims. ‘Men will bring to court little video clips, strategic moments, when she’s picked up the knife and she’s swinging it around and looks horrible, dangerous, frightening. But what happened before that, and what happened after? Yes, she picked up a knife – that was the only way she could get you to step back or move out of her space!’ Walters is keen to stress that it’s not as simple as saying all women are princesses and only men are villains. ‘There are challenging, complex, difficult women and there are vulnerable men,’ he says. But in terms of serious harm, ‘Overwhelmingly, women are the victims.’
Gold Coast defence lawyer Kathleen Simpson also specialises in domestic violence. She’s only ever seen one man she would describe as ‘scared’. ‘He was waiting to go into court,’ she says, ‘and he was obviously traumatised. It was to the point where one of the support staff said, “Oh, I wish we had a men’s room for him to go to.” But that’s one case out of a whole history of working in domestic violence.’§
*
The stock image of the ‘true’ victim – a passive, usually white, recipient of an abuser’s blows – is who judges expect to see in their courtrooms. If they are faced with a woman who has fought back, some – especially those with poor comprehension of domestic abuse – can struggle to see her as a ‘victim’.
In the majority of Simpson’s cases, women’s violence is what she labels ‘reactive’, and what Johnson and others call ‘violent resistance’. Violent resisters are almost exclusively women. They retaliate against a violent and dominating partner because they want revenge, they feel the need to stand up for themselves or they hope it will stop the abuse. In the most extreme cases, a victim may feel the only way to escape her abuser, and in some cases the only way to protect her children, is to kill him.
Violent resistance is common27 but rarely spoken about. Debbie Kilroy, a defence lawyer who heads up the prisoner support group Sisters Inside, told ABC Radio that ‘more and more’ women were being criminalised and imprisoned for defending themselves against a violent partner – especially Indigenous women. ‘We are now seeing data released by the ABS which shows that Aboriginal women are becoming more violent,’ said Kilroy. ‘The reality is they’re being charged with violent offences where they’re defending themselves, but that’s not being unpacked.’28
Professor Judy Atkinson sees this pattern time and again in the women’s prison in Alice Springs. Since 2015, she has been running a program with the Kungas (inmates) that aims to break cycles of violence and trauma through telling and reclaiming stories, moving through layers of loss and grief, and learning how to connect positively with others and the world around them. The vast majority of Kungas she works with have suffered lifetimes of violence. When they are attacked and terrorised by the men they love, they do what they have to: defend themselves. Says Atkinson, ‘there’s no sense of trust that the police will take them seriously’. That’s not just a suspicion – it’s borne out by devastating experience. She tells one story of a woman on remand in Alice Springs who was planning to plead guilty to assaulting her partner. Her police records ran to 500 pages. For eleven years she had done everything in her power to get protection from her abuser, calling police repeatedly and taking out multiple intervention orders. Police were angered by the fact she kept going back to this man, and labelled her a ‘nuisance caller’. ‘Not him – he’s not a nuisance offender, she’s a nuisance caller.’ What police couldn’t see was that as long as this man was in the community, she and her two daughters would never be safe – even when she did leave him, on several occasions, he would just follow her wherever she went. Finally, one day she had enough: she picked up a pole and flogged him. ‘She was asked why she did it, and she said, “Because I could. Because he flogged me over and over again … and suddenly I saw that nothing was going to stop him. So I picked up the pole and flogged him.” And I thought,’ says Atkinson, ‘how wonderful!’ After enduring years of physical violence from this man, she was put in jail for eleven months, awaiting trial. The police report for the court described him as being ‘emotionally distressed’ by her.
When women use violent resistance, they become – in the eyes of untrained police and judicial officers – just as guilty as their abusers. Such was the case for ‘Olivia’. After she violently resisted an attack from her partner, ‘John’, she was the subject of what’s called a ‘cross-application’ – in which both partners apply for intervention orders against each other. What’s incredible about this case is that in one court proceeding, Olivia looks just as guilty as John; in the next hearing, she is clearly the victim. What’s the difference? Two separate police reports.29
The first police report is a summary of the incident, which police submitted to the court with their application for protection orders against both Olivia and John:
Parties have been arguing with each other over the last 2 days. Yesterday both parties had assaulted each other. Tonight, around 5.30pm further assaults took place by both parties. [John] assaulted [Olivia] by throwing her against [a] wall, choking and hitting her. [Olivia] assaulted [John] by scratching him severely all over his body. Both parties charged with assault.
In court, Olivia consented to the protection order, which stipulated she must not intimidate, stalk, assault, molest, harass, threaten or otherwise interfere with John for twelve months. If Olivia breached the order, she could be fined or jailed.
But a second police report painted a starkly different picture of the same incident. This report was a charge sheet for offences allegedly perpetrated by John, and it was submitted for a separate hearing, in which police were charging both Olivia and John for offences related to the incident. Here we see what actually happened that night:
[John] punched [Olivia] with his fist onto her left kidney area. [He the
n] commenced walking out of the bedroom, whilst he was doing so he punched the door causing damage to it. [He] woke the children and made them scream.
[Olivia] ran towards [John] and grabbed him by his collar of his shirt and she … scratched him at this time. [Olivia] said, ‘Why do you do this, why do the children have to put up with this. I am sick of you smashing my stuff and how do you like it.’ [Olivia] walked up towards the stereo and pushed her foot on it causing it to crack.
[John] grabbed [Olivia] with his two hands onto her shoulders and threw her to the ground. [John] had a tight grip [on Olivia’s] neck causing her to not breath[e]. [John] released [her] neck and stepped away from [her].
[Olivia] got up from the ground and said, ‘Are you trying to kill me?’ [and verbally] abused [John].
[John] said, ‘fuck you, you[’re] dead.’ He grabbed [Olivia] and threw her onto the ground. He pushed [her] head back and forth onto the ground, whilst this was occurring [Olivia] was swinging her hands at him to protect herself.
[John] leant over [Olivia’s] body and started to head butt her onto the head area … [Olivia] sustained lumps and bruises to her head and ear … [John] said, ‘If DoCS take my kids, you[’re] a dead cunt’, and ‘get off the floor you fucker’. At this stage [Olivia] was vomiting blood from her mouth area and could not get up from the floor. [John] tried to wipe off the blood from the floor. He said, ‘Get up like nothing has happened, get onto the lounge.’ [Olivia] had trouble getting up from the ground. [John] grabbed a blanket and placed it onto [Olivia’s] head and later placed his hands over [her] mouth.
[Olivia] tried to release herself from [John], whilst this was happening [Olivia] bit his finger for him to let go. [John] was screaming for [Olivia] to get her mouth of[f] his finger …