See What You Made Me Do

by Jess Hill

  In her analysis of these two reports, Professor Jane Wangmann observes that the second, more detailed account reveals many things the first does not: John uses violence that is more serious and aggressive, and the violence Olivia uses against him is clearly being exercised in response to his attacks. But that’s not all – we can deduce that this is not a one-off, because the reports show Olivia is angry that John is attacking her again, and that their children are again being forced to see his violence. As Wangmann writes: ‘I present Olivia and John’s story – not for the numerous questions it raises about the police response – but rather for the way it illustrates that in order to understand the nature of domestic violence we need to know more than simply “who did what to whom” and “how many times” … before [we deploy] labels such as “domestic violence”, “perpetrator” and “victim”.’

  Stories like Olivia’s are becoming more common, says Rosemary O’Malley, director of the Gold Coast Domestic Violence Prevention Centre. In clear situations of violent resistance, police are simply classifying the incident as mutual violence. ‘Police will say, “She’s as bad as him.” They realise he’s being violent, but they’re making all sorts of judgements around her putting herself in harm’s way and then reacting.’

  *

  So why, when police are better trained than ever to understand domestic violence, are the arrest rates for women increasing? It comes down to a change in policy that was introduced in the 1980s, first in the United States, which removed police discretion around domestic abuse: if an assault occurred, they had to make an arrest. This was supposed to be a win for victims. Finally, abusive men would be held accountable!

  But it wasn’t that simple. After mandatory arrest policies were introduced in the United States, an unprecedented number of women started being arrested for DV offences. In some areas, the rate of arrest for men even went down: in Sacramento, while the arrest of women shot up by 91 per cent from 1991 to 1996, the arrest of men fell 7 per cent.30 Anne O’Dell, who worked on thousands of cases of domestic violence with the San Diego Police Department, says mandatory arrest policies had a dramatic influence on her colleagues: ‘Officers would often state they were afraid to not make an arrest in DV situations.’ For police under pressure to arrest someone, female victims were an easier ‘get’ than their male abusers. As one probation officer explains: ‘The women are more likely to admit what they did, like they’ll say, “Yeah, I stabbed him! But this is why.” The men, a lot of times, will not even admit that they struck her unless you say, “Well, then how did she end up with a broken nose?” Even then, the men still sometimes don’t admit it, even when you have the facts right there.’31

  That’s what happened to Crystallee Crain, a resident of Oakland, California, in 2016. Crain had just emerged from her bathroom, where she had been washing blood off her face, when she found herself facing seven police officers. Her ex-husband – who had just finished brutally beating her – had been in the living room telling his version of the story to police, who turned up after being called by the neighbours. The police confronted Crain, having been convinced by her husband that she was the primary aggressor. Standing there in her bedroom, her body covered in bruises under her pyjamas, Crain was handcuffed and arrested. She readily admitted that she had tried to defend herself. ‘I was sure,’ she later wrote, ‘that my battered body would be enough evidence.’32 But instead of being protected and having her injuries seen to, Crain was arrested under California’s mandatory arrest policy. Police refused to allow her to change out of her pyjamas, and put her in the back of the patrol car. With her wrists bleeding from handcuffs that were too tight, Crain started having a panic attack; from the front seats, the officers made fun of her and told her to stop crying. When Crain was booked into Santa Rita Jail, she was shaking so hard it took three goes to fingerprint her. Police then placed her in a holding cell for fifteen hours; so battered was her body, she could hardly bear to sit on the concrete bench, and so had to lie on the floor. When she was released the next day, Crain returned home and gingerly removed her clothes. She counted thirty-four bruises on her body. Crain published this story online under a pseudonym, but for this book, she wants to be named for the first time. She wants readers to understand that this experience left her forever changed, that she has ‘lost a spark that was once there’.

  Since similar pro-arrest policies were introduced in Australia, studies here have shown that a large percentage of women arrested for domestic violence are actually victims. In Queensland, Rosemary O’Malley remembers a typical case. ‘Neighbours called police out. The male partner was in the driveway to meet them, and she was also standing in the driveway. Police warned her, because she was incoherent, she looked like she was drunk and she was threatening them. They said, “If we have to come back, we’re arresting you and taking you away,” and then they left.’ For some reason, one of the police decided to go back. When they returned to the house five minutes later, the man had the woman on the ground in the driveway and was banging her head on the concrete. ‘She wasn’t drunk,’ says O’Malley, ‘she was actually concussed, because that’s what he’d been doing before they’d arrived.’

  Mistaking concussion for intoxication is not uncommon. When someone is concussed, they can exhibit all the signs of being drunk: incoherent speech, confusion, memory loss, a dazed or vacant stare and – the symptom that so often leads police to mistake victims for perpetrators – irritability and aggression.

  In this case, police didn’t end up arresting the woman, but it could easily have been different. ‘Quite often when women are arrested, it’s been a complete misinterpretation,’ says O’Malley. ‘I don’t say that it’s wilful … When police go to an incident, they see just one scene in a movie. The problem is, they don’t look at the whole movie.’

  *

  On my last day in Southport I was on my way to talk to Gold Coast police about female perpetrators. Then I got an email: the meeting was cancelled. There had been a serious incident – ‘DV-related’ – and no officers would be available to talk to me.

  I felt ill. There was only one kind of incident that could be.

  Over the next couple of hours, the news started coming through. A woman, Teresa Bradford, had been killed that morning in a rural township outside the Gold Coast. Her ex-husband had also been found dead in the house. Their four children were home when he murdered their mother and killed himself.

  I drove out to the scene, with no sense of what I was even looking for – I just needed to be there. On the highway, my eyes stung with tears. I felt stupid and angry at myself for spending so much time looking at women’s violence. I clenched the wheel, raging silently at all the murderous men with their pathetic nihilism and their raging entitlement. His children were in the house, for fuck’s sake. Fuck, fuck, fuck. Another woman murdered.

  Obeying the GPS, I turned off to Pimpama, the last rural township on the motorway between the Gold Coast and Brisbane. Everything here was brand-new – a Mirvac dreamscape of identikit houses for young families and up-and-comers. The unforgiving Queensland sun beat down on new saplings, planted equidistant along the nature strip. A solitary man in singlet and stubbies was leaf-blowing his driveway. The only other sign of life was a flash of blue and red lights.

  Up ahead was a miniature police town. With no trees to shelter under, forensic investigators were shaded from the punitive heat by temporary awnings. There was no point hanging around to ask questions. ‘As soon as it’s DV-related, the police just clam up,’ said a reporter leaning against a television van at the end of the street. She was the picture of commercial television: silky straight blonde hair pulled into a tight ponytail, a bright-orange fitted dress. ‘What is it with the Gold Coast?’ I asked, honestly hoping she could tell me why, in just sixteen months, five men had killed their female partners. ‘I know,’ she replied, ‘it must be something in the water. Or the heat.’ We exchanged pleasantries for a little longer and I told her I was writing a book. As I go
t back in my car to leave, she called out, ‘Good luck with the book,’ and then paused. ‘People always ask, “Why didn’t she just leave?” People need to understand why.’

  Teresa Bradford did leave. When her ex-husband, David, attacked her a few months earlier, she went to the police, expecting protection. The attack had been severe: David had punched her until she passed out; when she came to, he was choking her, saying he was going to cut her up. It was also premeditated. David arrived at the house that afternoon with a box of tools – gaffer tape, rope, clear piping, box cutter – that he’d bought at Bunnings a week earlier. When Teresa’s brother helped her clean up afterwards, he also found knives and axes hidden around the house, ‘mostly in the bedroom where he was trying to get her to go’. David Bradford was arrested for choking, deprivation of liberty, assault occasioning bodily harm and domestic-violence-related common assault. But despite police pleading for him to be kept behind bars, the specialist domestic violence magistrate at Southport Court, Magistrate Colin Strofield, was persuaded by Bradford’s defence lawyer to release him on bail due to his ‘fragile mental state’. After all, Bradford had no prior criminal convictions, and there were no independent witnesses to the attack. Strofield – a knowledgeable magistrate on domestic abuse – made a horrific error that day. Bradford had been charged with strangulation – a known risk factor for future homicide. Magistrate Strofield did not take this red flag seriously enough. It’s a decision that will likely haunt him for the rest of his life.‡

  Two weeks after he was released on bail, David broke into Teresa’s house early in the morning, stabbed her to death in her bedroom and then killed himself. I defy anyone to find a single case in Australia where a female perpetrator has done this to a man they have victimised.

  *

  This is an inarguable fact: when women kill their intimate partners, they are almost always killing a perpetrator. A review by the NSW Domestic Violence Death Review team found in the decade to 2010, twenty-eight out of the twenty-nine men who were killed by their female partner were themselves violent perpetrators. You won’t hear about this inconvenient truth from men’s groups like One in Three, who misuse the data on domestic homicides to make it sound like dozens of male victims are being killed every year. That group’s website states: ‘75 males were killed in domestic homicide incidents between 2012–14. This equates to one death every 10 days.’ This is nothing short of rank propaganda. There is nothing comparable about male and female victims of domestic homicide in heterosexual relationships. When women commit intimate partner homicide against men, they almost always do it after suffering years of abuse.

  In the vast majority of cases, women kill because they can think of no other way to be safe. Further proof of this comes from the United States where, in the 1970s, the domestic homicide rate for men and women was roughly the same: around a thousand per year.33 Since refuges were introduced, however, there has been a significant drop in domestic homicides: not in the number of women being killed, but the number of men. Between 1976 and 2002, the number of male perpetrators killed by female victims went down by 69 per cent.34 In a bizarre twist, the introduction of women’s refuges in America – an innovation to save the lives of women – has actually done more to save the lives of the men who terrorise them.

  The gender gap in domestic homicide is crucial. Men almost never have to flee the house with only the clothes on their back and the change in their pockets. They don’t have to get security cameras outside their house to protect themselves from attack. They don’t jump every time they hear a creak in the floor or a tree branch scratch the window. They don’t need shelters to protect them from vengeful exes. The standard hallmarks of a female victim’s experience do not apply, for one simple reason: male victims of female perpetrators are almost never at risk of being killed.

  *

  There is nothing controversial about the fact that male victims of domestic abuse need help and advice on how to recover from abuse. But it’s very hard for the domestic violence sector to prioritise a cohort of victims that are generally not facing life-threatening abuse. Which raises the point: if men’s rights groups are so concerned about male victims, why don’t they set up their own shelters?

  There are some in the domestic violence sector who make time for male victims. Paula Mudd manages a women’s refuge in the Hunter Valley. In 2013, it was the first shelter to open in the area, with three beds for women and eight beds for children. In its first year, it had to turn away fifty women who needed a bed – twice as many as they were able to shelter. But even when the shelter is full, Mudd has a totally open approach. ‘You knock on my door, I will help you to the best of my ability. I don’t care if you’re male, female, transgender.’ I’m curious, given that perpetrators often claim to be victims, how does she tell the difference? ‘I say, “Where’s your responsibility in this? You must have responsibility.” [Perpetrators] don’t take ownership. As soon as they don’t take ownership, you know we’ve got a perpetrator.’ Mostly, the few enquiries Mudd receives from men are not for refuge, but for help to explain an intervention order, or just to talk. ‘A lot of men … thank me for believing them. Even if they know I can’t help them, the main thing is I’m listening to them. I think they want validation a lot of the time – yes, I’m a male victim of domestic violence, and I’m not making this up.’

  *

  The last word on women’s violence should go to the legendary Ellen Pence, who spent her life advocating for victims, and changed the way the world understood domestic violence. At one of her last public lectures before her death in 2012, Pence told the crowd she wanted to get an unqualified statement on the record. ‘I think women are very, very capable of being violent,’ she began. ‘If you look at our history, women participated in the saddest, sickest ways in slavery. We told [our boys] we would turn a blind eye to what they wanted to do with African-American women who had first been captured, and then enslaved. And then we’d let those men take advantage of those women, use those women, rape those women … and we didn’t do much about it … We in fact escaped much of men’s violence because we let some other woman take it for us,’ she said. ‘Women are capable of abusing power. We’ve done it throughout the centuries, and we continue to do it in many ways.’ For too long, said Pence, the domestic violence sector had dodged the issue of women’s violence and had lost credibility: ‘We kept saying it didn’t exist, and now all this stuff is coming forward that of course it exists … We cannot act like every time a woman does something aggressive, it’s because a man made her do it. We have our own aggression, and so we have to say, yes, women have the capacity to and will use violence.’**

  As Pence rightly says, it is a big mistake to ignore the topic of women’s violence. When we relegate women’s violence to a footnote – or claim it doesn’t happen at all – we leave a vacuum for men’s rights groups to fill with disinformation.

  Here is the story, simply put. When it comes to family conflict and domestic hostility in heterosexual relationships, women are just as capable of being physically and psychologically abusive, and can cause serious distress and even trauma to their male partners. But when it comes to coercive control – the most dangerous form of domestic abuse, suffered by 60 to 80 per cent of women who seek help – women make up an extremely small minority of perpetrators.

  Domestic abuse is gendered. In its most dangerous forms, it is a crime perpetrated by men against women.

  *I’m not talking here about noisy and poorly informed elements on both sides who, from their entrenched ideological positions, seem bent on pushing the debate into the realm of intractability. For reason’s sake, I’ve done what I can to avoid these, from the men’s rights groups and their ‘culture warriors’ in the media, like Miranda Devine, Mark Latham and Bettina Arndt, to the hardline feminists for whom any violence against men is framed as either a lie, or an appropriate response to patriarchal male aggression.

  #The Australian Bureau of Statistics uses a similar
incident-based questionnaire to conduct its Personal Safety Survey (PSS) – our country’s best and most oft-quoted source of domestic violence statistics. It’s where we get figures such as ‘one in six women have been emotionally abused by a partner’ or ‘one in three victims of domestic violence are men’.

  †This is the actual text that gets read out when administering the CTS.

  §Fear is a critical distinction in the experience of male and female victims. One English study tracked the police records of 128 cases of intimate partner violence over six years (thirty-two of which had women as the sole perpetrators). It found that while the male perpetrators invoked intense fear and control, only one of the female perpetrators tried to create that environment for her male partner. (R.B. Felson, J.M. Ackerman & C.A. Gallagher, ‘Police intervention and the repeat of domestic assault’, Criminology, 2005, 43(3), pp. 563–88.)

  ‡When that news got out, women’s groups called for him to be removed from the bench. I might have joined them, had I not been sitting in Magistrate Strofield’s courtroom just the day before, watching the effort he put into getting things right. His close attention to the defendant’s history of violence. The care he gave his decisions. His empathy for victims. His no-nonsense approach to perpetrators. His decision to release David Bradford on bail was a terrible error from an otherwise fair magistrate.

  **Pence went on to say that while the sector needed to own up to women’s violence, stopping individual acts of violence wasn’t the real work of the movement. Their work was to change the social conditions that cause domestic violence. What would change, she asked, if women stopped being violent to men? The answer is clear – nothing like the change that would occur if men stopped being violent towards women.

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  STATE OF EMERGENCY