See What You Made Me Do

by Jess Hill

The legal system is designed to protect men from the superior power of the state but not to protect women or children from the superior power of men.

  JUDITH LEWIS HERMAN, TRAUMA AND RECOVERY

  The moment Nicole Lee realised she was about to die, she didn’t see her life flash before her eyes. ‘In the last moment of your life, it’s fucking terror. Absolute, pure terror.’ Her husband was driving wildly, faster and faster and faster down the freeway, screaming, ‘I’m gonna crash the fucking car! I’ll fucking kill both of us! We’re both gonna fucking die!’ As terror engulfed her, one thought hammered over and over: ‘This is how it ends, and I hope it’s quick. I hope it doesn’t hurt. I hope I die straightaway.’

  That was in 2012. Nicole had been living underground for eight years.

  Leaving ‘Greg’ wasn’t an option. He wasn’t just her husband and her son’s father – he was her carer. Nicole can’t walk; she injured her spinal cord when she was a kid. ‘You’re told your whole life, being disabled, it’s going to take someone really special to want to love you, to take on a person like you. That played into the abuse once it started. I’d think, at least he wants to be with me.’ For eight years, the man she’d once loved, whom she relied on to help her shower and look after her kids – the man who, to the outside world, looked like a devoted carer – had been intent on destroying her. ‘You’re belittled, beaten, raped, told you’re worthless and useless. You slowly become isolated from everyone. Then the gaslighting – “They’re gonna take the kids off you,” “You’re not capable of doing this on your own”, “You can’t survive by yourself, you’ll kill yourself.” You think to yourself, I’m going crazy, I’m mad! But you’re going crazy because you’re coping with that happening to you over and over and over.’

  The day Greg almost killed her, Nicole weighed 38 kilos and had been diagnosed with severe anorexia, as well as bipolar disorder with borderline personality traits. She had no previous history of mental illness; her symptoms were a reaction to Greg’s violence. ‘The system tells you the violence is happening because of your mental health,’ says Nicole indignantly. ‘No, my mental health is suffering because of the violence.’ Like so many women living underground, Nicole was ‘checking out’ in her mind. ‘When you’re starving, you can’t think. If I can’t think, I don’t have to acknowledge what’s going on. I don’t have to feel what’s going on. I can just be completely outside of my body. I couldn’t control anything else around me, but I could control what I ate.’ It may sound counterintuitive, but for Nicole, anorexia was a survival tactic. Being in hospital was the only way to escape – even if just for a while. ‘I’d go in there and I’d be safe. I could sleep, I’d be okay – for a little bit – before they sent me back home again.’

  Four months after Greg’s attack on the freeway, Nicole became so dangerously underweight she had to be admitted to the anorexia ward of Royal Melbourne Hospital. There, Nicole told staff she was being raped and abused by her husband on a regular basis. The mental health nurse gave her pamphlets.

  Greg had been raping Nicole since their son was six weeks old, sleeping in a bassinet beside their bed. From then, ‘He was just on me constantly, every night. I’d be pushing him away, leave me alone, will you just fuck off, fuck off, until eventually the pushing away wasn’t enough.’ Nicole initially blamed herself – with a new baby, she hadn’t felt like having sex. ‘I thought, okay, I need to initiate sex, that’s how I stop this. I’ll just be more proactive! As Bettina Arndt says, it’s my wifely duty. So I did my wifely duty, and [later] that night he raped me. The next day I was like, how fucking dare you – you said it was because you never got sex! You got sex, and you still raped me! Then he’d cry and apologise, saying, “I’m a filthy human being, I’m disgusting, I hate myself, I wish I could stop.” And then I’d feel bad.’ Over time, though, Greg stopped apologising. ‘It went from “I’m a bad person” to “You made me do it … if you weren’t so fucking crazy, if you didn’t make my life so goddamn hard, I wouldn’t do this to you.”’

  At the hospital, in a routine family therapy session, the therapist told Nicole and Greg to look into each other’s eyes. ‘Now,’ he asked Nicole, ‘why don’t you trust Greg?’ Nicole refused to say: ‘He knows why.’ When the therapist pressed Nicole, Greg interrupted. ‘Oh,’ he said matter-of-factly, ‘it’s because I rape her in her sleep sometimes.’ ‘The therapist was like, “What do you mean?”’ says Nicole. ‘And he was like, “What am I supposed to do? I’ve got needs!” He could not understand why the therapist was like, “But that’s a crime! You shouldn’t be doing that!” He was like, “What the fuck would you know? She never wants to have sex!”’ Greg then became so threatening the therapist had to call security.

  A few days later, Nicole’s treatment team offered to call the police and get her into a refuge. ‘But at no point did anyone say, “We can help you go to a refuge, and we can get your kids, too.”’ To Nicole, it was clear: leaving the relationship would mean losing her boys.* ‘I’m in hospital with a tube up my nose. I’m refusing to eat. Who’s going to believe me? “No way,” I said. “I can’t go. I will never see my children again, and I cannot do that to them. I cannot leave them.”’

  There are critical moments in the trajectory of a woman’s life underground. When – even for a moment – her private abuse becomes public, she sees other people seeing it and seeing her. In a rare moment of clarity, the fog shrouding the underground clears enough for her to get some perspective and see the danger she’s in. She senses – but dares not believe – the possibility of an alternative future. These moments must be seized immediately. If they are missed, her belief that nobody can help her is confirmed. The fog closes back in, and she slips underground again, where the abuse continues, unseen.

  This was one of those moments. When Nicole refused to call police or go to a refuge, the hospital could have called in a family violence caseworker to talk to her, to allay her fears, to develop a safety plan. But they didn’t. ‘Nobody sat down with me to say, “You’re not going to lose your children, you will be okay, we’ll put supports in place.”’ The medical team responsible for her wellbeing instead discharged her into the care of a man who had admitted raping her in her sleep. For Nicole, this was confirmation: nobody could pull her out of this trap. Worse still, it made her doubt her own mind. ‘When nobody takes action, you start to disbelieve what’s going on in your own head. You’re thinking, Maybe it’s not as bad as I think it is. They don’t seem to be too worried about it – they’ve sent me home to him.’

  Within a fortnight, Nicole – still dangerously underweight – collapsed on the kitchen floor and passed out. When she woke up, Greg was anally raping her. ‘It was fucking painful. I just lay there and cried. I was completely broken. I was just thinking to myself, No-one’s called for help! What’s going on here? That’s the main thing that really, really got to me.’ As Nicole lay there crying on the kitchen floor, Greg sneered at her and said, “Think of this as your motivation to eat. If you didn’t pass out, I wouldn’t have done it.”’

  Nicole managed to survive for another year. While she had been in hospital, Greg had sold the house she owned – he’d come with the estate agent into the anorexia ward to get her signature. Because he’d already put a deposit on a new house – with money they didn’t have – Nicole felt she had no choice but to sign and sell. In the new house, a year after she was sent home from hospital, Nicole tried to kill herself. ‘I couldn’t stand living in the relationship anymore, and I knew I couldn’t survive on my own. So, I thought, I just need to get rid of me. I’m the problem.’

  When Greg found her unconscious on the kitchen floor, he just rolled her onto her back and walked away. ‘His words afterwards were, “Why would I call an ambulance for you? Why would I bother? When your heart stops beating, I’ll call an ambulance.”’ When Nicole’s sixteen-year-old son got paramedics to come to the house, Greg refused to assist – he wouldn’t even give them Nicole’s Medicare card.

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sp; When she regained consciousness in hospital the next day, a doctor asked Nicole why she did it. ‘It just poured out of me: “He’s raped me four times this week, I can’t fucking do this anymore, I do not want to live anymore.”’ When Nicole again refused to go to a refuge, the hospital called Greg to collect her.

  But this time was different. Somebody at the hospital had called child protection. ‘That was the change,’ says Nicole. When the child protection workers arrived at the house, they confronted Greg about what Nicole had said. Greg was blithe: Yeah, so what? After ushering the two kids away for a private chat, the workers came back into the room and told Greg his kids had just told them they were afraid of him. Greg told them to get the fuck out of his house. Then the police arrived. ‘The police stepped in and said, “We can’t let this man back into your house. You cannot protect yourself, so we have to,”’ says Nicole. ‘I was petrified. I was begging them, “You can’t do this, he’s my carer … You can’t take him away.” And they said, “No, you don’t see this right, but one day you will.” And they were so right. They didn’t take the decision of leaving off me – they took it off him. They forced him outside the house. It was the best thing anybody ever did for me.’

  But Nicole’s ordeal didn’t end there. With Greg gone, she was alone with her two children and no carer. ‘I don’t think I slept the first week. I was scared. I needed help, and there was no-one. I couldn’t get my back door open to feed my dogs, I couldn’t get my kids to school, I couldn’t even shower myself.’ Nicole was ready to go back to court to ask that the protection order be lifted so Greg could come back to the house. ‘I [didn’t] know what else to do. The thing I was so afraid of – of not surviving – was coming true. But it didn’t have to. All I needed was support.’

  It was eight weeks before someone thought to refer Nicole to a disability service. ‘When my child protection worker approached them, they were like, “Oh yeah, we’ve got a disability family violence initiative package, which is twelve weeks of funding. What does she need? Does she need someone to come in right now?”’ A caseworker came and helped her to get groceries and clean the house, fixed the back door and put in a dishwasher. ‘That’s when things changed. I had the energy to get up and get the kids to school. It was like, okay, maybe I can be here by myself, if someone’s here to help me. It wasn’t the family violence sector that helped me – it was the disability sector.’

  But just as Nicole was getting her life back together, she was drawn back into Greg’s web of abuse – this time, through the legal system. Even after he was charged with nine counts of rape,# Greg was allowed to contest both the intervention order and the child protection order in court. ‘The magistrate at the Children’s Court should have just said, “Look, this is a losing battle, you’re never going to win this, sir, I’m granting child protection their order.” Not, “Oh, he’s entitled to his due process.”’ Nicole had to attend four separate court dates, including one in which Greg was due to contest his intervention order from prison, after he breached bail. ‘I’m down at Heidelberg Magistrate’s Court, and I’m waiting, waiting, waiting, and someone comes out and says, “I’m sorry, Nicole, we’re going to have to adjourn today; we can’t unload prisoners because downstairs is flooded.” I’m like, oh, okay, and then, oh shit – you’re sending him here from Port Philip Prison to contest an intervention order? He was going to be in that courtroom? I felt sick. I was getting dragged through this process because this man in prison was stomping his feet. It’s control – it all comes back to control.’

  Eventually, because Greg had openly admitted to raping Nicole, he had no choice but to plead guilty to all nine counts, as well as assault and breaching an intervention order. ‘It wasn’t because he was remorseful,’ she explains. ‘It wasn’t to save me a trial – it was to save him time in prison.’ Greg was imprisoned for two years and six months.

  Today, the fierce woman sitting across from me in a wheelchair – with crimson red hair, tattoos on her arms and hands, and big glasses – is not only thriving with her two sons, she’s in a loving relationship, and just ran as an independent for the Victorian Senate in the 2018 state election.

  It’s stunning to think that so much of Nicole’s pain and suffering could easily have been avoided. There were so many opportunities for professionals to intervene. Like many women underground, Nicole reached out for help several times, but was placed back in danger by professionals that should – and need to – know better.

  *

  As we’ve seen, reliable data on domestic abuse can be hard to find. What happens underground is almost impossible to quantify: domestic abuse is largely hidden from view, and women are often under threat to keep it that way. Whatever statistics we have are just an indication – they show what we’ve been able to measure. For example, eight women in Australia are apparently hospitalised due to domestic violence every day1 – but how often do hospitals record the reason for an assault, or even ask? Forty per cent of family violence victims hospitalised in Victoria over the past decade had a brain injury2 – but how many women sustain traumatic brain injuries and never think to go to hospital? How many women simply live with the personality changes, the depression and anxiety, the difficulty concentrating, the headaches and fatigue? How many women start to believe that these symptoms prove they really are crazy, like he says?

  Most of what happens underground is never measured. There are no statistics for the number of women in this country who are maimed, forced into hiding, beg on street corners or sleep in their cars. No-one counts how many women leave their partners but remain locked in a feverish routine of survival, in which every decision is weighed against an unpredictable threat.

  What we can measure – more or less – is domestic homicide. This data tells us that a quarter of Australia’s homicides are due to intimate partner violence, and that a man kills his current or former partner at least once a week.†3 Police data, too, shows that domestic abuse is Australia’s number one law and order problem: every two minutes, police are called out to domestic incidents.4 Now, as you digest that statistic, consider that more than 80 per cent of women living underground today have never reported to police.§ Imagine if they all started reporting.

  *

  Just because women choose not to call police doesn’t mean they’re not seeking help. Many ring domestic violence helplines for advice, emergency accommodation, or just to tell someone what’s happening, so at least somebody knows. These helplines act as a gateway: they assist women to develop safety plans, place them in crisis accommodation and refer them to the support they need – interpreters, legal aid, Centrelink, housing and so on. For women in remote areas, helpline operators can even book flights to get them out – DVConnect, for example, arranges flights every three days for women in the Outback and Far North, and even rescues women from Papua New Guinea. Sometimes the abuser is so dangerous women have to be urgently flown out of the country: Safe Steps flies around ten women a year to the United Kingdom, Canada or the United States – to any centre that can accommodate them immediately.

  The calls to these helplines can be harrowing. At Safe Steps, I listened to a counsellor respond to a woman stuck on a farm with her small children. Her husband was about to be released from jail and she was desperate to get away before he got home, but didn’t have a car. When the counsellor asked if there was anyone who could help, the woman replied flatly that there was not a single person she could call. Safe Steps sent her a taxi, got her into crisis accommodation and gave her vouchers for food and groceries. I’ll never forget how desolate and afraid she sounded, or the sound of her children playing and crying in the background. These are the kind of unadulterated accounts helplines hear hundreds of times a day. It’s what makes helplines perhaps the best – and most underrated – source for what domestic abuse really looks like in this country.

  When Safe Steps gets a call, their counsellors keep an ear out for serious risk factors: strangulation, use of a weapon, threats to kill
, sexual assault, stalking. When these factors are reported, they record them. Their data provides a nuanced answer to the question, ‘Is domestic abuse getting better or worse?’ It shows that in the past few years the violence has been getting worse: violent incidents are happening more frequently, and becoming more severe.

  Some readers may think this increase can be explained by women’s greater willingness to report. There are more women reporting – in just one month in 2017, Safe Steps received 10,293 calls, a staggering 70 per cent increase on the previous year.5 But increased reporting doesn’t account for what the data shows. The women calling are reporting greater levels of risk than ever before. In total, 67 per cent of the women who called Safe Steps in 2016–17 were in need of immediate protection6 – up from 58 per cent in 2014–15.7

  Rosemary O’Malley, director of the Domestic Violence Prevention Centre on the Gold Coast, backs this up: ‘The severity and complexity we’re seeing has definitely increased over the last five years. It’s different to what we’ve seen previously. There’s something else going on. What’s coming out of the shadows, especially with these new women who are reporting, is stuff we’ve never seen before: sexual and physical violence that’s really tantamount to torture. So that’s kind of terrifying.’

  In 2015, Annette Gillespie, then the head of Safe Steps, predicted a backlash from perpetrators when the Victorian state government started talking about a royal commission into family violence. ‘I said to ministers, “You need to be prepared for what will come with that.”’ Anytime the status quo is challenged, she says, there is always resistance – especially from those under the most pressure to change. ‘We’re saying to men with the propensity for violence: “We don’t accept the way you do things anymore – you’ve got to change.” It’s like a woman moving on and finding a new boyfriend. Society is saying, “We prefer these men over here, and the way they act.” So the resistance [from perpetrators] is, “Nobody’s going to tell me what I can or can’t do in my home, or with my family, with my children.”’ Men have never had less control in society than they do now, argues Gillespie: that’s why they are exerting power more firmly within their relationships. ‘It’s the only place they can safely have control, where they can be king of the castle. It’s their domain.’