See What You Made Me Do

by Jess Hill

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  This is a situation we’ve created. We’ve spent millions on campaigns urging women to leave situations of domestic violence, and to risk a jump into the unknown. Women have bravely responded, despite the risk that leaving – or even saying they want to leave – could get them killed.‡ But instead of being there to catch them, we’re holding out a safety net that’s full of holes.

  The biggest hole in the net is the emergency refuge sector. Ever since a rowdy group of feminists commandeered a couple of abandoned houses in Sydney in the 1970s to set up the first women’s shelter, a nationwide network of shelters has been providing emergency protection to women in danger. ‘When women come to us, they’ll get tea, coffee, food, children put to bed, pyjamas, a toothbrush, bras, knickers – whatever they need, they’ll get,’ says Jocelyn Bignold, who heads up McAuley Care, a 24-hour women’s refuge in Melbourne. ‘We’ve also got a playroom, so children are safe and occupied while their mothers speak with our workers to figure out their next step.’ More than anything, the refuge gives women a chance to breathe. ‘What we often hear is: “I feel safe”; “I can sleep for the first time”; “I can have a shower in peace.”’

  But around Australia, the system of emergency refuge is practically broken. Women and children – even those in extreme danger – are almost never placed directly in a refuge anymore. The reason is simple: there isn’t enough room. On a conference call with representatives from every statewide helpline in Australia, the South Australian manager, Gillian Cordell, said that placing women and children in motels was almost always the only option. Other helpline reps agreed. Women are commonly sent to a motel with one voucher for accommodation, another for meals and another for the supermarket. Sometimes, a caseworker or someone from the motel will go to check on them. There is little to recommend the system, they agreed, except that it is at least an immediate safety response.

  With luck, women and children** will eventually be moved into refuge. However, given the extreme demand, the bar for entry in some states is set very high. ‘In South Australia, services are really only accepting high-risk clients into shelters,’ says Cordell. That means women must be ‘at high risk of imminent injury or worse, where the offender is still at large and where there has been a high level of police involvement’.

  For women who need somewhere to go right away, a motel voucher may be a godsend. But when you’re dealing with extreme trauma and fear, being placed alone in a room with no support is a precarious, even threatening option. Migrant women are particularly vulnerable. SBS reported the story of one South Korean woman, Grace, who spoke very little English and who had been placed in a motel with her baby, with no follow-up from police or local services. Grace says police repeatedly ignored her pleas for protection, choosing instead to believe her English-speaking husband. ‘He’s born here,’ said Grace, ‘so they talk about the situation, and he told to police officer, “Oh, we’re going to fix this relationship. You can just go, this is nothing.” And police left. And I was shaking as well. I was scared.’ It took a violent beating from her husband to make police take action. But they didn’t take Grace to a refuge, where she would have had access to an interpreter and someone to help her arrange a visa. Instead, they took Grace and her baby to a motel, and left. ‘They didn’t even call me back,’ says Grace. ‘I had no family, I had nowhere to go; I had no money. I didn’t even have clothes. I didn’t even have food.’ Soon afterwards, Grace’s husband found where she was staying and made her return home with him. With nobody there to stop him, Grace had no choice but to comply. From there, the violence escalated.8

  Most victims accommodated in motels will not get tracked down by their abuser. But their experiences – right at a time when they need acute support – can be alienating and even dangerous. A 2019 Victorian survey found that in the low-end motels and private rooming houses being allocated to family violence victims (and other homeless people), their stay was ‘overwhelmingly negative’, with women ‘feeling unsafe, demoralised by the squalor they witnessed, and [having] a growing sense of worthlessness and disconnection from their community’. In 2016, the ABC reported that women and children in the Wollongong area were being ‘retraumatised’ and put at risk after being placed in some of the region’s ‘most notorious hotels’. Said one family violence worker, who spoke on condition of anonymity: ‘They’re living in a motel room, there’s unsavoury characters up in that area, and there’s a lot of screaming, shouting and abuse by other people in the hotel … The children are listening to that and it’s bringing back their trauma from their own domestic violence.’9 In some areas, few motels are willing to accommodate domestic abuse victims: in 2019, the only motel supplying emergency accommodation in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales was blacklisted due to safety concerns about drug dealing and prostitution. There are no refuges in the Southern Highlands, so women and children in crisis now have no options. The local newspaper reports that women fleeing violence are having to couchsurf or sleep in their cars.10

  As South Australian social worker Maryanne told Daily Life, twenty-five years ago it was easy to move women from shelters into public housing. That meant women and children didn’t need to stay in a refuge for so long, and beds became available more quickly. But since then, according to Shelter SA, the state government has sold off more than 20,000 homes in the public housing system – which is about the same number of people who are now stuck on the waiting list for housing.11 Sector workers in regional South Australia say they also know that women and children are sleeping in the bush or in their cars because there is nowhere for them to go.12

  Around the country, more than a third of the women who seek help from homelessness services are escaping domestic abuse.13 The waiting list for public housing in Victoria is four times longer than in South Australia – 82,000, including 24,000 children – and yet only 118 new apartments were added to Victoria’s pool of public housing in 2016–17.## There is a gigantic disconnect here for governments that claim they want to end violence against women. It’s pretty obvious: if women and children don’t have somewhere to go, they are left with a set of dangerous options. Until governments are willing to invest in affordable housing and crisis accommodation, they may as well throw their strategies to end domestic violence in the bin.

  Domestic abuse victims don’t just need accommodation when they leave – they need a very particular kind of protection. Refuges provide a safe and secure place to stay, and go to extreme lengths to keep their addresses secret, for the simple reason that the perpetrator – once he realises his partner has fled – is likely to pursue her. The acute shortage of refuge accommodation means women and children are not getting the high-level protection they need.

  In 2014, Leila Alavi tried to get into a dozen different refuges before she stopped trying.†† She was offered a voucher for a hotel in Kings Cross but felt too afraid to stay there on her own. By failing to get her into a refuge, the system had missed a critical opportunity to connect her with a caseworker and develop a safety plan. In January 2015, her ex-husband stabbed her to death.14

  In another instance, in 2017, ‘Yvonne’ left her husband ‘Don’ – a man with a long criminal history who’d served two years in prison for assaulting his former partner. Yvonne had a history of mental illness and substance abuse, and had been abused by violent partners for most of her adult life. The last time Don assaulted her, he held her hostage on a mattress in the lounge room, refused to let her go to the toilet, and then punched her in the face when she urinated on the mattress. Reporting the assault to police, Yvonne said Don had also tried to strangle her a week earlier and she showed them the injuries. Police tried to get Yvonne into emergency accommodation, but nothing was available. They suggested she try Housing NSW, but Yvonne had already exhausted her temporary allocation there. Instead of going into a refuge, where she would have been protected, Yvonne had no choice but to return home, to Don’s unit. When officers turned up at 9 pm that night to follow up on
the assault, Don told them Yvonne was sleeping. Police went to look for themselves and found Yvonne unconscious, having suffered a head injury. She died in hospital. The team assigned to review domestic homicides for the NSW coroner were clear about this case: Yvonne would not have died that night if she’d been able to get into a refuge.15

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  The need to fix our crisis response is particularly urgent because now, more than ever, women need the support of experts when they’re leaving an abusive man.

  Julie Oberin heads up the peak advocacy body WESNET and runs the Annie North refuge in Bendigo, Victoria. Her workers used to quiz every woman coming into the refuge on whether her partner was tech-savvy. ‘If she said he wouldn’t have a clue, we wouldn’t worry too much about it.’ But now, they don’t bother asking. ‘You don’t have to be tech-savvy anymore. It’s so simple now – you can just YouTube instructions. Easy to buy and install, easy to use.’ With WESNET, Oberin has pioneered research and training on high-tech stalking in Australia, bringing experts out from the United States to train and raise awareness with local lawyers, police, service providers and public servants. She says the severity and frequency of tech stalking has ‘really escalated’. The week before I spoke to her, she got a call from a Canberra refuge, where a worker had just seen a perpetrator running along the alley behind the refuge. He was clearly looking for his ex, who was inside. He wasn’t supposed to know where she was, and the refuge’s address was secret. ‘That’s a tracking device,’ says Oberin. ‘Sometimes they’re not perfectly accurate, so they end up in the wrong street. I told her, you have to eliminate whether it’s the car or the phone. I would leave the car behind and go somewhere in some other vehicle and see if he finds you. If he does, it’s the phone.’

  Tech-facilitated abuse has become so ubiquitous that refuges and domestic violence services are teaming up with specialist risk and safety assessors trained to detect concealed devices and apps, which can even be hidden in a child’s favourite toy. One such risk and safety assessor is Nic Shaw, a former correctional officer and supervisor in the Victorian Corrections System. ‘Anytime they have a woman coming into refuge, they’ll get us to come out and assess the devices,’ says Shaw, who now works for the private risk and safety business Protective Group. At one of the refuges Protective Group partners with, 80 to 85 per cent of the women who come in are being tracked. When they’re hidden in a car, tracking devices are almost invisible to the untrained eye: one device Shaw recovered looks like the car’s cigarette lighter; others look like a small battery and can be fixed under the bonnet. ‘I can go on eBay right now and buy a tracking device for $10, and they’re accurate to within 10 to 30 metres. In five years’ time I’ll be able to buy one for $5 that’s accurate to within a foot.’

  Most commonly, though, a perpetrator tracks his partner through her phone. ‘For $45 per month, you can see everything on someone’s phone, including stuff that’s been deleted. You can also see encrypted messages, because the encryption only happens when the message is being sent – once it’s actually received, it’s no longer encrypted.’ Shaw says this kind of surveillance usually starts before the perpetrator becomes overtly abusive – it’s an early foray into control.

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  Women don’t just leave domestic abuse – they journey away from it, step by step. There is no straight path out – it’s a game of snakes and ladders, and women can slip back underground just when they’re about to escape. This means that any potential escape route needs attention and support.

  Calling police is one of the most fraught decisions a woman can make. She may think she knows how to manage this man better than anyone. But once police arrive, the situation is out of her hands. She can’t control what the police will say or do, and she has to surrender to a system that she may not trust. Everything is up for grabs: What if they don’t take me seriously? What if child protection take the kids? What if he punishes me for calling? What if the police just make things worse? When police show up at the front door – whether they’re responding to a call from her, a terrified child or an alarmed neighbour – the surface of the underground suddenly cracks open and the world above comes flooding in. It doesn’t matter if it’s the first time police have intervened or if they’ve come so many times they’re on a first-name basis with the household: the moment they arrive, the perpetrator is no longer the most powerful person in the room. What police do and say next is critical.

  If a woman is lucky, she’ll get a cop like Genelle Warne. Warne is the domestic violence liaison officer (DVLO) for Blacktown Police in Sydney’s western suburbs, where the rate of reported incidents is among the highest in the state. Across New South Wales, every local area command has at least one DVLO, but in Blacktown the chief inspector has gone a step further: he’s moved two police officers out of general duties to work side by side with Warne. This pragmatic approach has transformed the way they police domestic violence: the extra resources free up Warne and her team to pay regular visits to women at risk, including women still in violent relationships, and keep a close eye on their partners. It’s a strategy that’s saving lives. In one instance, Warne made a routine follow-up call to a woman who’d come into the station to make a complaint about her boyfriend. During this call, Warne managed to convince the woman to talk about the torture to which her boyfriend had been subjecting her. She confided in Warne that over the past six years, he had forced her to commit sex acts on his friends, carved a game of noughts and crosses into her back, and burnt skin off her arms with a hair iron. ‘I said to her, “You’re going to be dead if you don’t leave. He’s going to kill you.”’ Warne managed to persuade the woman to leave, and her abuser was charged with twenty-seven offences. Since then, Warne has stayed in touch with the woman and, after two years of regular encouragement, finally convinced her to see a counsellor. The day of her first appointment, Warne dropped her off and picked her up.

  There are police officers like Warne across the country. They are the cops who give out their personal phone numbers, who tell victims to call them anytime – day or night – if they need help. They’re the cops who will come to the station when they’re off-duty to take a statement, because they know that by the time their next shift starts the victim may have had a change of heart. They’re the cops who know that victims of extreme trauma often can’t provide the neat chronologies they need for their reports, so they work around it. They know the perpetrator will try to manipulate them and how vital it is to resist. Most importantly, they don’t make their protection contingent on the woman’s willingness to leave, or even cooperate: their first priority is to do whatever they can to make sure that woman is safe, even if she tries to resist.

  Sadly, though, this brand of protective policing is not the norm. Despite the introduction of domestic violence training, pro-arrest policies and other strict protocols, victims still commonly report that police don’t take their fears seriously, that they speak to them disrespectfully, that they sided with the perpetrator, and that they don’t follow up or arrest the perpetrator for breaching an intervention order. In one study of sixty-five survivors of family violence in Brisbane, law professor Heather Douglas found that the majority of women who had sought help from police found the response inconsistent at best.16 Most reported a lack of interest and understanding, and many felt police didn’t take them seriously, even when there were protection orders in place. ‘I hate to use the term, but I feel I’m just getting cock-blocked everywhere,’ said Susan, one of those survivors in the study. She was being threatened, and had reported many protection-order breaches to police, but couldn’t get them to do any follow-up. ‘I said … to this [police officer] this morning … you guys have ignored every single complaint I [have] made for the last six months and they’re just getting worse. His behaviour is escalating. What’s it going to take for me to be noticed? Do I have to show up here black and blue?’

  Douglas’s study found that even when women and children were at high risk, police sometim
es failed to take it seriously. ‘One woman talked about how she was hiding out in the bedroom with the kids,’ says Douglas. ‘Her ex-husband had come around really drunk and irate, and was trying to get into the house. She’d changed the locks, and he used so much force trying to get in his key was broken in the door. Then he was under the house, banging on the floor of her bedroom. By the time the police came, two hours later, he’d fallen asleep under the house. The police said, “Oh, it’s alright … you’re safe right now.” There’s a damaged lock, she’s got recordings of him threatening to kill her, and they don’t follow up. That’s pretty bad.’

  Women were also aghast at police siding with the perpetrator. One reported that after her partner had assaulted her, a policewoman told her, ‘Look, I’ve had a talk to him … He says he feels very nagged in the relationship, and you really need to think about whether you’re putting too much pressure on him.’ The woman did end up getting him charged with assault, but with little help from police: she took her own photos, and got her own medical report.17 She had the means and time to do that. A lot of women don’t.

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  Often, the stories with the worst endings are not blockbuster horror stories, but catalogues of negligence, laziness and procedural error. These are perhaps the most important cases for us to grapple with.

  Just after midnight on 8 February 2014, Norman Paskin called police to report that there was a man inside the house of his neighbour, Kelly Thompson, who shouldn’t be there. For over two hours, Norman had seen his former neighbour, Wayne Wood, drive past Kelly’s house repeatedly in his white van. He knew something was up – in the past month he’d seen Wayne at the house several times with a police escort, removing items from the garage. That night, when Norman saw Wayne park his van some distance away and approach Kelly’s house on foot, he called police and told the junior constable on duty that he suspected there might be an intervention order against the man now inside Kelly’s house.18