by Jess Hill
Police with attitudes like this need to make friends with reality. Domestic abuse is not just a crime – in fact, there may be no discernible crime committed at all. Victims need police to use their authority to protect them, to understand that domestic abuse is a complex pattern of behaviour that generally escalates over time, and is perpetrated by men who may be just as skilled at manipulating police as they are at manipulating their partners. Victims need police to accept that they may not be what police want them to be: the damsel in distress willing to do whatever police say. They have complicated links to the perpetrator, and have to weigh each action against his reaction; they are often operating within conditions of extreme trauma, and may, in the moment police arrive, be bound to their perpetrator by love, loyalty and children. Some police really get this. As one senior sergeant explained, ‘Family violence is … a love or hate thing, [police officers] are either fine to do it or they hate it. Because it’s a grey area and it’s not that fun like it is to go and catch a crook … It’s not as black and white.’
Law professor Heather Douglas says police need to start attending domestic violence incidents with the primary goal of protecting the victim, no matter how many times the victim has called or how uncooperative they might be. ‘You want to get police understanding that women will leave eventually, probably, but they may not be ready today. So how do you make them safe? … I think the training is telling them to think that way, but most still revert back to the easy, incident-based, “beyond reasonable doubt” approach.’
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In 2017, the acting Victoria Police commissioner, Shane Patton, announced that family violence would be pursued as urgently as terrorism. ‘The consequences of family violence are the same,’ he said. ‘We have death, we have serious trauma, we have serious injury and we have people impacted for the rest of their lives.’24 From 2018, Victoria Police’s five-year strategy involves replacing their family violence units with family violence investigation units, staffed by dedicated detectives and intelligence practitioners. These detectives target repeat offenders, and work with analysts and psychologists to predict escalating behaviour.25 In 2018, an additional 208 specialist family violence police were deployed across the state.
While this is exactly the kind of leadership and change many have been screaming for, the success of such programs will depend on how well these units are integrated with the general duties of police and within the wider police culture. There’s no doubt it will be a vast improvement on what came before. But will it be the revolution in policing that victims need? We urgently need a system that women can trust, to get women reporting their abuse earlier, before their perpetrators entrap them. To return to an earlier statistic, it is estimated that more than 80 per cent of women living underground today have never reported to police.
Given this, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to consider a radical response, as some other countries have: an entirely new model of policing that would revolutionise the way women report domestic abuse.
To see radical change in action, we need to look to South America – specifically, Argentina. Here’s the backstory: in the 1980s, as Argentina emerged from a brutal military dictatorship, newly elected democratic governments faced an enormous trust deficit when it came to law and order. Women – who had experienced severe forms of gendered violence – didn’t trust the police. The military police ‘were the ones who abducted them, raped them, tortured them’, says Professor Kerry Carrington, head of Queensland University of Technology’s school of justice. ‘You know The Handmaid’s Tale? That’s based [partly] on Argentina, where young women were kept in captivity, made to have babies for officers, and then had their babies stolen.’ Needing a new approach, Argentina looked to Brazil, where women had been similarly brutalised by the state. Brazil had introduced a new model of policing: delegacia da mulher, or ‘police stations for women’. These new police stations looked nothing like the old ones: they were brightly painted converted houses, located in the heart of the barrios (neighbourhoods). Most importantly, they were led – and mostly staffed – by female police officers.
Argentina introduced its first police station for women in 1985, and today in Buenos Aires alone there are 128 comisaría de la mujer y la familia (police stations for women and children), staffed by around 2300 police. They have all the powers of regular police – they conduct investigations, make arrests – but that’s where the comparison ends. Their structure is completely different – they report to the police minister via their own Commissioner for Women’s Police, not the head of the common police – and their mission is different too. Their primary purpose is not to enforce the law; it’s to protect the victims. ‘The police there are completely guided by what the woman wants to do,’ says Carrington, who spent three months with the women’s police in Argentina. ‘They will listen to her story, and investigate and prosecute – if the woman chooses to do that. Whatever they do, it’s always at the woman’s instigation, because they know that intervening is not always the solution. They prefer to empower and prevent. They never turn a woman away, and they never take their power away from her, which is what abusers do.’ Sometimes they will help a woman apply for a protection order. Other times, she may want them to kick her abuser out of her house. Or she might just want them to talk to him. ‘It’s not driven by punitiveness,’ says Carrington. ‘It’s driven by what works.’ No matter is too trivial – they are there to listen and protect, not to decide whether a law has been broken.
The stations are designed to be inviting. Instead of walking into a hard, grey waiting room, women enter a living room hung with paintings, where they are welcomed. If the woman has kids with her, she can leave them with a worker who will look after them in a playroom while she is interviewed by police. Crucially, all the services she needs – lawyers, social workers, psychologists – are under the same roof, and police will also help her to get medical and financial aid. Instead of having to contact several different agencies, as most women do in Australia, they can get everything they need in one place.
But the women’s police don’t just wait for victims to come to them: they go out and find them. ‘They go to hospitals, and if there’s a woman who looks like she’s been beaten, they’ll go and ask her about it. They even stand outside churches when the congregations come out on Sunday, and hand out flyers to women that read “domestic violence is a crime”, saying, “If you ever want to talk.” They’re just amazing – they’re not frightened of the local minister. They know where the pockets of resistance are.’ The women’s police even organised a public march to end violence against women, which drew a massive crowd of 70,000 people. This community outreach is a big part of their power. ‘They form incredible links with the community. At Christmas time, they get in their police cars and take donated toys to children in the barrio. They have roving units that go to remote and rural areas of the province of Buenos Aires to hand out information. When you drive in a women’s police car it’s an amazing feeling – everyone’s waving and saying hello. They don’t do that to other police.’
Women don’t report domestic abuse to police for many reasons: they think it’s too trivial, they’re ashamed, they’re afraid their children will be removed, or they don’t trust police to act in their best interests. But getting police involved early can be the best kind of protection a woman can have. Studies have found that although women are afraid that calling the police will make the perpetrator escalate, the opposite is true. A decade-long study from the United States, in which each victim was interviewed six times over three years, found that perpetrators were 89 per cent less likely to reoffend after police were called.26 The longer women delay reporting, the more dangerous their relationship may become, and the harder it is for them to leave. Only 11 per cent of perpetrators kill their victim within the first year.27 Getting women to report early is critical for preventing future homicide.
That’s where the women’s police are making a difference. A five-year study from Brazi
l – which compared two groups of 2074 barrios with comparable socio-demographic characteristics – found the homicide rate for all women dropped by 17 per cent. The result was much better for young women in metropolitan areas, aged fifteen to twenty-four: the domestic homicide rate for these women went down by 50 per cent.28
Across the world, women’s police stations are becoming increasingly popular. There are now 485 in Brazil, and the model has spread not only to Argentina, but Bolivia, Ecuador, Ghana, India, Kosovo, Liberia, Nicaragua, Peru, the Philippines, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Uganda and Uruguay. In 2011, a UN Women evaluation found that in Latin America, women’s police stations enhanced women’s access to justice, increased the likelihood of conviction and gave women greater access to other services like counselling, health, legal, financial and social support. The stations were also incredibly well received by the community: of those surveyed, 77 per cent in Brazil, 77 per cent in Nicaragua, 64 per cent in Ecuador and 57 per cent in Peru believed they had reduced violence against women.29 This was also having a ripple effect in terms of advocacy: victims who’d been helped by women’s police, and educated on their rights, were more committed to helping other women leave domestic violence and to pursue their abuser through the courts.
Professor Carrington is in the middle of a three-year research project in Argentina, where she’s conducting the first evaluative study to examine just what effect women’s police stations are having on domestic violence.‡‡ When she’s finished, in September 2019, she’ll be knocking on the doors of every police commissioner in Australia. She’s adamant that Australian police need to transform the way they respond to domestic violence. ‘We have a structural problem in Australia: 85 per cent of sworn officers are men, whereas 85 to 95 per cent of victims of gendered violence are women,’ she says. ‘That structural problem is not going to be fixed by just telling women to report. They’re not going to do it. You need to have a completely different culture – a completely different mechanism.’ For Carrington, it’s a no-brainer – and it wouldn’t even cost that much. ‘They don’t have to be police stations. They don’t need cells, so you can convert houses, units, churches, community halls – there’s all sorts of ways you can do it.
‘Women’s police stations have taken off around the world because they’re cost-effective, they’re on the front line, and they’re really solving that structural issue of women not wanting to report to male police.’
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Many women who are dominated and controlled underground don’t report because they think that without proof of physical violence, police won’t help them. Sadly, often they’re right: in Australia, coercive control is not a crime.*** Our laws empower police to arrest for discrete acts of violence, but not for an ongoing pattern of controlling behaviour (aside from violent threats and stalking). This is a fundamental disconnect. Governments funnel millions into awareness campaigns, emphasising that domestic violence is not just physical. Report domestic violence, women are told: it’s a crime. But if we don’t treat coercive control as a criminal offence, is domestic violence really a crime?
For many women, it’s not the physical abuse, but the prolonged domination that ruins their lives. In a 2014 survey of UK victims, 94 per cent said that the coercive control was the worst part of what they suffered.30 However, unlike in Australia, women in England and Wales now have laws that recognise the scope of domestic abuse: in a world-first, these countries outlawed coercive control in 2015, and made it punishable by up to five years in jail. Police, trained to focus on specific incidents, have been slow to apply the new law – a 2016 report recorded only fifty-nine convictions in the first eight months. Nonetheless, it signals the beginning of a paradigm shift. Since the laws were introduced, men have been convicted for patterns of behaviour that include confiscating or destroying their partner’s mobile phone; demanding that they eat certain foods or sleep on the floor; prohibiting them from working; deleting all male contacts from their social media; and threatening or actually committing self-harm to prevent them leaving.31 In some Australian states, such actions might persuade a magistrate to issue a protection order, but they are not themselves considered criminal offences. In other words, our justice system still responds according to what sociologist Evan Stark calls the ‘men’s definition of violence’.###
Criminalising coercive control is not a new idea, and several Australian law reform bodies have actually advised against it. There are legitimate concerns, particularly that an untrained police force will mistake victims for primary aggressors. But, as Deakin University’s Paul McGorrery and Marilyn McMahon argue, ‘most of these decisions [against a law change] were made before the UK laws came into effect, or at least before we knew how such an offence would work in practical terms. That is no longer the case’.32
In April 2019, Scotland brought in new coercive control laws that are being hailed as the ‘gold standard’. The Scottish laws – which carry a maximum penalty of fifteen years in prison – are backed by an impressive countrywide education program. Fourteen thousand officers and staff have received first-responder training to help them recognise the ‘seemingly innocuous actions’ [that] form coercive control, and a further thousand are receiving more intensive training as domestic abuse ‘champions’, who will work on the frontlines to lend support and embed long-term cultural change. But the education doesn’t stop with police: the women’s charity Women’s Aid will also be training Scotland’s judges and sheriffs on how the new offence will be prosecuted, and how coercive control impacts on adult and child victims. ‘This new offence is groundbreaking,’ said Gillian MacDonald, crime and protection lead for Police Scotland. ‘For the first time, it will allow us to investigate and report the full circumstances of an abusive relationship.’
For too long, women have been left to protect themselves and their families from men intent on destroying everything they love and cherish. Why should coercive control – the most dangerous kind of domestic abuse – be invisible to the criminal justice system? It’s not good enough to wait for the bruises to appear: we know controlling behaviours are red flags for future homicide. Scotland has set an example for the world to follow. It’s time that Australia got serious about protecting victims and made coercive control a crime.
*Not only did Nicole fear having her boys removed by child protection, but she believed that if she went into refuge her teenage boys would not be allowed to come with her. Older boys are not permitted in some women’s shelters as some teenage boys can present safety issues. This is not a uniform approach: some refuges have no problem taking teenage boys. ‘If the mother wants them to come with her then they should be with her,’ says Julie Oberin, chief executive of Annie North Women’s Refuge in Bendigo, Victoria. ‘I have found the boys that come into refuge with mum are extremely supportive of her. The ones who aren’t won’t come.’
#The reason there were only nine charges, says Nicole, is that in order for a charge to be made, she had to assign a date to each offence. Rape had been so commonplace in her marriage, she could only remember nine incidents that happened at key points in time, ‘such as kids’ birthdays or a wedding we had attended’.
†Even this statistic is not perfect – women may go missing for years, their murders may go unsolved, or – especially in the case of Indigenous women in remote communities – their deaths may not be investigated at all.
§The ABS 2016 Personal Safety Survey found that less than one in five women (18 per cent) who had experienced violence at the hands of their current partner had ever contacted the police.
‡The 2018 Australian Domestic and Family Violence Review found that most men who committed domestic homicide (63.6 per cent) killed their current female partners, but in 26 per cent of those cases the female had indicated an intention to separate. Thirty-six per cent of male perpetrators killed their female partners after they left, and almost half of those killed her within three months of the relationship ending.
**With the exception of t
eenage boys in some cases.
##Community housing organisations managed to add more than four times that number, creating 530 new apartments.
††Some have attributed this to the ‘Going Home, Staying Home’ reforms in New South Wales, in which a vast number of specialist women’s refuges were defunded in 2014, and their services given to large faith-based charities or consortiums. The reform also caused navigation confusion, meaning that police and other services didn’t know where to refer women who needed crisis accommodation.
§§Threatening other men was a pattern: the night before, Wayne had beaten a man with a pool cue for ‘hugging’ his wife.
‡‡For further information on women’s police stations in Argentina, see https://research.qut.edu.au/pgv/
***One state has come close to criminalising it. Tasmania’s Family Violence Act 2004 criminalises financial and emotional abuse, which is defined as the pursuit of ‘a course of conduct that he or she knows, or ought to know, is likely to have the effect of unreasonably controlling or intimidating, or causing mental harm, apprehension or fear, in his or her spouse’.
###It is a criminal offence, however, to breach a protection order.
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THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS
Women will be told by child protection, it’s absolutely critical that your child have no contact with the [abusive] father, otherwise we’ll remove the child from you. Then the next week, they’re told in the Family Court it’s absolutely critical that this child has contact with the father.