by Jess Hill
And yet, seven years later, the same old stories persist. Parents are still warned against raising abuse allegations. They are still pressured by their lawyers to sign consent orders they know to be dangerous. Victims are still being admonished by judges for bringing up ‘ancient history’, urged to forget their grievances and ‘think about their children’, as though domestic abuse ends when the relationship does. ‘Until they sort out the Family Court, people should stop telling women to leave,’ said one barrister I spoke to, ‘Nikki’, who stayed in a violent relationship herself for ten years after she first saw her husband hit her child. She knew just how unsafe the Family Court could be for victims of abuse, and how hard it would be to prevent her husband getting access, so she stayed in the marriage as a ‘supervisor’. ‘It was the only way I felt I could protect my son.’
If you’re a parent making a genuine allegation of abuse in the Family Court, you could be lucky: your judge may understand family violence, your family report writer may be trained to recognise it and your lawyer might believe you. But for many domestic abuse survivors, the reality is that they will be dragged through the courts for years after they’ve left their abuser and will only be free of the ordeal after the courts rule their children are old enough to decide for themselves. Overwhelmingly, the people who contact me about their cases are mothers, but I’ve also heard from a handful of fathers who had solid evidence they were abused in their marriage, and were met with similarly unprofessional assessments by single experts and disbelief from the bench.
In 2016, two high-profile campaigns to reform the family law courts were launched, barely a month apart.40 Amid the tumult of the federal election campaign, Rosie Batty launched a five-point reform plan from the Women’s Legal Service at the National Press Club. ‘Since I lost Luke,’ she said, ‘the number one issue women come to me with is their desperation and despair over the family law system.’ This had become her ‘biggest area of concern’, because ‘a significant number of people within the family law system simply do not understand or even want to understand the complex nature of domestic violence’. The plan suggests reforms like developing a specialist pathway for domestic violence cases in the family law courts, adequate funding for community legal services, and education for all family law professionals on domestic violence and trauma. The following month, child safety group Bravehearts, founded by Hetty Johnston, released a 277-page report and called for a royal commission into the family law court system. In the last days of 2018, a coalition of federal politicians and community groups united behind Johnston and others to push for a royal commission. The letter, signed by seventeen senators, three MPs, and representatives from forty community groups, stated: ‘The current system is dangerously dysfunctional. It is harming children on a daily basis.’41
The Family Court has rejected these allegations outright for years. But in 2018, the outgoing chief justice of the Family Court, John Pascoe, finally acknowledged them.42 He was haunted by cases of children being murdered by their fathers, like four-year-old Darcey Freeman, and teenage siblings Jack and Jennifer Edwards. ‘These are matters that haunt us all and lurk in the shadows as we face new cases with allegations of violence and wonder which seemingly commonplace case may suddenly take a horrific turn,’ said Justice Pascoe. There had been about fifty major inquiries into the Family Law Act, he told a conference in Brisbane. But if an upcoming government inquiry couldn’t assuage the public’s concerns about the system, ‘it must surely be time to consider a Royal Commission into Family Law’.
I want to put a sharper point on this. The time for toothless inquiries is over. The family law system is ruining the lives of vulnerable children – kids like Carly, Jess, Tim, Sally and Alex, who will now spend the rest of their lives dealing with the legacy of their trauma. Nothing can take that back, but we can act now to make sure no other child is ordered to live with a parent they fear. Only a royal commission can reveal what is going wrong with the family law system, why it is happening and what we must do to change it – and change it for good.**
*One such group, the Australian Brotherhood of Fathers – who regularly protest outside family law courts – claims twenty-one fathers are killing themselves every week because of family access issues, a claim that’s been amplified by the political party One Nation. Roughly forty-one men kill themselves every week in Australia (Samara McPhedran, ‘FactCheck: are “up to 21 fathers” dying by suicide every week?’ The Conversation, 15 November 2017). But though family breakdown is a risk factor for suicide, there is no statistical evidence that shows whether a man who suicided was even a father, let alone a father who suicided due to family access issues. And here’s something else to think about: the NSW Domestic Violence Death Review Team found that of the 245 males who suicided in the six months from July to December 2013, 94 (38 per cent) had prior contact with police in relation to domestic abuse. In the vast majority of these suicides, the men were known perpetrators, while a small minority were victims and perpetrators (and an even smaller group were just victims, of male or female abuse). Does the Australian Brotherhood of Fathers acknowledge that their ‘21 fathers’ suicide rate would have to include men who have spent years abusing their wives and children? I think you can guess the answer to that.
#Today, ABS statistics show that one in eight women, and around one in twenty men, experienced some form of sexual abuse before they were fifteen (ABS, 4906.0 Personal Safety, Australia 2016).
†Fathers’ rights groups even give advice on what terms fathers should use to replace parental alienation syndrome: ‘Consider carefully before you use the term PAS in an Australian family law court; especially using the word “syndrome”’, advises the Family Law Web Guide, a website moderated by fathers’ rights advocates. ‘Better perhaps to talk about “brainwashing”, “extreme alignment” or just “parental alienation”.’ (‘QLD psychologists attack parental alienation (syndrome) (PAS)’, Family Law Web Guide (online), 7 April 2008.)
§In later correspondence with Dr Rikard-Bell’s lawyer, a clarification was added: ‘Our client certainly does not hold the view that 90 per cent of child sexual-abuse allegations in family law proceedings generally are false.’
‡Readers may recognise this purist interpretation of the ‘psychopathology’ model, detailed in Chapter 3.
**Harry and Mia, whose story opened this chapter, were returned to live with their mother after their father relinquished custody. When I asked Harry what he thought about the Family Court, he said, ‘I think [the] Family Court is terrible, and it shouldn’t be a real thing, because children shouldn’t be put with their abusive parent. You can’t accuse the one parent who isn’t doing anything wrong and basically steal their children and give them to an abuser.’ To other kids who were being ordered to live with a parent they were afraid of, he had one last thing to say: ‘Don’t give up. Keep trying.’
10
DADIRRI
Dadirri is inner, deep listening and quiet, still awareness … We have learned to speak the white man’s language. We have listened to what he had to say. This learning and listening should go both ways. We would like people in Australia to take time to listen to us. We are hoping people will come closer. We keep on longing for the things that we have always hoped for – respect and understanding.
MIRIAM-ROSE UNGUNMERR-BAUMANN, ABORIGINAL ELDER, ARTIST AND EDUCATOR, NAUIYU (DALY RIVER)
In the course of writing this book, I met many extraordinary women, but one in particular – an Aboriginal woman – astounded me with her power and resilience. Her story was like nothing I’d ever heard: what she had done to keep herself and her daughter alive was the stuff of thrillers and spy novels. Not only had she survived some of the most terrifying abuse imaginable, she had taken her fight right up to the country’s most powerful, and won. Her humour was wicked and her will unshakeable.
When we spoke, several years had passed since she escaped the man who almost killed her. Her story was central to this chapter. But just days
before this book went to print, she had to withdraw it. She had received a security threat from her ex-partner so grave she couldn’t have her name appear in public.
I wish her story could be told. One day, I hope it will be. But for now, instead of pretending it never existed, I want to begin by honouring her courage and her remarkable mind. I can’t tell anybody who you are, but you know.
*
After more than two centuries of systematic degradation and trauma, it should be no surprise that First Nations people also suffer the worst family violence in Australia. In some communities, it is so endemic the women living there can’t imagine a life without violence. As the Goorie author Melissa Lucashenko writes, ‘For Indigenous women who have been surrounded by violent and oppressive environments their whole lives, assaulted by men both Black and White, the idea that some men do not bash and rape is a startling revelation.’1
The statistics are brutal. Indigenous women are thirty-five times more likely to be hospitalised for family violence–related assaults (that’s just the national average; in some remote areas, it can be more like eighty times the average).2 From their injuries, Indigenous women are also eleven times more likely to die.3 When they do, their deaths are scarcely mentioned in the press. As Arrente writer and activist Celeste Liddle says, ‘the death of Aboriginal women is expected’.4
Leaving situations of domestic abuse is vexed and dangerous for most women. But for Indigenous women particularly, leaving an abusive man can feel impossible or come at too high a price. This hypothetical, submitted to the Queensland Special Taskforce on Domestic and Family Violence, shows how each strand of the web entraps an Indigenous woman in a remote community:
Imagine that you are an Aboriginal woman in a remote Queensland community … You are three hours away from the next community and nine hours away from Woolworths, for the half of the year that the road is open. There are 75 houses, 500 people and one phone box. A roasted chicken costs $50 and a tube of toothpaste costs $14. There are limited services. It takes ten minutes to walk from one side of town to the other. You have lived here all your life. This is all you know.
This is normal for you. Your family lives here. Your support network lives here. Your three children live here. He lives here.
He beats you. Repeatedly. He rapes you. He bites you. He controls you. His family lives here too.
You can’t complain or your children will be taken away and you will spend the next 18 months fighting to get them back. That happened to your sister. You can’t complain or his family will seek retribution. You can’t leave because this is all you know. His uncle works at the Skytrans office. His cousin works at the local shop that sells mobile phones. His sister works at the petrol station. Even if you manage to leave, he will find you and you will be moving to a place where you have nothing, no family, no support.
He assaults you in the street. The police see it. He goes to court. He blames you. You tell the police officer the truth of what happens. The police say that they’ll bring it up in court. He is not taken away from his community because this is all he knows. The matter is adjourned. You wait.
You return home after court with him. You put your name at housing. You are on the list. There are 20 before you. And 50 houses in total. You are expected to wait for three years. Housing is run by the council. His Aunty works at the council.
A few months go by. You try not to make him angry. You see a counsellor. She tells you what you already know. If you can’t leave your community, then the violence will simply be less if you stay with him than if you leave.
Court comes around again. It’s been three months. He returns home again. You’re scared and you don’t understand. Why can’t they just make him leave? The Constable tells you that the prosecutor doesn’t know. It’s the defence lawyer that is adjourning the case. You wait. No-one talked about you in court that day.
He threatens you not to say anything. He punches you in the stomach so it doesn’t show. He always does that. Child Safety spoke to you last week. They didn’t take your children away, but they said there is to be no more violence in the house. You can’t control it. The court date is coming up in three weeks. Hopefully something can happen then …
A Domestic Violence Order is eventually made. He hits you in the street again. The whole process starts again.5
‘You’re not just going to leave your community, when that can mean leaving your kids and your kinship networks,’ says Darumbal and South Sea Islander journalist Amy McQuire. ‘That’s why so many Aboriginal women end up staying: because there’s nowhere else to go.’ Another reason these relationships can be so hard to leave is that, when you’re faced with the powerlessness of dispossession and multigenerational trauma, ‘your relationship is the only thing you hold onto. A lot of this violence is driven by jealousy, because when so much else is out of control in your life, you’re trying to control this one situation that makes you feel better.’
Indigenous women and children are targeted more than any other group in Australia, but their abusers are not always Indigenous men. In fact, as one study showed, the majority of married Indigenous women – 59 per cent – have a non-Indigenous husband.6* Djirra, an Aboriginal family violence legal service, ‘routinely sees Aboriginal clients, mostly women, who experience family violence at the hands of men from a range of different backgrounds and cultures, Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal. The only certainty in the existing data is that Aboriginal women are at disproportionately higher risk of family violence.’7#
*
When I started researching Indigenous family violence, I knew the basics. Police often don’t take women’s complaints seriously and fail to properly investigate when they are assaulted or killed. Stories about this are legion, such as the ‘botched investigation’† of the death of 25-year-old Kwementyaye Green, a mother of two found dead in a vacant lot in Tennant Creek in 2013. Even though her de facto partner, Rodney Shannon, was found lying next to her, police developed what the coroner labelled an ‘irrational preoccupation’8 with the explanation, provided by Shannon, that Green had stabbed herself. That same reasoning seemed to convince Northern Territory police after the death of 31-year-old Natalie McCormack, a youth worker at the Tangentyere Safe House in Alice Springs. Despite the extensive history of domestic abuse from her husband, police accepted his explanation that she had stabbed herself – despite him providing, as the state coroner said, ‘not one scintilla of evidence’ to support it.9 McCormack was killed in 2015. Police have not charged anybody over her death.
But I quickly learned that this understanding only barely scratched the surface. I remember the moment when I realised how little I knew: I was in the car listening to Curtain, a podcast hosted by Amy McQuire and lawyer Martin Hodgson. Hodgson launched into a monologue that left me breathless and enraged. It started with a bold claim: ‘Not only are the police and services not actively supporting Aboriginal women,’ he said, ‘they’re actively punishing Aboriginal women who even dare to speak out about domestic violence.’ At first, that claim smacked of hyperbole. But then Hodgson cited a specific case:
Just last year, an Aboriginal woman supporting her daughter contacted the police to speak about a domestic violence issue that her daughter was experiencing. This is precisely what we ask people to do: to support one another, to support their loved ones, and to contact the police.
This woman would end up in prison. Why? Because when she contacted the police and they came to her home – as she requested of them – they discovered that there was a warrant of commitment [for an outstanding fine], and she was imprisoned for weeks. It could have been longer, but luckily someone paid the fine …
What was it about? An unregistered dog. Police placed the importance of a civil dispute over an unregistered dog ahead of the lives of two Aboriginal women, did not address the issue of domestic violence, and instead imprisoned an innocent Aboriginal woman at Melaleuca women’s prison because she dared try to seek help for her daughter.10
&n
bsp; I couldn’t believe what I’d just heard. Arresting and jailing women for unpaid fines after they had actually called police for protection?
I needed to hear more proof that this police response was a pattern of ‘punishment’, so I gave Hodgson a call. As a lawyer, Hodgson works pro bono not only for victims of domestic violence, but for vulnerable people all over the world – from Australians falsely accused of terrorism overseas to African-Americans facing execution for crimes they didn’t commit. He does all this from home, above a garage on the far south coast of New South Wales, and supports himself the way he did when he was studying law: by writing late at night for car and motorcycle magazines.
When we speak, he’s still tired from the night before: he slept in his car outside a local Aboriginal woman’s house. He was there not as a warning to her perpetrator, but to the police. ‘This is a very common example of what happens to Aboriginal women in particular,’ he explains. ‘Often women will make a report, and then the police will turn up, and before they do anything about the DV, they’re asking everyone for bloody ID. Of course, someone will have outstanding fines, so they’ll be trying to drag them away. It’s an inflamed situation, because often teenage sons wanna protect their mum, but are really in no position to do so.’