She was only four, but when Holly’s dad kept hurting her mother, she knew she had to tell someone
MORE than 70 women were killed by their partners in Australia last year. Here is the story of how one SA mother, spurred by her child, had the courage to leave.
HOLLY* was just four-years-old when she revealed a secret that likely saved her mother’s life.
“Mum hadn’t told anybody so I told my (kindy) teachers – I just said ‘My dad strangled my mum’.”
Sarah* had been beaten by her husband from a time long before Holly was born.
Once, during the pregnancy, he kicked the mother of his child square in the stomach. He regularly beat Sarah until she blacked out. He sexually assaulted her and often threatened to kill her.
When Holly came along, he used the child to inflict emotional torture and eventually began assaulting her, too.
“I don’t know why I told that day,” Holly, now nine, says from across the kitchen table in their Adelaide home, eyes downcast. “Probably because it was the night after it happened.
“All I remember is him just coming and banging and shouting.
“I didn’t see most of it because I was hiding upstairs or hiding in the cupboard.
“They (the teachers) were just shocked, I think, when I told.”
Sarah, who has been emptying the dishwasher as Holly and I chat, rejoins us to say her daughter’s revelation was “the turning point”.
“Once she (Holly) was conscious of it I thought ‘That’s it’,” Sarah says of that decisive moment.
“When you finally work up the courage to leave, you turn on a dime.
“It makes me feel annoyed at myself when I think about what he used to do and how pathetic it was that I stayed.
“But you feel so trapped.”
Sarah, now in her 40s, first met the man who would go on to abuse her more than a decade ago.
He was charming in the beginning, and the first year of their relationship was like any other – until the day he strangled her.
“The first time it happened it’s so out of the blue,” Sarah says.
“He was so apologetic afterwards. You’re trying to make sense of that in your head so you accept it. They’re so good for a time afterwards, then it slips again.”
Sarah actually told a friend about the first incident, but lost her support when she took her partner back.
That experience put Sarah off telling others when it happened again.
“You know what the big problem is – you love them,” she explains.
“They wait for you to fall in love with them because it is hard to walk away if you love them.
“If you haven’t told anybody (about the abuse) in the beginning then you’re too embarrassed to tell anybody when you let it happen again.”
Despite the violence, it took Sarah about four years to decide she should leave. The pair split up, but soon after Sarah was surprised to discover she had fallen pregnant.
“He promised the world then,” she says. “He was beautiful again for a while, and I actually believed that he would stop now that I was having his child.”
The couple married and Holly was born soon after. Despite her hopes, the abuse only escalated until the night Holly witnessed her mother being strangled.
It’s been about three years since Sarah gathered the courage to leave her husband for good, but she still lives with the fear that he will appear on their doorstep or at Holly’s school. A restraining order has had little effect and Sarah has almost given up on reporting breaches because the police have regularly not had time to follow up her reports or have not deemed them serious enough.
In one instance, she had to return to the same police station three times to report that her ex-husband had followed her and Holly in a car.
“The whole thing’s a joke,” she says of the intervention order system.
“There’s always an excuse (not to act). There’s no clarity.
“(Holly) has even told police what he’s done to her, that he’s grabbed her around the throat, but that’s not enough apparently, unless there’s physical harm where you can prove it with bruising.
“All those crime shows, when they (victims) say they don’t want to press charges, I can understand why now. Why would you bother when you put yourself out there and then are made to feel like the guilty party?
“I’d take the time to do it if I knew they were going to do something about but...
“In the end you give up.”
Sarah’s harrowing story echoes the experiences of a growing number of victims coming forward to expose failings in a system that is supposed to protect them.
In the past year, at least 72 Australian women have been killed by violent partners. Crisis shelter workers report rising demand for accommodation and support and are having to turn people away. The Domestic Violence Crisis Centre sees up to 2000 women a year. SA police respond to about 10,000 domestic violence incidents annually.
Laws introduced in late 2011 made it easier for police to impose restraining orders on abusers and in their first year of operation officers issued almost 1800.
However, abusers violate these orders frequently. In 2012-13 there were more than 1500 reported breaches. These figures show the extent of the problem still facing society – a problem usually played out behind closed doors.
Recent high-profile cases around the nation have brought the issue into sharp focus but also revealed how authorities and support services are struggling to stamp out abuse.
The Gerard Baden-Clay murder trial in Brisbane seized the public’s attention as prosecutors detailed their case that the real estate agent killed his wife, Allison. Friends of the murdered woman said Baden-Clay was a domineering husband who emotionally belittled his wife.
In Victoria, Rosie Batty spoke publicly a day after her 11-year-old son Luke was killed by his father, Greg Anderson. Anderson’s treatment of Rosie became abusive after Luke was born and the couple were estranged. He killed his son at a public cricket pitch as Rosie stood nearby. Their case shows how children often become caught in the crossfire of abusive relationships.
In South Australia, mother-of-three Graziella Daillér was killed in May by her estranged partner Dion Muir. He then killed himself. Graziella had repeatedly sought help from police to leave her abuser.
This fatal failure to pay attention to a victim’s cries for help was also identified in the case of mother-of-three Zahra Abrahimzadeh, who was murdered by her husband Zialloh in front of 300 people at the Adelaide Convention Centre in March, 2010. Zahra suffered in that abusive relationship for 24 years.
Handing down findings of a coronial inquest into that case in July, Coroner Mark Johns found police failed to arrest or charge Zialloh in the 13 months before the murder, despite a report made by Zahra and her children in February, 2009.
Johns identified arresting and charging abusers as “one of the most powerful” tools police have – but warned that if this power was not used “there is a real danger that the offender will think that he or she has ‘got away with it’”.
One of the most common complaints from victims is that abusers rarely face consequences for assaults or breaches of restraining orders.
They also argue there is too much onus on a victim to prove abuse. If they finally find the courage to leave an abusive relationship, victims are confronted by a lack of support services, which can leave many feeling like they have no option but to return to a dangerous home. Senior police have admitted they need to treat domestic abuse reports with more urgency and the force has committed to more than 50 changes.
Deputy Police Commissioner Grant Stevens is now in charge of a domestic violence portfolio, which aims to influence all police interactions with victims, monitor trends, and “drive cultural change”.
He has also promised to increase training for officers who deal with domestic abuse cases and appoint more staff to the family violence unit.
“There’s been an evolution in society’s understanding and expectations in preventing domestic violence,” Stevens says. “My expectation (of officers) is that you treat every report of domestic violence as if it could be made by your mother or your wife or your sister or your friend… as opposed to treating people like a number.
“You only have to imagine something like that happening to someone you care about and you’d like to think that the system deals with that and provides them with a safe environment.”
At the height of the abuse against Sarah, the tiniest thing would send her then-husband into fits of rage.
“It’s explosive and comes from nowhere,” she says. “He’d shove you against the wall, choking you to where you black out.
“It’s the brute force, the absolute control and domination. He’d put his forehead against mine and be pushing.
“When he’s right close up to you and shouting in your face and you can feel the spit hitting your face and the absolute hatred in his speech.”
Sarah falls silent for some time before opening up about the sexual assaults she describes as “torture”.
“I’d often have bruising on the inside of my thighs,” she says.
And there was the emotional manipulation. “He’d call me all these names and accuse me of sleeping around.
“He’d call friends and family bitches, whores, sluts. He’d try to break down those relationships.
“If (Holly) ever saw it and she’d be screaming for me, he would hold her back and not let her come to me. He’d be punishing me but not realise what damage he was doing to her.”
There remains deep shame at staying in such a dangerous relationship, but it wasn’t until Sarah got out that she really understood what she had been living with.
She remembers crying as she read a book on domestic abuse, feeling as if it was describing her life.
Crisis-shelter workers report women return to abusive partners as many as 12 times, excusing behaviours or feeling a sense of duty to stay for children or pets.
“I used to make a pact with myself that I wouldn’t be nice (to him) again until the bruising was gone,” Sarah says, shaking her head.
“But the next day he would just act like everything was normal and if you couldn’t go back to being normal then he’d get angry again.”
Near the end of the relationship, Sarah said she could “see it coming” and would resign herself to a beating.
National data shows women are two-and-a-half times more likely to be the victim of both partner violence and sexual assault than men. So what is the State Government doing about it?
Premier Jay Weatherill has identified men’s attitudes to violence as a key problem he wants his Government to tackle in its fourth term. He says the balance of power in abusive relationships is often shifted disproportionately to men who “essentially betray a relationship of trust to cause harm”.
“Women are, more often than not, the victims of domestic violence, but it really is up to men to change the way they behave,” he says. “It’s centrally a men’s issue.
“The most significant way we can grapple with this is for men to send a message about this being abhorrent.”
Law changes in 2011 broadened the definition of domestic abuse to include damage to property, emotional or psychological harm and denying a person financial, social or personal independence.
Status of Women Minister Gail Gago said there had been a concerted effort to “remove the blame from the victim and increase the community responsibility for calling (domestic violence) what it is”.
The government is working to build a database of information about domestic abusers and their victims in a bid to identify trends and inform new policy. It
has appointed a researcher, Heidi Ehrat, to advise the Coroner on open investigations and closed cases that involve domestic violence.
Ehrat says her focus is on creating a database that can be “mined”.
“We can look at relationships between demographics, age, employment status, background, location,” she explains. “What are the risk factors, their contact with government services, what are the intervention points? We can do an analysis of . . . gaps in the system.”
Following criticism for not providing enough funding for a sector in critical need, the State Government this month pledged $79,000 a year for four years to the national Foundation to Prevent Violence Against Women and their Children.
Crisis services desperately need funding to provide emergency accommodation and counselling. “One of the most dangerous points in a woman’s life is when she leaves (an abusive relationship),” UniSA’s Dr Sarah Wendt says. “That’s often when murder happens.”
If Sarah had her time over, she would have done things differently. But like many victims, she had no idea of the support available.
“If I’d mentally decided to leave and then stayed for some months and got evidence – the holes in my walls that he fixed, photos of the bruising, going to the doctor – that’s the only way it would have been better,” she says. “If I’d got proof.”
Sarah’s ex-husband was acquitted of an assault charge, but was subsequently convicted of breaching an intervention order. After bitter Family Court proceedings, Holly still has to spend time with her father – the man she describes as “scary, mean and horrible”.
An initial temporary custody order required their visits to be supervised, but this restriction was lifted.
Sarah says the process became so draining and costly that she eventually agreed to a custody settlement where her ex got to spend regular time with their daughter unsupervised. She is still paying off around $50,000 in legal fees.
The Family Court is always supposed to consider the best interests of the child, but judges do not take evidence directly from children caught up in custody battles.
The only way their voices can be heard is through a Family Assessment Report, conducted by a psychologist.
It is very rare that a custody order is made preventing all contact with a parent, although it may be restricted to supervised visits or phone calls.
Asked if she ever wonders what life would have been like with a better dad, Holly answers: “No, I just think of a life without him. I don’t want to see him at all.
“Once he strangled me. He knows that I’m scared of him. He just does what he does and doesn’t even care about it.”
Holly’s pragmatic words sum up the powerlessness many victims feel: “It’s a hard thing to go through but there’s no way that we can stop it, we just have to deal with it.”
* Not their real names
HOW TO GET HELP
• Open up to family and friends and be open to an outsider’s perspective.
• Seek help from a GP who can refer you to specialists such as a psychologist.
Doctors can also document abuse for future evidence.
• Meet with an officer in the SA Police Family Investigation Unit and ask about
taking out an intervention order.
• Ask to speak with senior police managers if you do not feel officers
are taking your reports seriously.
• Contact helplines such as the Domestic Violence Helpline 1800 800 098, 24 hours or the Domestic Violence Crisis Service on 1300 782 200.
• Catherine House helps homeless women to find accommodation,
training and employment — 8232 2282 or catherinehouse.org.au
• Know your rights or contact a legal service to learn more. There is free or
low-cost legal advice and support such as the Women’s Legal Service SA on
8221 5553 or 1800 816 349, the Legal Services Commission of SA on
8463 3555 or 1300 366 424 and the Family Violence Legal Service Aboriginal Corporation (offices in Port Augusta, Ceduna, Port Lincoln) 1800 111 052 or fvlsac.org.au
• Trained volunteers from the Family Court Support Program can accompany
women to the Adelaide Family Court, visit officeforwomen.sa.govau/womens information-service family-court
If you suspect someone might be a victim
• Let them know you are there for them and ready to listen.
• Do not pressure them to make decisions before they are ready.
• Do not make them feel as though the situation is their fault, but remind them
they deserve better.
• Ring domestic violence helplines on their behalf or offer to gather information.
• Do not confront the perpetrator, this could end up putting the victim in
further danger.
Unexpected victims
While victim surveys show that most cases of domestic violence occur in heterosexual relationships and that violence is predominantly targeted at women, a significant number of men in gay and straight relationships are reporting that they have been the victim of physical and sexual violence.
Lesbian women and transgender or intersex people are also reporting violence.
The perception that domestic violence is done by a man to a woman can result in other types of violence going unnoticed.
Crisis accommodation for men and transgender people is limited and men often find it hard to add their voices to those of women who have been abused.
• Gay and straight men can call The National Sexual Assault, Family & Domestic Violence Counselling Line on 1800 737 732 or visit oneinthree.com.au
• Victims of same-sex abuse can contact an SA police Gay and Lesbian Liaison Officer 131 444.
• For further information on same-sex abuse, visit the LGBTIQ Domestic Violence Interagency website anothercloset.squarespace.com