Domestic violence perpetrators sniffing partner’s underpants, bodies to monitor their behaviour

A domestic violence sector source says that a “surprising number” of abusive men are sniffing their partners’ bodies and underwear to check for signs of infidelity.

Jealous and abusive partners are sniffing their partner’s underwear after she comes back from trips outside the house by herself.

A Cairns domestic violence sector source says that jealous men sniffing their partners’ bodies and their underpants is surprisingly common and often escalates into physical violence.

The Cairns Post has learned that women in Cairns have been complaining to counselling services and lawyers about jealous partners who are reluctant to let them leave the house alone.

And, if the partner “lets them out”, when they return, they smell them all over and smell their underwear to see if they slept with another man.

The actions are part of a pattern of behaviour that domestic violence advocates hope will be covered in contentious new coercive control laws the state government says it will bring in next year.

Domestic violence advocates say controlling behaviour rather than other events of violence often precipitate women being killed by their partners.

Some domestic violence advocates have repeatedly voiced concerns about how the laws will be phrased and have expressed disapproval at draft versions of the legislation.

Nadia Bromley, CEO of the Women’s Legal Service Queensland, told the Cairns Post that in a high number of cases where women were killed in acts of domestic violence, their murder was the first act of physical violence and often followed an increasingly coercive pattern of controlling behaviour.

“It is behaviour that involves an imbalance of power and an architecture of control. It includes all sorts of control: sexual violence, control and jealousy, threats of violence, isolating people from their friends and family, technological surveillance”.

At least one woman is killed each week in Australia in family and domestic violence-related homicides.

Ms Bromley said the underwear and body sniffing examples provided to the Cairns Post by another source fitted with the “surveillance and jealousy aspects of coercive control”.

The state government has committed to criminalising coercive control.

Earlier this year, it passed some amendments to “address the patterned nature of coercive control”.

Premier Annastacia Palaszcuk has said that “coercive control is at the core of domestic and family violence.”

Ms Palaszcuk has described it as “a pattern of deliberate behaviours perpetrated against a person to create a climate of fear, isolation, intimidation and humiliation”.

But legislation making coercive control a stand-alone offence has not yet been introduced into parliament.

Attorney-General Yvette D'Ath has confirmed coercive control has been criminalised but there is still debate on how the yet-to-be-drafted legislation should be shaped.

The Cairns Post understands that domestic violence advocates are concerned about the proposed legal test of the new laws. Some in the sector say that drafts of the new laws indicate a complainant must prove “serious harm” has occurred due to the conduct for it to be considered coercive control.

“We would like to see an emphasis on control rather than harm in the legal test,” Ms Bromley said, with advocates concerned that this would place too high a bar for complainants when making coercive control complaints.

Ms Bromley was also concerned that inadequately drafted laws would “misidentify” female victims as perpetrators because of how they can emotionally react to episodes of domestic violence against them.

“Sometimes, for instance, a woman is so upset she damages property after a domestic violence incident, and we don’t want women victims being misidentified as serious offenders” under the new laws, she said.

A range of behaviours that will become illegal next year are currently not captured by the law. However, there have been cases where courts have held that underwear sniffing and inspections for semen formed part of an overall matrix of domestic violence behaviour.

Originally published as Domestic violence perpetrators sniffing partner’s underpants, bodies to monitor their behaviour