This woman helped police bring the first coercive control charge

NSW Police have received more than two dozen reports of coercive control in the first month since it became a criminal offence. One person has been charged, and it’s partly thanks to this woman.

Hayley Foster, who is the first director of the Federal Circuit and Family Court, spent years campaigning for the criminalisation of coercive control, a form of domestic abuse where someone repeatedly hurts, scares or isolates another person to control them.

Hayley Foster has faced vitriol and abuse from unlikely places. Credit: Steven Siewert

The form of psychological violence is often a precursor to, or occurs alongside, physical violence. The new offence was introduced in July. In that month, 23 incidents were recorded by NSW Police, who recorded 3.3 types of controlling behaviour per incident on average. Ninety-one per cent of victims were female.

Foster says bringing the legal change wasn’t easy: “The public debate was painful, and it took a toll on many of us on both sides of the discourse,” she said. First Nations advocates were “understandably concerned” about further policing impact on First Nations women and families, she says.

Foster comes off as elegant and efficient but humble. She wears a pale blue trench coat that matches her eyes. An engagement ring sparkles on her finger. For our meeting, she considers a cafe in Glebe, where Sydney’s women’s refuge movement took off with a first shelter established in 1974, but instead she decides on the Good Chemistry cafe near the Federal Circuit and Family Court in Sydney’s CBD.

Good Chemistry’s Clean Green bowl with a side of halloumi.Credit: Steven Siewert

It’s a favourite spot among lawyers and judges, hidden at the back of Ace Hotel where no prying eyes can see in. The staff serve us from the menu of Loam, a restaurant next to the cafe, also in the hotel. Foster orders the Clean Green bowl with a side of halloumi and picks at it delicately while answering my questions. I get stuck into a Portobello Katsu burger.

The privacy is something Foster appreciates. She’s faced abuse and violence in her previous roles as the chief executive of Full Stop and Women’s Safety NSW, where she was an outspoken advocate and prolific on social media.

This is how I know her – as someone who always picks up the phone to give a quote, and who doesn’t shy away from saying what she wants.

Foster has played a role in almost every major piece of sexual discrimination legislation in the past five years. She’s helped develop affirmative consent laws; she introduced paid domestic violence leave; and she worked on both Respect@Work and the National Plan to End Violence Against Women and Children in Australia.

This month, the national cabinet announced $4.7 billion over five years for frontline services to help those escaping family violence, as part of the national plan.

“[The plan] is something I’m incredibly proud of, but we knew from the start that its promise would be hollow without the proper investment. You can’t end gender-based violence in a generation if you’re not willing to fund the services that make that possible,” she says.

Her new role is to enhance the court’s ability to respond to family violence. She says part of her job consists of “making people uncomfortable”. Foster asks difficult questions about whether court proceedings harm rather than help.

She advises some of Australia’s most distinguished judges to go back to the classroom for lessons on family violence. (She says it’s a “respectful invitation” as judges can’t be compelled to do the training).

She has a calm demeanour and a bright outlook, always focused on the silver lining, so it’s difficult to picture Foster making anyone uncomfortable – though putting them in their place I can see.

It’s also difficult to imagine her in any other field. Foster has worked for ANZ bank and studied for a masters in economics – which she abandoned after becoming pregnant and moving to the NSW’s Northern Rivers region to be closer to her mum – but she has been primed to work in the gendered violence space since she was a child.

Her mum Pamela Foster worked for the NSW Women’s Refuge Resource Centre, helping get women out of dangerous situations in the 1980s and 1990s. “I remember being in the car and trying to get somebody out of the house while we knew the partner was out. So we’d go and help her get her and her stuff – we’d always have to park the car so we could get out quickly,” Foster says.

It’s an intense thing for a 10-year-old to experience, but it was just the way of life for Foster, spending afternoons in refuges and celebrating Christmas with victims of violence. Some children spoke frankly about their experiences. Others mimicked the kind of behaviour they’d seen at home.

“It was quite an eye-opener. There were times that I definitely didn’t feel safe,” she says.

She remembers falling asleep on the couch at home, listening to feminist trailblazers such as Aunty Sue Pinckham and Barbara Kilpatrick as they sat around her dining table debating policies and services that would shape the state’s approach to gendered violence. “It was exciting, and I was learning through osmosis,” Foster says.

She has experienced gender-based violence herself, but she doesn’t speak about it publicly: “There are too many people involved, and they need to have that agency to talk about it publicly. I don’t want to take that consent away from them.”

Public roles bring criticism and gender-focused roles bring violence. Foster has had vile threats thrown at her on social media, and she has been followed and stalked to the home she and her two children lived in by men who took issue with her remarks about male violence.

But toxicity has come also from others who are fighting to end gendered violence, as organisation leaders – carrying their histories of violence and trauma – fight for scraps of funding.

“It felt like every time we’d achieve victory in the public arena, you’re waiting for vitriol,” she says. “You get a lot of criticism working in a space where there’s so much lived experience and people are so personally impacted. It’s an environment where some people want to take you down.”

Working 80-hour weeks in such an emotional area was exhausting, and being a public figurehead even more so. The time of COVID lockdowns, when domestic violence skyrocketed, was particularly challenging. She recalls her daughter interrupting an ABC News interview for help locating her hairbrush, not caring that her mother was on live TV.

“You’re always doing something important. You’re always on the radio, on the television or on the phone. I remember this one time during COVID-19, I was on the phone running down the street just to get away from my children, who were determined to talk and ask me questions at that moment – they were like, ‘my needs are important, too’,” she says.

It seems Foster never stops moving, but there was a time when she couldn’t sit up for longer than 10 minutes. Around 2009, while pregnant with her second child in Lismore and working in a range of community legal and safety roles, she suffered a mini-stroke.

It set off a series of neurological conditions and three years of being mostly bed-bound. She was in and out of hospital with near-death experiences. Once, her heartbeat dropped to 12 beats a minute as her vitals collapsed. Hemiplegic migraines caused muscle paralysis on the right side of her body and her face to drop. She lost her capacity to speak for five days. Doctors found – and repaired – a hole in her heart. She credits a Sydney neurologist with bringing her back to health.

Once recovered, instead of slowing down, Foster sped up: She studied law at Southern Cross University and started working at a boutique feminist law firm called Her Legal. The cases were heart-wrenching: children were placed with abusive parents against their will and women and children were set up by the system to fail. “I knew I couldn’t stay practising law on the front line. I needed to help improve the systems overall,” she says.

In 2017, the family lost their home in the floods that inundated the NSW North Coast. She separated from her partner and moved to Sydney with the kids, where she took up her executive roles.

It’s a series of life events that could leave anyone with a chip on their shoulder, but not for Foster, who always focuses on the positives. I point this out to her – she hasn’t noticed she’s an eternal optimist.

“I think it’s my natural state, and I think that is part of my coping strategy,” she says, joking that it’s a trait that probably doesn’t produce good fodder for a journalist searching for drama.

The bill from the Ace Hotel.

Accepting a position as director of the Federal Circuit and Family Court has been a “healthy break”, but she does miss her social media presence.

“I felt a little bit frustrated because there are things that I really want to say,” she says. “I have found that challenging,”

Mostly though, it’s been a nice change. Being away from the 24-hour news cycle has given her more time to focus on her two teenage kids and two soon-to-be stepchildren. Her wedding is scheduled for early next year.

“I needed to be able to see that I was making some sort of system change because, seeing that positive change that’s making a really big difference, and seeing that we’re improving the situation for people, that does sustain me,” she says.

Start the day with a summary of the day’s most important and interesting stories, analysis and insights. Sign up for our Morning Edition newsletter.