It is hard for those living in situations of domestic violence to escape with children and rebuild lives

THE violent men – the behind-closed-doors thugs and bullies – don’t pick up the pieces and pay the bills. We must make it easier for those in abusive situations to escape.

TWO old blokes across a table, a long night, too much wine, too many memories – and I find out my father was a wife beater.

My cousin, six years senior, recalls the time in the 1940s when his dad threw my father out of the house because he had assaulted my mother.

He remembers the blood and the anger.

My parents are long dead and beyond hurt or embarrassment but it added another dimension to my slim understanding of why they separated and why they eventually appeared as Sweetman v Sweetman under “In divorce” in a newspaper law list of 1949.

This is not a case of collapsing public morals, but the result of men letting their fists have the last word.

But what I do know is that the separation made nomads of us as my mother earned a quid as a cook on stations, in hotels and at schools with me at her heel.

The work was demeaning, the conditions appalling, the wages probably modest but the jobs came with accommodation and meals.

That meant a sleep-out on an enclosed veranda, a room in a pub and a hut near the kitchen of a snooty church boarding school.

It must have been tough on her, a trial that ended only when she remarried.

I don’t lose any sleep over it and, believe me, there were a lot of people doing it tougher, including those who occasionally knocked on the kitchen door desperate for a feed or even a warm bottle of milk for a baby.

But things are so much better these days. Or are they?

Only last week I read that more than a third of Australians who sought help from homeless services between 2011 and 2014 did so because of domestic violence.

And, awfully, only 9 per cent of what the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare called “domestic violence clients’’ were able to get long-term accommodation when they first asked for it.

The report says that most (110,000) domestic violence victims seeking homelessness support were adult women.

Of them, 45,000 also had children and 24,000 were young women aged under 24 and on their own.

More than a third of Australians who sought help from homeless services between 2011 and 2014 did so because of domestic violence.

That’s 110,000 women – and probably many more children – looking for somewhere to lay their heads at night just because they made what turned out to be calamitous choices when it came
to partners.

This is not a case of collapsing public morals, of the shredding of the bonds of marriage, the pressure of same-sex relations or any of other real or imagined social sins.

This is the result of men – usually men – letting their fists have the last word.

For many of the victims, that desperate search for shelter would have been compounded by the fact that some cowardly galoot could be stalking, harassing and even assaulting them.

We’ve been down this track before. We’ve worn white ribbons, we’ve marched in the streets and we’ve banged our heads on walls in the search for a solution to domestic violence.

Sadly, I don’t think there is one that doesn’t involve some kind of collective frontal lobotomy for thousands of blokes who can’t or won’t contain their rage and learn to live with their anger and their inadequacies.

What we can do is make it marginally easier for people in abusive situations to escape and to remake their lives and those of their children. But how can that be when even the strongest, the toughest, the most loving of parents has to solve the basic problem of finding a roof and bed before they even think beyond today?

For many victims, the desperate search for shelter is compounded by some cowardly galoot stalking, harassing and even assaulting them.

To be fair, only last year the Federal Government threw another $230 million into the National Partnership Agreement on Homelessness with priority to domestic violence services and young people.

The $230 million is a handsome slab of dough but not much more than we pay into the religiously skewed school chaplaincy program.

Still, it isn’t enough.

But, we could find enough if we looked beyond the immediacy of domestic violence and to a future of social and financial disadvantage and of self-perpetuating generational violence.

Strong women do amazing things but they start off the back marker with possibly decades of hard work and ambition sacrificed to alcohol and violence.

In the social game of snakes and ladders, too many are condemned to slide to the bottom and to vainly try to throw a double six before starting again.

The violent men – the behind doors thugs and bullies – don’t pick up the pieces and pay the bills.

Too often that is left to us through our welfare system as the cost compounds astronomically.

Announcing the new funding, then minister Scott Morrison said the homelessness agreement – begun under Labor in 2009 with federal and state funds – had been “pretty woolly” in the past.

“Woolly” it might be but the National Partnership does its best, providing for about 180 services that include youth, rough sleeping and family violence programs, helping 80,000 people a year and employing more than 3000.

Asked why he had taken so long to come to the party, Morrison replied that making a decision about homelessness funding “isn’t just a simple matter of going to the ATM”.

Sounds almost as tough as finding somewhere for you and your kids to sleep at night.