This harrowing story is too common in Australia

RACHEL’S story is horrific. Spat on, called awful names, beaten. The worst part is she’s not alone. WARNING: Confronting

Domestic violence during pregnancy is a predictor of future homicide, experts say.

WARNING: Confronting

“YOU useless, lazy bitch,” Blake* screamed at his heavily pregnant partner, Rachel*, as they ate dinner. He wanted the tomato sauce and she “didn’t pass it fast enough”.

Blake then picked up a drinking glass and smashed it over his own head.

Simultaneously petrified of Blake and worried about his injuries, Rachel drove him to the hospital as blood poured out of his head and hand. In the car, the verbal abuse continued.

“When we get to the hospital I’m telling them that you did this to me. They’ll believe me and if you don’t f**king agree to that, I’m going to jump out of the car,” Blake shouted at her.

Rachel did not agree and Blake made good on his threat and jumped out of the rapidly moving vehicle. He called a family member to pick him up from the side of the highway and Rachel met them at the hospital.

“They then had to keep him in because he had to have surgery,” Rachel recalls, “I got home and it looked like a murder scene from the TV series Dexter — just blood everywhere.”

Reflecting back on the violence her former partner inflicted on her, 31-year-old Rachel is still in disbelief. She comes from a close-knit, loving family and works full time as a project manager.

“I’ve been raised to be a strong, intelligent woman, to have my own opinions about things,” she said.

“I never imagined any of this happening in my life,” she confesses, “I used to judge people like me.”

A few moments later Rachel says: “He tried to kill me.”

Rachel pictured at seven months pregnant.

While Blake was mentally abusive before the pregnancy, the physical violence only started once Rachel was expecting.

“He would spit on me constantly,” she says, noting that as the pregnancy progressed so did the abuse.

“It started getting just a lot more frequent,” she says.

Shockingly, Rachel’s story is far from unique. According to ANROWS’ analysis of the ABS’s 2012 Personal Safety Survey, of the “768,800 Australian women who have experienced violence by a former partner and were pregnant during that relationship, more than half (414,600) experienced violence while pregnant.”

And for women who’ve experienced domestic abuse while pregnant with a current partner, “three out of five (61.4 per cent) experienced violence for the first time during pregnancy.”

For the first 14 weeks of the pregnancy, Rachel’s morning sickness was constant and severe — a fact that seemed to enrage her former partner.

When the morning sickness caused her to vomit, Rachel recalls: “It was just insult after insult with Blake calling me a dog, a c*** and telling me I was dirty and disgusting for doing that. I’ve ruined his night.”

One evening she was unwell and declined to cook dinner because the smell of food made her nauseous.

“He got so angry that he started screaming at me. So I went to my room [and] locked the door,” Rachel explains.

“It’s my time to be happy. You’re f**king taking it away from me,” Blake screamed through the locked door.

Rachel cried and packed a bag with her clothing. Attempting to leave, she wheeled it out of the bedroom towards the front door.

“He grabbed my suitcase and he screamed, ‘You’re not stealing my shit!’ and ripped open my suitcase, threw all my things all over the floor.

“I was scared at that point so I tried to go out through the front door,” she says.

Blake grabbed the back of her head and smashed it against the door she was trying to exit.

“There was a park down the end of the street and I ran all the way to the park. I remember it was winter,” Rachel says, “it was freezing.”

In the chaos, her little dog had run out the door after her.

“I remember just holding her to keep warm … I was probably there maybe three hours. And I thought: ‘What can do I do? I have no phone, I have no wallet, I’ve got nothing.’ He’d ripped it all out of my hands. So I went back,” she says.

On the surface the notion of harming a pregnant woman seems incomprehensible. To Jacquelyn Campbell, a professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing in Baltimore, it isn’t. She’s been working on the issue of pregnancy and domestic abuse for more than 30 years.

Dr Campbell’s research shows men who abuse their partners during pregnancy are “particularly dangerous.”

“It’s one of the risk factors for homicide,” she says.

Even so, Dr Campbell wants us to view this information in context.

“The vast majority of women who leave an abusive partner leave safely,” she says.

Reflecting on the hundreds of stories she’s heard from woman who have been abused during pregnancy, Dr Campbell says the partner was often “pathologically jealous” and against the evidence “thought the baby was somebody else’s.”

One woman she interviewed during her research told Dr Campbell: “He held me under water in the bath tub, trying to get me to admit that the baby wasn’t his.”

Dr Campbell goes on to explain that the variables are complex. For some women in violent relationships, she says, pregnancy is a protective factor. The violence ceases at pregnancy and resumes again after the baby is born.

For other women, it’s more of a “business as usual” scenario.

“He was already hitting her [and] pregnancy didn’t make any difference,” Dr Campbell says.

In cases like Rachel’s, the physical violence starts during pregnancy. Dr Campbell says blokes in this camp may attempt to blame their violence on the woman’s behaviour by saying things like: “She wasn’t interested in sex anymore, she was neglecting me … she was all temperamental because of the pregnancy.”

As a registered nurse, Dr Campbell is greatly concerned about the health risks this type of violence poses to the mother and baby.

“We find that women who are abused during pregnancy are more likely to have a low birth weight infant,” Dr Campbell says, and “have an early delivery.”

While Dr Campbell says “we don’t know all the reasons why” babies of abused mothers are prone to having low birth weights, it “suggests some compromise of the placenta, which may be that stress response.”

“Women who are abused are more likely to smoke during pregnancy and that also is related to low birth weight infants,” she adds.

Furthermore, the evidence shows intimate partner violence during pregnancy can be associated with “mental health problems and cognitive delays” in children.

And as Dr Campbell points out, the mother’s mental health can suffer too.

“Abuse during pregnancy is one of the major risk factors for post-partum depression,” she says.

Interestingly, Rachel was diagnosed with depression while she was pregnant and only recently stopped taking medication for it.

Like most romantic relationships, hers started with high hopes. Rachel met Blake in 2012, shortly after moving back to Sydney from Brisbane. The man she was introduced to by a mutual friend came across as “intelligent” and “very charismatic.”

“He sold himself as a really motivated person that … worked really hard and had lots of friends.

“What he portrayed was completely different to the reality of it. He sucked me in with lies, that’s all I can say,” Rachel says.

The pair moved in together a few months after they met. It wasn’t long until Rachel started noticing “the cracks.”

“He hardly went to work, he ended up losing his job, he would smoke marijuana all day.”

Blake was paranoid Rachel was cheating on him and was constantly messaging her to try and find out where she was and what she was doing.

“[He] started talking about how the world owes him things and how society isn’t made for people like him,” she recalls.

“You always want to believe the person you love and I did love him and I trusted him and I didn’t really think that he was lying or making things up,” she says, adding: “I guess I was a little bit naive.”

After a few months of living together things seemed to settle down into “a really good period where we were discussing our future and … we were talking about having a child,” Rachel says, and “about three months later I fell pregnant.”

The night Blake smashed the glass over his head was the final straw. With help from her father, Rachel left and went to live with her parents. Her daughter, Olivia*, was safely born 12 weeks later.

Although she was grateful for her parents’ kindness, Rachel eventually wanted her own space. Mother and baby moved into a rented townhouse. The decision nearly cost her life.

For their daughter’s sake, Rachel was still in intermittent contact with Blake. She had started dating a new man and felt duty-bound to “do the right thing” and tell Blake about it.

This set off a tirade of verbal abuse and online stalking. Sometimes, Blake would send her more than 300 text messages a day.

Late one night Blake turned up at Rachel’s door claiming he wished to apologise. Rachel let him in. Once inside, he began threatening to take Olivia off her.

“I saw this change in his eyes, like he glazed over,” she says, “and he launched at me.”

He snatched Rachel’s phone and tried to strangle her.

“I don’t remember it hurting, I just remember feeling like I couldn’t breathe,” she recalls.

Blake then grabbed a pair of scissors off the dining room table.

“He had them up against my neck. He said, ‘I’m going to f**king kill you, I’m going to f**king kill you’.”

Rachel screamed for help and pinched him between the legs. Briefly, he let go. As she grabbed her phone back, Blake bit a huge chunk out of her arm. She shows me the scar.

At this point she ran outside and Blake chased her. Then Rachel managed to get back in, lock the door and call the police.

Last year a magistrate found Blake guilty of multiple charges, including common assault and assault causing bodily harm. He was given a 12 month good behaviour bond and a fine.

In her victim impact statement, Rachel wrote that the violent assault had permanently changed her.

“Her [Olivia’s] terrified cries because of my screaming for help will be a sound I have to remember for the rest of my life,” she wrote.

Rachel’s statement explained the abuse caused her to become “scared” of life as well as “closed off, angry, self depreciating, tired, irritable and empty.”

“Even to this day when I do go to work, I am anxious, constantly looking over my shoulder. Almost every day I have to excuse myself to go and cry in the toilets.

“I lost my new partner because he did not feel safe for himself or his own daughter because of what you [Blake] did that night,” the statement read.

Looking back now, Rachel acknowledges she used to be ashamed of being in a violent relationship.

These days she wishes she’d reached out for help much sooner and urges other women to do the same.

“It’s so much better having shame than the violence getting to the point where you might lose your life,” she says.

More than a decade ago, Dr Campbell and her colleagues drew an important link between violence during pregnancy and femicide. The researchers called for “the immediate need for universal abuse assessment of all pregnant women.”

Subsequently, experts at the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing’s Domestic Violence have clinically tested a home visitation program called “DOVE.” The program has been proven to reduce domestic violence exposure among pregnant women.

*For safety reasons, names have been changed along with some identifying details.

If you or someone you know is impacted by sexual assault or family violence, call 1800 RESPECT (1800 737 732) or visit www.1800RESPECT.org.au. In an emergency, call 000.

You can also call Lifeline on 131114 or chat online at www.lifeline.org.au

Ginger Gorman is an award winning print and radio journalist, and a 2016 TEDx Canberra speaker. Follow her on Twitter @GingerGorman