Abuser who bit teen girl more than 20 times handed two decade DVO

A sadistic domestic abuser whose vile history of ‘extreme’ abuse against his teenage partner left her ‘covered in blood’ has been handed a two decade domestic violence order.

A SADISTIC domestic abuser whose vile history of “extreme” abuse against his teenage partner left the girl “covered in blood” after he bit her more than 20 times, has been handed a two decade domestic violence order.

The Alice Springs man, who cannot be named, pleaded guilty in the Supreme Court last month to a string of violent offences against the girl between 2018 and 2020.

The court heard the abuse started in 2018 when the man was 17 and his partner was just 15 and he first punched her in the face for “some unknown reason”.

Then in 2019, he again punched her in the face while he was driving to a service station where he told her to “wipe your tears and just go get us a drink”.

After he yelled at her, the girl “ran into the shop, distressed and in tears” and bought the drink before returning to the car where the man punched her in the face four more times, while calling her a “slut”.

The man eventually got out of the car and whipped the girl with a rubber door seal before leaving her by the side of the road and eventually returning, yanking some of her hair out and then “threw her some baby wipes and told her to clean up”.

Later, the court heard, the man punched the girl again, pushed her to the ground and told her to stay there where she sat “for about half an hour, crying”.

The horrific abuse only escalated once the man turned 18 when, again for unknown reasons, he grew enraged, “screamed and threw things around the room”, and cut her with a knife before instructing her to lie to hospital staff about the injury.

In another incident in 2020, sentencing judge Judith Kelly said the man began repeatedly beating the girl with a cricket bat before forcing her to clean the car.

“She was walking on eggshells at this stage,” Justice Kelly said.

“She went out and cleaned the car, and then you yelled at her, saying you were only joking: ‘You’re making me look like an idiot.’

“And you engaged in more physical violence while you were sitting in the car, and she told you that she was sorry.”

The man would also go on to choke the girl until she blacked out and bite her on multiple occasions, “so many times that she lost count”, to “teach her a lesson”, saying “You hurt me, I hurt you”.

He later locked the girl in a bedroom before she managed to escape and alert a neighbour who saw her “covered in blood” and called the police.

Just Kelly said hospital staff then found “in excess of 21 human bites on her neck, hands, torso, thighs and feet”.

“This included open wounds on her hands, fingers and torso, a laceration on her head, swelling and bruises to her nose, mild swelling to the neck area and evidence of various old injuries,” she said.

In sentencing the man to six years and nine months in jail, Justice Kelly said “the abuse (the girl) suffered at your hands was horrendous” and praised her for having “the courage to stand up in court, look you in the eye and read out her (victim impact) statement”.

“That was a very brave thing for her to do,” she said.

But Justice Kelly said the man had had a difficult childhood, marred by his father’s domestic violence against his mother and had “suffered from quite extreme deprivation, trauma and neglect as a child”.

“So I do accept that your moral culpability for this offending is somewhat reduced because of your traumatic and dysfunctional upbringing,” she said.

“You suffered neglect and abuse at a time when kindness or cruelty had the potential to shape who you became.

“But on the other hand, your actions were so extreme that the need for community protection is correspondingly increased.”

In setting a non-parole period of three years and five months, Justice Kelly also issued a full non-contact domestic violence order, to be in place for 20 years, to protect the girl from him once he gets out of prison.