Victims left stranded as Territory’s ‘horrifying’ domestic violence rates spiral ‘out of control’

After her partner put his hands around her throat and threatened to kill her, she was terrified of what he would do next. It took police five hours to respond to her plea for help.

On an otherwise typically carefree dry season day in June, a woman’s screams splinter Palmerston’s sunny suburban torpor.

As good neighbours do, the other residents in the street call the police, while inside the woman’s home, her partner, who we’ll call Frank*, has his hands around her throat.

“What you’re doing is wrong,” she tells him after he lets go and pushes her out the door.

“Women get killed (like) this.”

Frank’s reply is chilling: “Maybe I should kill you too.”

But despite her cries for help and the quick thinking of her neighbours, no help would come. At least not for another 45 minutes.

“I was waiting across the road … because I felt unsafe to go to the house, but I had to put myself in a position where I could still see my son was safe,” she says.

“I was calling my dad (interstate) and saying ‘Look they’re still not here’, and he was putting pressure on them and they finally came and I told them everything that had happened.”

The woman, who we’ll call Sarah*, didn’t want to press charges this time, and while she did take out a domestic violence order prohibiting Frank from harming her, it would take months for it to be upgraded to stop him contacting her.

In the meantime, while “getting the run around” from overstretched domestic violence shelters and legal services, Sarah took a holiday to visit family down south and “avoid the violence”.

“Within a week of me being there he was just calling non-stop and accused me of having an affair, he was threatening my father that he was going to come to (where we were), and this happened within the course of a Saturday night, and he just wouldn’t stop,” she says.

“(Local) police came out within 10 minutes and they took it really seriously.”

FIVE HOURS FOR POLICE TO RESPOND

Back in Darwin, Frank’s harassment would continue, along with veiled threats, which Sarah took seriously given his known criminal associations from previous jail stints, until one day the pressure got too much and she again called police “in fear for my life”.

This time it would take officers five hours to respond, during which time, thankfully, he didn’t make good on his threats.

“This guy’s got access to weapons, I’m really scared of my life, he’s also using heavy amounts of crystal meth, he’s put his hands around my neck before and I get told that they take it seriously,” she says.

“But you know, every cop that I’ve dealt with, they roll their eyes, or they take forever to come.”

By November, Frank hadn’t been living at the house for a couple of months, but Sarah wanted to “try and give (him) the benefit of the doubt” and let him come home: “Within 24 hours I went to call for help,” she says.

What happened next would later be described by a Local Court judge as “totally unacceptable.”

“She wants to call the police and he takes the phone from her, she reaches to grab it back, which is completely reasonable, and he slaps it out of her hands,” the judge says.

When Sarah managed to get the phone back and dial triple-0, this time the response was different, at least at first.

“When I called the police that day the magic words were ‘I feel that I’ve been assaulted’ and they came within five minutes,” she says.

“(But) the attitude from this Senior Constable … they stood at the door and I told them the story, I was in tears, and the first thing he said was ‘Oh well he’s got a right to defend himself’.”

“It wasn’t until I said ‘Look, I’ve had nothing but issues with you guys, I’ve been in contact with the Ombudsman, we’ve got a guy here who’s missed two court dates (for breaching the DVO), he’s not getting that his behaviour’s unacceptable, and you’re standing there saying he’s got a right to defend himself.”

The officers did end up taking a statement and Frank would later plead guilty to multiple counts of breaching a DVO, breaching bail, possessing an ice pipe and aggravated assault causing harm.

He was sentenced to 33 days time served and released in March.

VICTIM HAS NOWHERE TO TURN

But with the Territory’s sky high rates of family violence overwhelming support services, Sarah says she now feels like she has nowhere left to turn and is considering moving interstate where resources are less stretched.

“You feel like you’re being victim blamed, you feel like they come out and you’re seen as a waste of space to them,” she says.

“That’s where I feel like I need to be bleeding black and blue, almost dead, and then they’ll say ‘Oh well we should have done something’.”

Top End Women’s Legal Service chief executive officer Caitlin Weatherby-Fell says the police’s attitude is reflective of a wider community view about what constitutes domestic, family and sexual violence, and clients who present at the service experiencing psychological trauma actually “far exceed those presenting with physical injuries”.

“For so many people still the only type that people will see is physical violence, and that’s only one in a very large spectrum, and so things like gaslighting and stalking and harassment are not taken as seriously as physical assault and they should be because they’re the precursors to those really serious incidents of harm,” she says.

TEWLS CEO Caitlin Weatherby-Fell Top End Women says the number of women seeking help from support services ‘far exceed the current capacity’ Picture: Pema Tamang Pakhrin

“There will (often) have been months, long, long periods of psychological violence, of emotional violence, of financial abuse, of sexual violence – the physical violence often is the end result of that, and if police are being called at that point in time there is already so much that has occurred that they then need to be grappling with as well.”

Ms Weatherby-Fell says it’s also not uncommon for police to dismiss a woman’s account of a violent interaction in favour of the (mostly male) perpetrator’s version of events.

“Often victim-survivors will present as heightened or unable to give a clear version of facts, that’s trauma, that’s not her saying that she doesn’t want to work with police,” she says

“(Whereas) he’s not going to be as heightened as she will be, his level of trauma is far less than hers, and so he will be able to give a really clear, succinct version of events, which may be contrary to the actual version of events, which will put the victim-survivor in a far worse position.”

Even after Frank was charged, Sarah felt let down by the justice system as a whole, which afforded her no opportunity to be heard.

And while Frank’s lawyer told the court there was a men’s behaviour change program “ready to accept him” upon his release, there was no court ordered rehabilitation and it’s not clear whether he actually attended.

“I don’t feel confident that we’ve really addressed the behaviours, so the behaviours for me were a perpetrator of DV who has admitted that he’s had a short fuse and he can become quite aggressive,” she says.

“We didn’t even address the drug use, which was a contributing factor, so we’ve taken someone’s freedom away and then we’ve given them back their freedom and that’s kind of it.

“It leaves me definitely feeling like a bit of a sitting duck: Yes, there’s still a DVO in place and yes, it was looking at being upgraded but I don’t even know if I trust that that could happen now that he’s just walked.

“We’re allowing perpetrators to potentially go out and reoffend and that’s where I feel there’s a big gap in the system.”

SYSTEM NOT EQUIPPED TO ‘DO WHAT IT SHOULD’

Ms Weatherby-Fell says this too is a common experience for victim-survivors, who are not technically a party to court proceedings, but who should be given the chance to be heard in the form of a victim impact statement often sought by prosecutors in cases that reach the Supreme Court.

She says providing a VIS can be cathartic and help victim-survivors move on once the gavel falls, but that doesn’t typically happen with assaults prosecuted in the Territory’s busy Local Court system.

“In an ideal world there would be more involvement or even more communication with a victim-survivor during the course of a proceeding by way of an increased witness assistance service and those updates that should come through,” she says.

“But in our clients’ experience, we have some clients who are advised by the relevant service that their ex-partner has been released one month after it’s actually happened, it’s not a system that’s currently equipped to do what it should be doing.

“A system that’s prefaced on rehabilitation as opposed to punitive outcomes is a way for whole communities to be able to move forward and receive support, but the system as it is, is a lot of the time, based on what are the needs of the defendant, of the perpetrator, as opposed to what are the needs of the victim-survivor.”

Meanwhile, for the women left to pick up the pieces, the services that do exist to put their interests first simply can’t keep up.

“The number of women and persons identifying as women who are seeking assistance from the legal system far exceed the current capacity,” Ms Weatherby-Fell says

“It’s horrifying.”

Dawn House’s Susan Crane says DV is “pretty much out of control” in Darwin.

At Darwin women’s shelter Dawn House there are just three case workers struggling against an ever rising tide of women and children in desperate need of help.

In the words of the service’s executive officer Susan Crane: “We’re absolutely inundated.”

“And it’s not necessarily women experiencing DV right now, it’s inundated with women who may have historical incidences of DV and as a result are homeless and that’s a whole group of women that we can’t support because we’re only funded to support women who are experiencing DV right now,” she says.

“So we turn a huge amount of women away who are homeless and there’s very limited places to refer that group of women and kids.

“Basically, since the onset of Covid it’s just got gradually worse and worse and it’s just pretty much out of control and I think you’d find probably other refuges would say exactly the same thing.”

An NT Police spokesman erroneously claimed, without explanation, that the force was “unable to comment” on its response times or handling of DFSV complaints.

*Names have been changed.