Women forced to ‘kill or be killed’ as DV perpetrators ’weaponise’ the system against them: NT lawyers

WOMEN are being forced to ‘kill or be killed’ as domestic violence perpetrators hijack the system and weaponise it against them, lawyers for the Central Australian Women’s Legal Service say

WOMEN are being forced to “kill or be killed” as domestic violence perpetrators hijack the system and weaponise it against them, lawyers for the Central Australian Women’s Legal Service say.

Writing in the NT Law Society publication Balance, Janet Taylor and Julianna Marshall say women are “too often in the situation of kill or be killed, stab or be brutally assaulted”.

The lawyers say the service has helped more than 30 women challenge applications for domestic violence orders in the past six months while DV related assaults have increased by 30 per cent.

“These women had fought back against a physical attack, had often used a weapon but had also sought assistance from police — they were often identified as a perpetrator of DFV on the basis of the injury caused to the other party,” they write.

“The woman’s reports of serious assault, often including less visible injuries such as sexual assault, strangulation or suffocation — red flags for intimate partner homicide — are not accepted as a rational basis for the use of resistive violence at the time of police attendance and/or arrest.”

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The lawyers say women in abusive relationships are left without options in a justice system that criminalises them “when force, the only available path of resistance, is used to resist ongoing violence”

“If she is judged as capable of taking other measures to protect herself, she will likely be served with a DVO protecting the man that has repeatedly assaulted her, raped her and systematically abused her,” they write.

“If she breaches the DVO, she faces criminal charges. So what options does she realistically have?”

The comments come amid a debate about whether to introduce specific laws against “coercive control” in the NT and the lawyers say while current laws are arguably already broad enough, “many instances of coercive control are not yet widely recognised or accepted as DFV”.

“The enduring presence of victim-blaming highlights the need for a much greater understanding of coercive control, and social entrapment, to be embedded in not only our legal response but also our broader community,” they write.

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The lawyers say they are now calling for “urgent coercive control training” to ensure red flags are identified and police are able to identify “retaliatory and resistive violence in the context of abuse and victimisation — and ultimately social entrapment”.

“Hijacking a system designed to protect a victim and weaponising it against her is described as systems abuse, the perpetrator uses the system to perpetuate the abuse,” they write.

“A DVO can be a powerful tool for abuse when it is made in favour of a coercive and

controlling partner or ex-partner.”

Writing in the same publication, Criminal Lawyers Association of the NT president Marty Aust said the current definition of domestic violence “appears to sufficiently cover the scope of behaviours that fall within a range of conduct amounting to ‘coercive control’”.

“Given the circumstances of our jurisdiction and our broad ranging definition of domestic violence, there seems little basis to create further offences,” he writes.

“Instead, any urgent reform to our current domestic violence laws should focus on repealing mandatory sentencing for breaches of orders.”

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