Home is where the hate is
A WOMAN must be almost murdered for Northern Territory police to take domestic violence seriously.
STANDING in a Darwin police station, Tiffany Paterson might as well have been invisible. The threats had been unequivocal. Her former partner, a one-time champion footballer who had throttled her on more than one occasion, was coming for her and this time he meant to kill.
It was a humid Sunday morning last year, a few days before Christmas, a season of escalating humidity sometimes known in the Top End as "suicide season".
As the terrified mother of two reported her former partner's latest breach of a domestic violence restraining order, police were far from alarmed.
"This is bigger than Ben-Hur," Paterson heard an officer mutter as she exited the Palmerston police station.
The following day, Paterson's six-year-old son watched as his mother's face was sliced open with a kitchen knife.
Victor Dunn was methodical and deliberate as he inflicted the horror that would destroy a family and expose a complete failure of the domestic violence restraining order regime in the Northern Territory.
A push by police to combat alarming rates of family violence in the Territory, where 90 per cent of victims are indigenous, has led to an explosion in the issuing of domestic violence restraining orders. But legal experts describe the violent crime reduction strategy as an "arse-covering exercise" that has resulted in a system flooded by paperwork, where police are unable to discern when a someone may be at serious and imminent risk of harm.
Disturbing questions are raised by the failure of authorities, despite ample warnings, to prevent Dunn's horrific crime.
On Monday, December 22, last year, after Dunn had stalked Paterson for two days and called her more than 50 times threatening to kill her, he burst into her Woodroffe home.
The 35-year-old had been jailed for assaulting Paterson and had served time for repeatedly breaching a DVO. He was released from prison on Friday, December 19, into an alcohol treatment facility. He immediately absconded, yet no one at the facility bothered to inform police he was missing.
At 10.50pm, he hauled Paterson from her bed, where she lay across her sleeping son, trying to protect him.
In a victim impact statement, Paterson described the attack. "He told me to 'Get the f . . . k off my son', then punched me in the face," she said. "Right away I could feel blood running down my face.
"He then choked me and punched me again. I watched him move to the kitchen drawers. I saw him pull out the knife. It was like watching a horror movie and knowing that whatever I said or did was not going to change what was going to happen next.
"All I heard was my heart beating while he was moving around with the knife. I was screaming at him to leave Mum alone. I couldn't hear anything, no screaming, no yelling, only the loud beat of my heart.
"He threw a bar stool at me. The last thing I saw was him coming over to me, raising his foot to kick me in the head."
Mercifully, Paterson was unconscious as Dunn cut her face from the corner of her mouth to her ear in what Northern Territory Supreme Court judge Trevor Olsson described as a "sawing motion". One facial muscle was completely severed and another partly severed.
Paterson's mother, Christine Christophersen, was with her daughter and desperately tried to prevent the crime. Christophersen had known that, despite repeated appeals to the police in the lead-up to her daughter's attack, the two women would be left to face the inevitable terror alone.
"I cannot comprehend it," Christophersen says.
"Police had the domestic violence order in their hands. The DVO was explicit. The first reaction when we reported it to police that Sunday morning was: 'What are you doing here? We can't deal with it. No one's here on Sundays at the station.'
"The Sunday night when we realised that the cops were not going to step in and help protect us, that's when I felt like I was having an out-of-body experience. You are suspended somewhere in space and totally isolated from every other living person on the planet because no one is going to protect you. And you know that he's coming at you, and it's inevitable what is going to happen, and all you can do is pray and pray that your daughter is not going to die."
Paterson's son was abducted by his father as his mother lay bleeding on the floor.
Thanks to quick medical intervention, Paterson survived the attack.
Dunn, who comes from one of the Territory's most famous footballing families, was sentenced last month to 13 years in prison, one of the heaviest sentences handed down for the offence of intent to cause serious harm.
Almost a year later, three times a day, Paterson kneads the scars on her face, trying to break down the hardened tissue and lessen her disfigurement.
Since 2004, the Territory has pumped out more and more DVOs under its violent crime prevention strategy. For all the crowing about the increase in the number of DVOs issued - a 152 per cent increase last year - chaos reigns in the system when it comes to enforcing them.
In Darwin last week, a man was sentenced to four months in jail after severely assaulting an Aboriginal woman in the back of a paddy wagon. The crime occurred after police had picked up the drunk couple in a main street of Katherine, 300km south of Darwin. The man and woman were thrown together into the back of the wagon. At the time the man was subject to a DVO taken out by the woman. He proceeded to kick her in the head.
It is not clear whether police knew of the existence of the DVO when they put them together in the paddy wagon.
Language chosen by magistrate Alisdair McGregor to describe violent attacks on women raised eyebrows in Darwin this week. Sentencing the man, McGregor said that while Aboriginal men in Katherine had symmetrical faces, "so many of the women in Katherine have faces like squashed tomatoes" from repeated bashings.
The Territory government's sporadic surges of outrage about soaring rates of family violence seem to materialise only during election campaigns.
During the lead-up to last year's election, Chief Minister Paul Henderson announced a mandatory reporting policy that forced any citizen who witnessed an incident of domestic violence to report it to police.
The policy is regarded as mere window-dressing by legal experts.
North Australian Justice Agency principal legal officer Glen Dooley says courts in Darwin and Alice Springs are crammed with domestic violence cases, yet governments are failing to stem the tide of grog that is the biggest contributing factor.
In contrast to the states, there is next to no access to alcohol and drug rehabilitation treatment programs for violent offenders in Northern Territory prisons.
"In court, it's a blur of paperwork," Dooley says. "People haven't got any idea in court what the domestic violence order is all about. The order probably ends up screwed up outside in a puddle. It's just a waste of effort.
"What it really boils down to is a transparent arse-covering exercise. In the Territory there is a succession of knee-jerk reactions that have got threadbare thinking behind them that don't make any difference."
Northern Territory Police crime manager acting senior sergeant Neil Hayes said this week that offenders alleged to have breached a domestic violence order were always investigated. "We investigate any reports of any breach of a domestic violence order," Hayes says. "If there is a breach then generally the person will be arrested for the breach as long as there is evidence to support the breach."
Hayes was not able to comment directly on the Dunn case. Why Dunn was not arrested for his repeated breaches of the DVO taken out by Paterson remains baffling.
The lack of co-ordination between justice authorities and the alcohol and drug residential facilities is also notable.
A condition of Dunn's release from prison on December 19 was that he attend an alcohol treatment program. Yet when he absconded from the facility on the night of the attack, it was 48 hours before managers reported to police that he was missing.
By that time, Paterson was fighting for her life and her son had been abducted.
When the case eventually reached court, Paterson was retraumatised by her experience in the criminal justice system. She was intimidated in court by a relative of the accused. There was no safe place for a victim to wait between court sessions.
Yet the determination of Christophersen and her daughter to force changes to laws surrounding violent assaults is being felt.
Civil action is likely to be taken against the police and corrections authorities over their lack of response to Paterson's entreaties before the horrifying attack.
And at senior levels of the Territory government, changes to both the domestic violence restraining order regime and the functioning of alcohol courts are being considered.
For Paterson, time will never be a healer. Though Dunn has only just begun serving his sentence, she lives in fear of the day he will be released.
"I am certain he will come for me again," she says.
Every time she sees her face, every time she sees a stranger blanch at her scars, comes the reminder of that dreadful night.
"The thing that I am first and foremost is a woman, but I don't feel like a woman," she says.
"I feel like a freak.
"Where I was once a very tall, proud and confident woman, I now can't stand the thought of going out in public.
"The simple task of of going to the corner shop to buy groceries can make me feel like a failure as a person.
"I haven't even begun to accept my appearance. I feel that if I accept what I look like, then I have to be accepting of the violent actions that caused my injuries.
"When I wake up and look at myself in the mirror I am reminded of the attack that took place that night.
"It's a very visible, unfair reminder that someone wanted totake my life and it cannot be hidden under clothing, nor will it ever fade away."