What can stem the tide of domestic violence in this country?

ANOTHER order. Another breach. Another woman killed. Will the tide of domestic violence ever stop?

Woman covered in bruises TWAM 140524 Domestic violence

THERE is a bald patch on her scalp where her ex-partner clubbed her with a baseball bat.

Inside the bald patch is a thick sewn gash that pulses like a blood-filled leech. She aches in her seat because her neck bones shifted in the impact of a punch that landed so hard against her right cheek it broke her ex-partner’s hand. And still her smile is the most shocking thing about her. Her nonchalance, the shoulder-shrugging hopelessness of acceptance; that yet again he breached his domestic violence order; that yet again she finds herself in the safe room adjoining the courtroom set aside every Monday for domestic violence matters in the Ipswich Magistrates Court; that she lives in a country where the Queensland courts alone filed more than 34,700 domestic violence orders in the 2012-13 financial year; where the number of similar orders for the three eastern mainland states was 116,163.

“What now?” she asks.

Honestly? More of the same. Another order. Another breach. Maybe another woman murdered in an act of intimate partner violence, like the 18 domestic-related murders in Queensland and the 28 in Victoria in 2012-13; like the 24 women killed in NSW last year; like the one woman at least who dies every week, on average, from domestic violence in Australia.

Across a clear white table, the woman’s court advocate, Jodie Dann, takes a deep breath. “How high is your fence?” she asks. “We could look at assisting you with installing some form of security camera system.”

“I’ve got a dog,” the woman says. “He always lets us know when someone’s coming.”

Jodie carries a clipboard with a sheet fixed to it, titled “Domestic Violence Callover, April 14, 2014”. The sheet was waiting for her at the court’s security desk when she arrived at 8.30am this morning with three other court advocates from the Ipswich Women’s Centre Against Domestic Violence, west of Brisbane. She wasn’t shocked when she scanned the sheet and saw the names of 71 women: “That’s a slow day.”

Every Monday, Jodie and her team support between 60 and 90 women as they face court to apply for or process domestic violence protection orders. Outside the safe room, the court’s foyer is bustling with women and children. The women applying for DVOs bring their nervous mums and sisters and best friends to babysit their children while they’re inside court being heard by Magistrate Virginia Sturgess, who manages to approach her regular Monday with enough empathy to keep women from falling apart before her eyes and enough nuts-and-bolts efficiency to make it through most matters in less than 20 minutes. “What’s a bad magistrate?” I ask. “One who says, ‘Well, he hasn’t killed you yet so you don’t really need the temporary order, do you?’ ” Jodie says.

Jodie wears her Monday courtroom pearl necklace. She carries business cards with her ­centre’s contact details cut so small they can be slipped under the insole of a woman’s shoe. Because some partners upturn handbags after court visits; grip their partners outside court and throw them into cars, probing their wives, girlfriends, fiancées for courtroom details: “What the f..k was the woman in the pearl necklace telling you?”

Through a security door off the courtroom is a long hallway leading to another safe room where DV court advocate Charmaine Walker calms a woman seeking a protection order against the father of her children. “I need it, I need it, I need it,” the woman says, shaking, in tears, her lips trembling. She describes her ­partner, a hulking giant who has been injecting steroids. “You’re not alone,” Charmaine says.

Isolation is a recurring theme today. Isolation by partners, by location. Isolation through a DV court system where the onus is on the ­victim to paddle upstream through recurring court appearances to secure her own safety. Even then, it’s not guaranteed.

Two days from now, Victorian mother-of-four Fiona Warzywoda will be stabbed to death in a Sunshine shopping strip in Melbourne. Her de facto partner of 18 years allegedly stabbed her hours after attending a court hearing for a protection order against him.

Jodie sits down with a young couple in the other counselling room. A domestic incident saw the police called to the couple’s home last week. The young woman is doing all the talking. She wants to withdraw a protection order against her boyfriend, filed by police attending the incident. Police don’t place protection orders on men for trivial matters.

“Who called the police?” Jodie asks.

“The bloody neighbours,” the young woman says, aghast. Most of the women today did not call the police during or after the moment of violence. The police were alerted by neighbours, friends or children. Roughly 20 per cent of women will report violence to police, and only after a history of 20-plus serious incidents.

“Well, they wouldn’t have called the police if there wasn’t genuine concern,” Jodie says, looking directly at the man, sitting quietly. Her job is about treading a fine line between ­creating a relationship with offenders enough to engage them yet still make them accountable for their actions. She fights her instinct to turn to the young woman and say, simply, “Run.”

For 10 years she has been at the coalface of a domestic violence epidemic that one in three Australian women will be touched by in their lifetime. She’s watched women leave court in the arms of men whose beatings made them miscarry. She advocated for a woman recently whose husband attacked her with a machete. The woman had three children, aged four, six and eight, who saw their father standing over their mother with the weapon. The father chased his children around the house, machete in hand. “But he’s a good dad,” the woman said. “He’d never hurt his children.”

True love is a powerful force, more powerful sometimes than the grip of a man who strangles his wife 10 times to the point of unconsciousness. Wake up, strangle, wake up, strangle, all for kicks, all for control. For 10 years Jodie has watched women return to abusive partners trusting in the all-conquering and redemptive power of love. For 10 years she has seen those women reappear in the system, more broken than before, more bruised. “Stop trying to figure it out,” she says. “If you’re being abused, get rid of him. You’ll waste a lot of energy trying to figure it out when you can’t control it. And you’ll need that energy to maintain your safety and be a mum to those kids. You won’t figure it out. And would an answer change things?”

Jodie studies the young man’s face across from her, leans forward to draw him in. “Do you understand the fear that must have been in her voice if the neighbours thought to call the police?” asks Jodie. The young man is blank. “Do you understand that?” Jodie drills.

The young man nods his head. He says he has committed previous criminal offences. His girlfriend leans in to the discussion. “Look, I just don’t want him to go to jail,” she whispers. Jodie hears that line almost every Monday.

She knows he won’t go to jail. Few cases ever go that far. Even some of the bloodiest, most horrific cases. “That’s the scary, tragic part,” says Jodie. “There’s no fear for men around domestic violence. Where are the 71 guys who did these things to the 71 women here today? Where are the 71 guys to talk to?

“For these guys who have breached today it’s a $200 slap on the wrist and they pay it off through their Centrelink payments. How does that make you not do that again? The Government’s paying their own penalty and it’s costing them $1000 to drag each case through the court system. If we had a consequence from the get-go I don’t think it would escalate as much.”

Change the man, change the system. In a month’s time Jodie will attend a seminar with a visiting Canadian DV specialist, David Adams, who has been running 52-week behavioural change programs for male offenders. “Our behavioural programs go for 16 weeks,” she says. “You can hold your breath for 16 weeks. You can be nice. Twenty-six weeks should be the minimum, with risk assessments on high-risk people.

“The system should be saying, ‘You don’t have an anger management problem. You manage it very well because you’re only going to hit her. You’re not going to hit your boss. It’s your behaviour that needs to change and we, as a ­society, are forcing you to do that’.” And if you can’t change, then you will go to prison.

The 71 women on the callover sheet have been waiting since 8.30am to be heard by ­Magistrate Sturgess. Woman after woman after woman enters the courtroom – black hair, brown hair, blonde, early-20s, late-40s, mid-30s, career women, mums, battlers, drunks, drug addicts, small-business owners – until those swinging doors between the foyer and the courtroom become the saddest place in southeast Queensland. “He’ll be back,” wails a mother-of-four denied an extension on the lengthy protection order against her ex-husband. “He’ll be baaaack.”

Doors swinging into the afternoon, back and forth, back and forth, chewing and spitting. Women hoping and waiting, living and dying.

It’s almost 3pm when Jodie walks through the rear door of the Ipswich Women’s Centre Against Domestic Violence, a sprawling, multi-level wooden home renovated into a bustling place of business where manager Gabrielle Borggaard heads a team of DV workers buzzing away in 12 or so small offices. Upstairs, safety team leader Susan Swain is on the emergency assistance hotline, speaking through a headset while dialling numbers on a landline. The hotline receives so many calls the centre uses a triage process similar to a hospital’s emergency department. “The woman is feeling unsafe and her partner is on the way,” Susan says. “The police have had to be contacted, so we’re working away at the phones as that’s happening. We safety-plan with them. We discuss risk indicators that are often precursors to DV-related deaths. The most dangerous time in DV is when a woman decides to leave. Safety planning for a worst-case scenario can keep women alive. Is a refuge something to be considered? How safe are your children? Where are your children? We are preventing homicides every week. Everyone from professionals to cashiers to full-time mothers.”

Jodie rests in an armchair in the office of Rebecca Shearman, the centre’s co-ordinator for the past six years. They debrief. “Seventy-one,” Jodie says. Rebecca nods. “Not the worst you’ve had,” she says. That’s just one court. Another 50 courts across the state hear DV matters on a regular basis, as do many more across the country.

I tell Rebecca about the woman clubbed by the baseball bat. She nods, grimly. “I remember working with a woman once in our crisis response team,” she says. “She could barely move she had been so badly beaten, but he left her face unmarked. Every single other place on her body had been bruised. He’d actually dragged her out of the shower and jumped up and down on her chest. Can you imagine the control he had, being able to beat someone so severely yet so precisely that he left her face completely unmarked?

“I was scared. I was really scared for her. But she wanted to go back because his daughters were still there. They weren’t her daughters, they were his daughters but she knew that if she didn’t go back then they were at risk. We normally try to stay non-judgmental, but I begged her not to go back. I was so worried she would die. But she went back. I never saw her again.”

What now? Escape. A young mother and her one-year-old child make their way across town to the 30-year-old Chisholm Women’s Refuge, on Brisbane’s northside. Refuge co-ordinator Jacque Taka organises a car to pick her up from a designated location. “She experienced DV last night,” she says, pacing the refuge grounds, ­bordered by a 3m-high steel fence. “Police were called. She was placed in a motel by [24-hour crisis hotline] DV Connect.” Between January and March, DV Connect received 16,000 calls from families in critical domestic violence situations. In those three months the hotline assisted 75 families escaping their homes for safety; 1163 women were ­provided safe housing, with 339 referred to women’s shelters or refuges.

“She has no idea where the refuge is,” says ­Jacque. “She doesn’t know the address, doesn’t know the suburb. She’s been directed to a safe location where we will pick her up. The reason is that if the perpetrator is following her we can use some strategies so he doesn’t find the location.”

Bernadette Dulac, co-ordinator of Brisbane’s Windana Women’s Refuge, walks beside Jacque. “Men track partners on mobile phone locating devices, on GPS tracking devices,” she says. “They put devices on cars. I had one man who put a tracking device inside a child’s toy.”

Jacque was phoned last night only hours after listing with DV Connect a rare vacancy in the refuge’s block of five well-maintained brick two-bedroom, self-contained fully furnished units. Chisholm supports between 35 and 45 mums a year and almost 80 children. Last year, says DV Connect, 1243 Queensland women were unable to access refuge accommodation and were given emergency housing in motels, with no security, no support networks on hand.

The mums here today hang washing on small portable dry racks outside their rooms. They access the communal internet space, searching for cheap rental properties, paying bills, contacting family, while their kids play in a recreational space filled with toys, play equipment, art supplies and sporting mats. “A woman will return to a refuge and to her partner in a cycle of up to seven times,” says Jacque. “Even if they stay for as little as a week we have an opportunity to help educate them on the choices they can make. It’s her journey.”

Jacque enters an indoor kids’ play area. There’s a child’s drawing pinned to the wall saying, ‘Family forever’ above an image of a mum, dad and two kids holding hands. “We’re seeing phenomenal amounts of children,” Jacque says. “They’re in the middle of it all. They’re the pawns.”

Jacque makes her way back to her office, passing a table full of donated food from the local Foodbank relief organisation. At her desk she clicks on an email from the refuge’s key funding body, the state Department of Housing and Public Works: “I’m writing to advise that the contract service agreement for Chisholm, which is due to expire on September 30, 2015, will not be extended past that date … this includes realigning services to consolidate and where necessary reduce the number of service providers, ensuring services are available where they are most needed.”

Her face is frozen. “Women are dying,” she says. “Their children are dying. I hope they realise that services are most needed right here.”

What now? Loss. Dionne Fehring fixes a ­coffee in the kitchen of a two-level colonial-style home in Samford Valley, north of Brisbane. She shakes her head. “Seventy-one women?” She remembers what it was like to be sitting in the foyer of the Brisbane Magistrate’s Court in the early 2000s, processing an order taken out by police on her behalf against her husband and partner of four years, Jayson Dalton.

“There were safe rooms,” she says. “But because of the nature of our relationship we sat together in the corridor outside court.” Entering a safe room with a court advocate would have meant Dionne breaking her husband’s control.

“It’s a surreal atmosphere and you’re nauseous because you don’t know what’s going to happen,” she says. “I felt it was partly my fault that we were there because he created an environment that led me to believe the abuse was being caused by what I was bringing into the relationship. I was once very self-confident, bubbly, outgoing. But I ended up feeling like a gutter-feeder in love. That’s how I was feeling in that corridor.”

All of the countless acts of abuse Jayson ­committed against Dionne in the four years they were together between 2000 and 2004 had their roots in control. He threatened to kill her by driving her into a passing highway truck. He threw a microwave oven at her while she carried their daughter, Jessie. Repeated bashings. Smashed windscreens. Repeated threats. Doors kicked in. Repeated police callouts. One day a compassionate police officer turned to her and said: “If you do not get out of this relationship, the next time we come here we’ll be carrying you out in a box.”

The couple ran a hardware business and lived in the affluent inner city Brisbane suburb of ­Kelvin Grove with 17-month-old Jessie and her newborn brother, Patrick. “This is how it runs in this family,” Jayson told Dionne. “There’s me at the top, there’s Jessie, there’s Patrick and then you come last.”

On March 4, 2004, Dionne got out. She left work early that day with a crippling headache. Jayson later called home, demanding she return to work. She refused. “Right, well, tonight’s the night,” he spat into the phone. “Get ready for it.”

Dionne fled with the kids to her mother ­Julie’s home on the Gold Coast. Jayson followed her straight there, calling her no less than 76 times along the way. “I was terrified,” she says. “I knew at that stage that in his mind he had snapped. He had flipped out. He just barged through Mum’s house and I remember, vividly, Mum was holding Patrick in her arms and she said, ‘I’ve got your son in my arms, Jayson’ as she put her arm up to block him and he pushed her even though she had Patrick in her arms.”

Jayson was taken away by police for breaching a protection order for the second time, restrained overnight and released at midday the following day. Dionne and Julie fled with the kids to a cousin’s house in Dalby, 210km west of Brisbane. “It was that night that I had a breakdown,” Dionne says. “You don’t just break out of a relationship like this and everything is OK. You’ve been inside a pressure-cooker for years. You’re never the same again. All this pent-up pressure and stress that you’ve bottled for your kids, it’s released. It all got too much for me and I just snapped. I ended up totally out of it in hospital in Toowoomba [90 minutes west of Brisbane].”

On March 17, Jayson got temporary custody of baby Patrick and his toddler sister Jessie. It’s a common occurrence in the troubled waters of domestic violence. A mother makes inroads in separating herself from an abusive partner after being brave enough to see a protection order through with the Magistrates Court, only to be forced to reconnect with her abuser because of custody issues. Says Jacque Taka: “The child becomes a hostage, a pawn, and sometimes they don’t actually care about the child. They want to get back at mum. They will take court orders out just to torment mum. They don’t actually want visitation with the child. They want mum to suffer. We’ve had women we’re protecting in the refuge, hiding out, who then have to go drop their kids off to the father because the court has ordered them to.”

On April 23, recovered from her breakdown (she’s since had another six), Dionne got custody of the children, with Jayson seeing them every second weekend. “He stormed out of the court,” Dionne says, sitting on the edge of an armchair in her living room. “He was supposed to hand over the kids on the Sunday, two days later, Anzac Day. The arranged place was a Gold Coast police station.”

Dionne attended the Anzac memorial dawn service that day at Currumbin Beach, Gold Coast. She remembers the sunrise that morning, a striking “blood red sky”. She remembers a plane soaring overhead. She remembers her mum being so excited about the children being handed over to Dionne, their legally recognised and supported primary guardian. “Why aren’t you excited?” Julie asked her daughter.

“I can’t explain it,” said Dionne. “I just have this feeling.”

“It’s fine,” Julie said. “Everything is fine.”

But Jayson didn’t turn up at the Gold Coast police station handover. Dionne drove straight to the house at Kelvin Grove. Driving to a rise on Kelvin Grove Road, nearing her home, she saw police lights flashing. She parked her car on the opposite side of the road to her house and sprinted across four lanes of traffic and fell in a heap in her front yard. There were television news cameras, emergency workers.

“What happened?” she wailed.

A police officer told her straight. “He’s killed them both,” he said.

Tears flood her eyes now with the memory. “And I saw these camera crews and I asked the police if they could put a sheet around me,” she says, softly. “And I remember that I wet myself inside this sheet and all I can remember now is this strong smell of urine.” She shakes her head.

“They still don’t know how the kids were killed but they think that it was an overdose of Panadol and smothering them. He then put a plastic bag over his head and suffocated himself.

“I remember going to the [state autopsy ­centre] to identify their bodies. I remember ­seeing them with sheets over them. Their little faces with mops of hair and I remember just ­saying their names out loud and just seeing them in that situation, all that stainless steel, not the warmth of their beds where they should be.”

Before he killed his children, Jayson had sent an email to Dionne’s mother, Julie. “It said he loved me right to the end,” Dionne says. “But when I took the kids off him, he couldn’t live without the kids. He said he had to go for a big long sleep with the kids. He had lost all the control that he had. I was the one in control and he couldn’t stand that. It’s total control. Always control.”

Dionne looks to the wall of her living room. There are framed photographs of Jessie and ­Patrick beside frames of the children – Sean, eight, and Melissa, seven – she has had since with a loving and deeply understanding husband, Glen. “I always wanted to have four kids,” she says.

She thinks about the 71 women in the Ipswich Magistrates Court. “I just hope that in the end those 71 women find some levels of comfort,” she says. “It’s not a short fix. They need good results in court. They need strength to keep a protection order in place. They need support through mental health services. They need immediate counselling services, long after they leave. They need to be recognised.”

She leans forward, considers her words. “I want you to say there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Because there really can be. Eventually.”

What now? Light. 6pm, May 7, and 200 people stand in the forecourt of Brisbane’s riverside Southbank cultural precinct. They hold candles, lit in remembrance of every Australian who ever died through domestic and family violence. There are candle-lighting ceremonies like this happening across the country. They’ve been happening for 10 years and they began here in Brisbane, organised by the coalface workers of the 24-hour DV Connect crisis hotline who were watching countless domestic deaths pass unrecognised by the public. A separate group of 150 people set off on a “Daylight to Darkness” challenge run. They have vowed to run 1km for every woman, man and child in Australia who died last year through domestic and family violence. They will jog through the night, panting and spluttering towards the light of dawn where they will end a run that stretches 110km.

Friends and relatives hug each other in the evening cold, watching their candle flames flicker in a building wind, the same hollow question on their minds and written across their faces. What now?

May is Domestic and Family Violence Prevention Month. DV Connect: 1800 811 811; dvconnect.org. National Violence and Sexual Assault Hotline, 1800 200 526