Behind the locked doors of a DV safe room wasn’t my life, until suddenly it was

I’ll never forget the woman’s wail. “Why are they allowed to do this?” Tears flowed and she shrank in her seat. She had returned from court with a threadbare offer that left her fearful for her and her child’s safety and distressed at the prospect of financial ruin.

Earlier in the day she had been welcoming, anxious but talkative. A warm and encouraging presence in the “safe room”, a sanctuary with comfy chairs, a kitchenette and a children’s playroom protected by locked doors down the corridor from the magistrates’ courtrooms. Here, women appearing in domestic violence cases can wait for their matters to be heard without having to sit with the men who turned their once-normal lives into nightmares.

Women spend years in the courts trying to protect themselves and their families from violent partners.Credit: Dionne Gain

My new friend was a professional woman, well-dressed, articulate and no stranger to the safe room. She had been through years of hell at the hands of a violent, financially controlling man. Today she was seeking additional orders to protect her young son from a father who had begun using him as a weapon against her, telling the boy she was the reason they could not spend more time together. If only she didn’t keep calling the police on his father, the son could see more of him.

Her savings had been drained by earlier legal battles, intentionally drawn out by her wealthy former spouse. When she left the safe room on this day and entered court, she was confronted by his posse of lawyers, who threatened to pursue her for substantial costs if she continued to fight her corner rather than accept the thin guarantees he was offering. “I feel like I’ve failed my son,” she wept.

Last month, I edited an article for the Herald written by Pia Birac, a senior domestic violence lawyer at Legal Aid NSW about her work representing women in domestic violence matters. It was powerful, and I was moved by it, but it was distant to me – not my life.

Now I was in Birac’s world, though in another jurisdiction, supporting a relative who had met a man through a dating app who concealed his identity, and his criminal record. He would go on to strike her, stalk her and install a spy camera in her home.

The police had applied for a domestic violence order, though known by different names in different jurisdictions across Australia. He had vowed to contest it. I was expecting an emotional day on my relative’s behalf. I was not expecting to be confronted up close by the stories of so many others. In that safe room, on this day, women opened up to each other. They offered legal tips and gave advice. They showed courage, and what care they could (a biscuit, a glass of water, a kind word) for strangers they would never see again but with whom they shared a moment of recognition before returning to their individual struggles.

Their stories were searing.

There was the young, urbane and beautiful woman from South Asia with the broken arm and the thousand-yard stare of a traumatised soldier. It was her talents that saw the newly married couple accepted to Australia and which won them citizenship. But he saw to it she formed no friendships, no community bonds. Now she had no one to turn to in her hour of need. He was fighting a domestic violence order even as she attended court with the broken arm he gave her, which, for reasons she could not fathom, the police would not press charges about. Talk to your state MP, I offered lamely, looking up the electorate office.

And there was the perfectly coiffed young woman with enviably elegant high heels and a police escort who came back from court bursting with excitement that this could be the last time she testified against her ex, having already done so in the Supreme Court and the District Court. Why, I asked naively, did she need to testify in the Supreme Court, so much higher than the mere magistrates court we were in today. Because, she told the room, not so long ago, he almost choked her to death. He had put her in hospital five times. He had broken almost every piece of furniture she had, plus three TVs, and ripped out the central console of her car. Today she was giving evidence as to why his bail should be revoked given he had come to her house, taken her keys, locked her out and driven over her.

Another woman had been fighting in court to protect herself and her children from her brutal former partner for five years. The best advice she was ever given, she told us, was that DV matters were marathons, not sprints. She comforted the sobbing woman with hard-earned wisdom: “Right now it feels like nothing, but it is something.” Even the small amount of ground he had given today would help.

Duty legal aid lawyers offered advice before and after hearings while a caring social worker did her best to comfort and strengthen each woman. But these were faint and flickering candles against the cold injustice of a system that to my eyes seemed unfit for the purpose of protecting them – that let abusers use their “rights” and their greater earning capacity to wield legal process as another tool of abuse. A well-heeled abuser can muster half a dozen lawyers while a less-resourced victim struggles to find one.

And my relative? At first, she was overjoyed that her particular persecutor had unexpectedly decided not to fight the matter and the magistrate issued an order for him to keep his distance. (She is the third woman to successfully apply for an order against this man but, given the tendency of these kinds of predators to find new victims and the lack of a mechanism for members of the public to check someone’s DVO history, she is unlikely to be the last.)

It was only later she realised that, in response to his plea that he needed to collect his belongings, the magistrate had given him the right to come (accompanied by police) into her home to look for them. Yes, into the home in which he had already made her feel unsafe, and which he had tried to rig with a surveillance device. To collect the paltry few items that she had been trying to get him to take for months before things escalated, which he had ample opportunity to take, but which he left as a kind of mortgage on her peace of mind.

The woman’s burning question remains: Why are they allowed to do this?

If you have experienced, or are at risk of experiencing, sexual assault and/or domestic and family violence, call 1800 RESPECT.

Julie Lewis is weekend features editor for the Sydney Morning Herald.