Bringing them out of the shadows

To get the protection of a family violence order, Olga Neubert was expected to provide the evidence, says Alina Thomas

WHEN Olga Neubert presented to the Bellerive police station, following the advice from her lawyer to apply for a police family violence order, the police officer determined there was no indication that family violence had been committed “on this occasion.”

Olga Neubert’s murder invites us to question a system that conceals abusive behaviour and minimises offender accountability.

For many people who live with abuse from their partner or spouse, the array of behaviours they are subject to do not fit into regular criminal definitions of family violence that happen “on occasions”.

Instead what they experience is a complicated series of tactics that build to form a pattern of behaviour. Much like criminal definitions of family violence, this pattern can be recognised, described and measured, however time again it is diminished and ignored.

As a matter of course, we hold victims responsible for their own safety while people who use abusive behaviours are protected by the invisibility of their violence, the silencing of victim-survivors, the need for evidence and the focus on a violent event, rather than their overall conduct.

In order to get the protection of a family violence order, Olga was expected to provide the evidence that a crime was being committed against her. For Olga, the violations of her rights were aplenty. However, to establish a body of evidence describing a cumulation of threatening behaviours, over an 18-year marriage, all the while being controlled and intimidated by her partner, places a cumbersome and dangerous responsibility where it shouldn’t belong.

Instead of looking at what Olga did or didn’t do, a more accurate determination of the risk she was facing would be to look at what her husband was and wasn’t doing. An understanding of the risk carried by Klaus should have been enough to initiate safely planning for Olga.

Klaus Neubert targeted a young woman 35 years younger than him and moved her away from her family and culture to a small country town on another continent. Over the years of their marriage, Klaus Neubert created a climate of fear and domination that he used to make Olga dependent and submissive.

When Olga tried to leave, Klaus responded by stalking her and harassing her. He threatened to kill her and he had threatened to kill himself. He had access to firearms.

All of these behaviours are the familiar patterns that we see over and over again which typically escalate when abusive people start to lose the control they have been wielding over their partners.

If the spotlight had been on Klaus’s behaviour, if a risk assessment was conducted based on what we know of him, more would have been done to protect Olga’s life. It is highly likely that if we were to look at Klaus’s previous relationships, that Olga would not have been the first person he had terrorised.

The expectation that victim-survivors must advocate for themselves in a system that does not recognise or understand their experience will keep family violence as the greatest cause of death for women aged 18 to 44 in Australia.

Family violence specialists are calling for a rethink of the criminal justice response to family violence. More needs to be done to make people who violate their partner’s human rights responsible for their behaviour.

Between blaming victims for the violence they have experienced and condoning men’s abuse, not enough is being done to look at the problem where it lies, and that is in the hands and minds of the perpetrators.

Cases like this discourage victims from seeking help. In taking the step of paying for a lawyer, of going to the police station at night and of trying to leave a relationship that made her fearful and worried for her safety, Olga should have been met with support and protection. Instead she was pursued and murdered.

With the message that help-seeking doesn’t result in being heard, believed and protected, victim-survivors will stay in abusive relationships as the best mechanism they have to look after themselves and their children; so completes the loop of protection for perpetrators. In the same way

Olga’s story reinforces a victim’s lack of power, the abusive person is encouraged to play the system so that it works in their favour. Their pasts are invisible, their conduct is irrelevant and we now have Olga’s murder as another reminder that victims are not believed, that under our current practice of the law, he is right and she is wrong. Alina Thomas is chief executive of Tasmanian family violence service, Engender Equality.