Behind closed doors:
People living in remote Australia are 24 times more likely to be hospitalised as a result of family and domestic abuse
the harrowing ordeals faced by victims of domestic violence in rural Australia
Karen Brock was sitting on the bedroom floor, her back pressed hard against the door; her feet bracing against a chest of drawers opposite. “And my husband was pushing on the other side,” she tells The Weekly. “I could hear the door cracking around me, and I was trying to work out how I was going to break the window to get out of the room. I knew the net curtain would stop whatever I threw at it and I didn’t have anything in the room to throw anyway. There was no phone to call for help. He’d already broken that. And if he got through that door, with the adrenaline rush he’d get, I wouldn’t have survived.”
Karen, her husband and their two little ones (her son was five years old and her daughter three) lived on a wild and windswept property in Tasmania. There was nowhere to run and no one would hear her scream.
Karen had weathered brutal treatment in the past. She had been beaten and raped throughout her five-year marriage. “And there was a mental war going on that, at first, I didn’t realise was happening,” she says. “That person wanted to control you. Slowly, like an acid erosion, you lose your self-esteem, you lose your self-worth, you lose sight of any hope. You get yourself down to where you just exist.”
This attack, however, was particularly vicious. “It was the war of the worlds,” Karen adds, because days earlier she had summoned the strength to tell her husband that he had to leave.
Karen’s story is frightening but it’s not unusual. People in regional and remote Australia are 24 times more likely than those in cities to be hospitalised as a result of family and domestic abuse. The further from the state capitals you travel, the worse the figures become, and the more scant the specialist services to help them. In NSW, for instance, one in every two domestic violence-related assaults and 47 of the 50 local government areas with the highest rates of family violence are outside Sydney. In the far west of the state, domestic violencerelated assaults are 3.6 times the NSW average. And similar figures play out around the country.
A whole range of factors feed these statistics, including isolation, community attitudes about masculinity and women’s roles, the availability of weapons and a lack of infrastructure and services (things like public transport, social housing, refuges and legal aid). And in the case of Indigenous communities there are complex webs of intergenerational trauma, disempowerment and racism that add fuel to all those factors.
“In [regional] communities,” Hannah Robinson from the Western NSW Community Legal Centre explains,
“the increased risk of physical harm, geographic isolation, social and cultural norms and structures, and the distinct lack of services and support all combine to trap women, physically and psychologically, in violent relationships.”
Karen’s kids were in the next room when their father returned to punish her. After he finally ran out of steam and left, Karen says, “I was sitting on the floor in the hallway because I was so injured, and my five-year-old comes out, puts his arms around me and says, ‘It’s okay now Mummy, he’s gone’.”
Karen drove into town to the doctor. “I just walked in and said, ‘Doc, I want you to document every injury and mark and bruise you see.’ So he looked at my whole body, marked it all down. He was very quiet, very shocked. He’d known me since I was in diapers, for Christ’s sake. I went to school with his kids. That’s the local community – everybody knows everybody.”
Karen had broken ribs, contusions (deep muscle bleeding) in her arms and thighs, a bruised neck from strangulation. “I was a walking bag of misery,” she says. “But as soon as
“I could hear the door cracking around me, and I was trying to work out how I was going to break the window to get out of the room.” Karen Brock
I left there, I went up the street to the town solicitor and arranged to apply for an AVO. I wrote five pages of incidents. He said that one page would have been enough…”
Karen had been reluctant to seek help because everyone in the district knew her and her family. And she hadn’t wanted to admit that her marriage was failing to her strict Baptist parents. That day she visited the doctor, she says, “was the first time I had ever actually admitted to anyone what had been going on in my relationship”.
This reluctance to report, says Fleur McDonald, an author and a farmer who lives in the far south-west of Western Australia, is particularly common in regional communities. “Everybody in the country is interconnected,” she explains. “A lot of the time, we know the policeman, we know the doctor. I’m in a Rotary Club where a couple of the coppers come every Thursday night to dinner. Now if there’s a person that’s using violence who knows those people – is friends with those people – then the person who is experiencing that violence is less likely to make a complaint … And it’s harder to be anonymous in rural areas. If you’ve got your car out the front of a counselling service more than once in a blue moon, people are going to notice.”
This reluctance to report is compounded by a lack of services. When regional women summon the considerable courage required to leave violent relationships, they often find that help is dangerously thin on the ground. “Instead of being there to catch them,” Jess Hill wrote in her groundbreaking study of domestic abuse, See What You Made Me Do, “we’re holding a safety net that’s full of holes.”
For 20 years Catherine Smith survived one of the most extreme cases of domestic abuse on record in Australia. In a speech to the United Nations in 2012, she said: “It’s not easy to escape the violence when you’re living in a rural community. One time I remember running from the house with my four children but where were we to go? We ended up walking almost 80 kilometres to the nearest town that had a refuge, sleeping on the riverbed, with just the clothes we had on us.”
Delia Donovan, CEO of Domestic Violence NSW, says too little has changed since Catherine made that speech. “Domestic violence is an epidemic, and we desperately need to address it with a whole-of-government response, with a commitment to decent funding,” she says. “The funding at the moment is like pouring a glass of water in a bath. We need so much more, and particularly in regional areas.”
Her list of complaints is long: There is a lack of transport infrastructure, which makes escape difficult. There is not enough legal support. Regional courts often don’t have safe rooms, which leaves victims exposed to their perpetrators. Most critically, there are not enough refuges in regional Australia and there is not enough affordable housing.
“We know that people are currently being priced out of a lot of regional areas and it’s more difficult for them to get safe, affordable houses,” she says. “This comes up so often when I talk to our member organisations. One organisation told us they were buying tents at Christmas. It’s just so awful.”
In many parts of Australia, the queue for social housing is 10 years long, by which time someone trying to escape family violence could have been killed many times over.
“And women are losing their children,” Delia adds. “They might flee domestic violence but then can’t find housing for themselves and their kids. And in that situation, their children can be removed. How much trauma do you need to go through to escape family violence?”
Having escaped her own experience of domestic abuse, Fleur McDonald was so fed up with the lack of support that she founded a charity, DVassist, which provides both a telephone helpline and an online directory to domestic and family abuse services in regional WA. She also wanted to “lift the lid” on non-physical coercive abuse – “the idea that if you don’t have a black eye and you’re not cowering in a corner then you’re not experiencing abuse.” It’s so much easier, she says, for an abuser to isolate their victim from friends and family emotionally when they are already physically distant.
Another complaint is that police take too long to cover the distances involved in responding to domestic and family violence callouts, and when they do arrive, they often leave victims exposed to further violence because they’ve had insufficient training or they know the perpetrator or are simply acting on preconceived ideas about a “woman’s place”.
Jonda Stephen was new to Broken Hill in far west NSW. A lifelong nurse, she’d moved there to work as a senior administrative officer at the local hospital. Jonda was a mother (with a 19-year-old daughter) and a widow. She hadn’t been in a relationship since her husband died in a car accident about 17 years earlier.
In Broken Hill, she met local man, Chris Tiffin. Big, bearded, tattooed, he wasn’t the type she’d ever imagined she’d fall for, but fall she did. She described him as “a bit of a diamond in the rough”. They dated for just a few months before he moved into her house on the hospital grounds and then, according to Jonda’s lawyer, Pauline Wright, “the whole tenor of his personality changed abruptly.”
“His jealousy became really pronounced,” says Pauline, who is also President of the NSW Council for Civil Liberties, “and he beat her. He tied her up with cable ties, kicked her and locked her in the laundry. He beat her shins with a baseball bat on one occasion. The violence escalated and he threatened that if she told the police, he would do the same to her daughter and her mother.” She learned that he associated with bikies and drug dealers. She was terrified.
One night when he was severely alcohol affected, Chris accused Jonda of being unfaithful. He then restrained her, forced anti-psychotic medication down her throat and taped her mouth closed. She eventually fell into a drug-induced sleep and she remembers very little of the day that followed. When she woke, that afternoon, she realised how close she had come to death and told Chris it was over. Furious, Chris saw a steam iron on the ironing board, picked it up and beat
Jonda around the head with it. He beat her so hard that the iron broke. She had great, bleeding gashes to the back of her head and around her eye.
Jonda glimpsed a small knife on the sideboard. “She picked it up,” Pauline says, “and stabbed him once in the chest. The medical evidence was that the blade of this small knife slid between two ribs and struck him in the heart. It was a fatal blow.”
Jonda had used the knife in selfdefence, with no intention to kill. It was sheer idiot luck that it had found a passage between those ribs. But the local police immediately contrived a version of events in which she was the criminal. Despite a gashed and swollen eye and bleeding head, she was denied proper medical attention and charged with murder.
“The usual protocol, when someone had sustained a head injury, which she clearly had, would be for her to go to the hospital immediately,” says Pauline. “There, she should have had a thorough medical. That just didn’t happen. Not only did she have the obvious injury to her eye, which turned out to be a fractured skull – but she had gashes to the back of her head which were still bleeding while she was in custody. If she had been taken to hospital and had that examination, it is quite likely that she would never have been charged with murder.”
Instead, Jonda was given paracetamol and spent three and a half months in prison before she was granted bail and then finally acquitted.
“It was the clearest case of self-defence I have ever come across in my 35 years of law,” says Pauline. “Yet she was charged with murder… And I do think that wouldn’t have happened if she had been in a city.
I think she would have been given that medical examination. In small towns, the police have great power, they’re respected. A paramedic in the city would insist on that person going to hospital, where I suspect they didn’t insist in the country…
“I also think there’s not enough specialist training provided to police and others who might be dealing with domestic violence. You’ve got specialist units in the cities, but they don’t exist as commonly in remote, regional and rural areas. There’s not the same understanding about the causes and impacts of domestic violence in some regional places.”
Jonda suffered PTSD following her abuse and her time in prison, but she survived the ordeal with her life and her family intact, which many First Nations women do not.
Police were called to 22-year-old Ms Dhu’s home in South Hedland, in
Western Australia’s remote Pilbara, on August 2, 2014, because her partner had violated an AVO. She had recently tried to escape the violent relationship, but her partner had tracked her down and convinced her to return. When police arrived, they not only arrested her partner (who had a criminal history of domestic violence) but ran a check on Ms Dhu, found she owed money on outstanding fines and arrested her too.
Ms Dhu (who was a Yamatji woman and whose first name is not used for cultural reasons) remained in police custody for two days. Throughout that time, she complained of increasingly excruciating pain, which was dismissed both by police and hospital staff (on two separate visits) as “exaggerated”. There was an assumption that she was either “faking” the pain or experiencing drug withdrawal. She did have some history of drug use.
When Ms Dhu finally collapsed on
August 4, she was dragged from her cell barely conscious and unable to walk and taken to hospital in a paddy wagon. She was pronounced dead shortly after arrival. She was found to have died from sepsis and pneumonia caused by an infection to a broken rib she had suffered when her partner assaulted her three months earlier.
A coronial inquest found Ms Dhu had suffered “unprofessional and inhumane” conduct by police, “deficient” treatment by hospital staff, and she was the victim of the most blatant and dangerous racism.
“Ms Dhu was treated as a criminal, not as someone who needed safety,” says Antoinette Braybrook, Chair of the National Aboriginal Family Violence Prevention and Legal Services Forum (FVPLS). “And Ms Dhu’s tragic death was not just an isolated situation. It’s racism. It happens in rural and remote areas, and in urban areas as well, all the time. This is a national emergency.”
Police and other government services fail First Nations women regularly, and many of those women have come to expect nothing more. That is why so much domestic and family violence goes unreported, and why Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are 34 times more likely than other Australians to be hospitalised as a result of domestic and family violence and 11 times more likely to die from violent assault.
“The fact that police are there doesn’t mean that women will report,” Antoinette says, “because of the fear they won’t be believed and because of the fear of child removal. We know that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women have their children removed at far greater rates than any other women in this country, we know that family violence is a primary driver for kids’ removal and we also know that First Nations women are not supported to keep their kids and escape the violence ... Women are blamed for the family violence that they experience. So, putting more police in communities is not the solution. We don’t need mainstream approaches imposed on us because they target and fail us.”
Antoinette believes that Indigenous organisations already have solutions. “We’ve been calling, for many, many years,” she says, “for a dedicated national action plan to address violence against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women and children. We need the federal government to take some leadership in investing in Aboriginal community-controlled organisations to keep our women and children safe.”
She speaks about initiatives like the Djirra organisation’s Sisters’ Day Out in Victoria. “That came about,” she says, “because we knew that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women would not just walk through our door to seek out legal advice. That’s because our women don’t understand their legal rights, and because the legal system has been used as a tool of oppression against our people, so it’s feared.”
“It was the clearest case of selfdefence ... yet she was charged with murder. I do think that wouldn’t have happened if she had been in a city.” – Pauline Wright
Sisters’ Day out is a cultural and wellbeing workshop, a chance to make new friends and catch up with old ones. And for the organisers, Antoinette says, it’s “an opportunity to raise awareness about the impact of family violence and the services that women can access for their safety. It’s also an opportunity to educate around legal rights, and to ensure that our women have an advocate when Child Protection becomes involved so their children are not taken. This is the extra mile that Aboriginal community controlled organisations know we have to go and will go. The work we do around awareness, education, prevention and healing is so important to everything else that we do.”
For Delia, a careful balance of prevention and emergency relief is also critical. The first thing Delia says she would do, if governments provided the level of funding her organisation asks for but doesn’t receive year after year, “is ensure there is safe, affordable housing and more of it. Then I would ensure every single school adopts consent education and sexual relations education. Next, I would ensure workplaces take responsibility around domestic violence … because one woman is being killed in Australia every week.”
And a disproportionately high number of them in the bush.
Pauline believes this is a human rights issue – that the risk of harm women face from domestic abuse and the lack of services to support them are infringements of their human rights. “I do think women have the right to live free from violence,” she says, “and the impact of domestic violence on women in particularly remote rural areas is much higher. That’s got to be remedied. It shouldn’t matter that you’re out in the bush. You should be treated the same way no matter where you are. There shouldn’t be postcode justice.”
Ms Dhu did not survive the injuries her perpetrator inflicted and the treatment meted out to her by the health system and the police, but Karen and Jonda did. Believing in and backing people who experience domestic and family abuse with properly funded services saves lives.
Karen has married again, happily, trained as a horticulturalist and works with her husband in their own scientific propagation business in regional Tasmania. She is currently propagating apple trees to replace those lost in the Black Summer fires. She still suffers from nightmares and some symptoms of PTSD, but she is undaunted. In recent years she has won a Nuffield Scholarship and was 2020 Tasmanian Agrifutures Woman of the Year.
Jonda sued the NSW government for malicious prosecution and negligence (and settled on terms she was happy with out of court). She and Pauline remain in touch.
“She’s great,” says Pauline. “She’s an incredibly resilient person. She still has terrible flashbacks and her life isn’t the same as it was before, but she is so strong and so impressive. She’s not full of hate. She is a really fine human being, and she’s doing well.”
“The fact that police are there doesn’t mean that women will report.” – Antoinette Braybrook
If this story has caused distress, you can call the sexual assault and family violence hotline on 1800 737 732, or Lifeline on 131114. Find DVassist WA at dvassist.org.au or 1800 080 083. Find First Nations community organisations represented by the FVPLS at: nationalfvpls.org/Where-We-Are.php