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RUBY:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am.

A new report detailing the experiences of frontline domestic violence support workers has revealed the myriad ways the system is failing victim-survivors.

The report comes as NSW Parliament debates reforms to the police and courts response to family violence.

Today, senior reporter for The Saturday Paper, Rick Morton, on how survivors are falling through the gaps and what needs to change.

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RUBY:

Rick, this is a story about the ways in which domestic violence victims are being let down by the system that is supposed to protect them. And you have spoken to some women who have first hand accounts of that happening. So can you tell me about one of them?

RICK:

Yeah, let's start with Natalie, so she's a single mom of three kids. She's also a survivor of domestic violence.

Archival Tape -- Natalie:

“I think I've moved six times in the last six years, five years…”

Archival Tape -- Rick Morton:

“Jesus…”

Archival Tape -- Natalie:

“...just trying to keep me and my family safe because I’ve given up on police and courts and services helping me.”

RICK:

Her experience with the police and with the things we call apprehended domestic violence orders in New South Wales, which is essentially a piece of paper saying that someone shouldn't get in touch with you if you've experienced violence in that domestic setting.

Her experience with those things really is a perfect study for how we are still letting so many survivors down.

Archival Tape -- Natalie:

“Multiple times I was at the police station, bawling my eyes out, telling them I’m afraid, like he’s going to kill me..and they wouldn’t put an ADVO on him because, there wasn’t enough, he hasn’t done anything, you know, he actually has to hurt me or threaten my life before they’ll do anything. It was just more of that stalking and harassment and it just wasn’t enough for the police.”

RICK:

You know, he'd call her constantly. Often it was from a private number or a different number that wasn't his. And they would say, oh, we don't know it's him. So they couldn't do anything. And the stalking escalated.

Archival Tape -- Natalie:

“Multiple text messages, he’d come around and mess with my car, he'd break into my house and he’d steal things..”

RICK:

So it's kind of like this kind of operation in the shadows. And he knew that he was doing something that couldn't necessarily get him pinged for it. And it got to the stage, she was saying, where the police were actually getting sick of her calling them.

What she didn't know at the time, but what the police definitely did, was that the man, her former partner, had multiple orders made to protect, you know, a partner before Natalie who ended up suiciding. He also had neighbours who had taken out AVOs, the apprehended violence orders for general violence against him, and Natalie herself had logged 12 individual domestic violence events with the New South Wales police. But they were either unable or unwilling to help her. And then one night, he tried to kill her.

Archival Tape -- Natalie:

“I woke up to being strangled and he was yelling at me. I remember just trying to get away from him.”

RICK:

And her three kids were in the house and witnessed the whole thing.

Archival Tape -- Natalie:

“I believed I was going to die that night, I was like oh my god, I’m going to be a statistic.”

RICK:

And that was when he was finally charged after that attack, not just with the violent offences, but finally with breaching the apprehended domestic violence order that she had against him.

RUBY:

Right, so Rick, Natalie was being repeatedly abused by her partner and she was reporting that abuse to police, she was looking for help, but police didn't act until he tried to kill her.

RICK:

That's 100 percent correct.

And that is actually a really common situation.

For example, Natalie has three children. And despite trying to get them added to the apprehended domestic violence order, she hadn't been successful.

Archival Tape -- Natalie:

“Like I know that he's the type of guy that would probably hurt my kids to hurt me. I see those stories on TV and I'm just like, oh, that could have happened to me.”

RICK:

There's a thing we call a protected person that gets added to one of those orders. And if you're the woman making it, for example, you're automatically a protected person. But it is not very common in New South Wales to have your kids added to that order.

Archival Tape -- Natalie:

“I did ask and I was told no, because ...So I was told that he still had a right to see the children, so they weren’t put on the AVO.”

RICK:

The New South Wales police can do it, but typically they kind of decide not to and almost 90 percent of frontline workers had encountered issues with police refusing to include children as these protected persons on these orders, and failing to include children as protected persons creates a loophole wherein the perpetrator can retain access to the victim.

RUBY:

Right, so why would police not want to include children on a protected violence order in this case?

RICK:

That's the key question here. And, you know, under the New South Wales Crimes Act, police are the only authority that can make the application for children to be listed on a violence order as a protected person.

And in doing so, they have the power within the Family Law Act to override, suspend or vary an existing parenting order. However, police appear anxious not to contradict family court rulings or to deal with the complexity involved. And this inherent belief surrounding a father's right to see their children or have access to their children.

RUBY:

Ok and so this experience that Natalie went through, how common is it?

RICK:

This is not something out of left field and Natalie's experience maps really quite completely to these two position papers that have been released by Women’s Safety New South Wales last week and the probably the most detailed frontline research conducted in the state about these issues.

And the research papers themselves are drawn from multiple surveys of family violence workers in New South Wales who themselves support about 50,000 women and their children each and every year in the state.

RUBY:

And so what else did those workers say?

RICK:

So almost three quarters of frontline workers surveyed by Women’s Safety New South Wales expressed that they had encountered the myth identification of the primary aggressor in some way, shape or form.

And one in 10 victims themselves of family violence told the researchers that they had experienced police misidentifying them as a person of interest for an apprehended domestic violence order or charging them as the offender, notwithstanding the fact that they were the primary victim.

In other words, an order might be made against the woman when she is the one being abused.

And in these cases, the research indicates police and later the court system are hamstrung by the rigidity of the law itself and this superficial understanding at best of what family violence actually looks like.

So last year, 22 percent of people against whom there were proceedings for domestic assault in New South Wales were women.

And why is that? It's because women might fight back in a single incident. So it might finally come to a head, you know, on a Tuesday right, and she might bite him because he threatened her or slap him. And when the cops called and they asked, did you hit him? Women have no reason to lie because, you know, in their head, it makes perfect sense about the history of the abuse and the intimidation and the threats.

So in these instances, it's often the women who are charged when really you need to look at the entire history and the pattern of the abuse, which the current laws do not really allow the police to do.

RUBY:

We’ll be back in a moment.

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RUBY:

Rick, when we think about the ways in which domestic violence survivors are being failed by the system, what is the cause? When we really trace this back, is this a policing problem? Is it police officers failing these women? Or is it a legal problem, do we need different laws?

RICK:

It's definitely a combination of the two.

And, you know, when I spoke to Women’s Safety New South Wales chief executive Hayley Foster, she said the same thing.

Archival Tape -- Hayley Foster:

“When it comes to reporting domestic violence, when victim-survivors are wanting to report, there are structural elements that are making it difficult. But there's also a very strong cultural element, and that came out very strongly in both surveys.”

RICK:

You know, some of those laws that we've got about stalking and intimidation can look at a pattern of behaviour over time. But there are many aspects, she says, of domestic and family violence, law and abuse related to coercive control, for instance, that just cannot be picked up by those intimidation stalking offences which are contained within the existing Crimes Act.

Archival Tape -- Hayley Foster:

“It's very, very difficult for many victim-survivors to get an appropriate response because a lot of what they experience is not necessarily captured in the law yet.”

RICK:

So we've got a situation now where we've got these, we've got very narrow definition of the law because it's very hard for police to charge for something that's not contained in the legislation. So typically, the easiest thing to charge for is physical assault, sexual assault, things like that. Harder to prove if you don't have something in the law, a pattern of abuse and behaviour, such as kind of cutting off contact from family, monitoring who you call and when. These things are all abuse, but much harder to kind of pin down in a single situation when the police have been called out to a domestic violence event.

Archival Tape -- Hayley Foster:

“So that is, again, a really strong reason for why we need to increase the availability of those provisions for people who are experiencing that coercive control, that ongoing pattern so that police are then required to take into account the full context.”

RICK:

If you don't have something in the legislation that says this is actually a thing such as coercive control, then you're not actually training the police to look for it.

And what they find, she said, is that many of the clients will have a whole raft of information and evidence around their experience of abuse over time, over a long time. But the police have kind of got one hand tied behind their back, she says, because it's not admissible evidence.

RUBY:

Right. And Rick, there is a push at the moment to criminalise coercive control. At this point in time, there's actually an inquiry in NSW that’s looking into it. But while that is underway, what is the government doing?

RICK:

So a small number of the reforms that are being asked for by Women’s Safety New South Wales are actually being addressed right now in New South Wales. So this week, we're actually seeing an amendment bill introduced by the New South Wales Attorney-General and Minister for the Prevention of Domestic Violence, Mark Speakman.

Archival Tape -- Mark Speakman

“We want victim-survivors to feel empowered to report abuse and to be confident that, when they take that courageous step, they will be supported during proceedings.”

RICK:

This bill would allow survivors to give evidence in court by audio visual link. And it would also clarify and would you know, judges and magistrates would have to give directions to a jury that a delay in reporting allegations of domestic violence is not an indication that the allegations might not be true.

Archival Tape -- Mark Speakman:

“Those close personal connections intertwine complainants and defendants in ways that maintain a callous grip on victims. This grip can silence reports of abuse, delay reports when victims are brave enough to come forward.”

RICK:

So some of the structural things are being resolved. But so many more problems, like the huge backlogs in getting a court hearing, still remain.

So almost 30 percent of surveyed victim-survivors in this research who attended court for mention reported waiting in court three to four hours before the matter was called.

The answer to these challenges, Foster says, is in training. It's in specialisation of magistrates and police and prioritising the system for survivors who are so often defeated by it's grinding, uncaring kind of apparatus.

RUBY:

So it sounds like there are things happening, but there is still a long way to go, Rick. And someone like Natalie, who you spoke to, she would be following this all very closely, I would imagine.

RICK:

Yeah. So, I mean, I was talking to Natalie about this and she was saying that particularly if coercive control was criminalised, she would have been able to, at least in theory, been able to get police to intervene much sooner, certainly before the night where her ex-partner tried to kill her.

Archival Tape -- Natalie:

“It would have helped me because I could have gone to the police and said, this is all things he's doing, which was coercive control, and they could have acted.

It was always, he hasn't hit you. He hasn't threatened your life.”

RICK:

I think one of the most important things about this whole story, I guess, is something really kind of haunting that Natalie said at the end of our conversation.

Archival Tape -- Natalie:

“I think that for every service that there is, they need to know that, the woman that's come in, she’s the expert, she knows him better than anybody, so if she's coming in and saying that this is him, or saying I’m afraid, that this is gonna happen, believe her.”

RICK:

And so this idea that dealing with domestic violence and family violence, that, you know, the system's know better. It's not true. And she said it starts with belief. This woman knows more than you. Believe her. Take her seriously and you will actually begin to unravel the mystery of what has gone on and that's how we begin to solve this problem.

RUBY:

Rick, thank you so much for talking to me about this.

RICK:

Thanks for having me, Ruby.

RUBY:

The name of the victim-survivor who you heard in this episode has been changed.

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RUBY:

Also in the news today…

Donald Trump has continued to tweet false claims that the US presidential election had been stolen. The outgoing President refused to concede, while Joe Biden worked with his transition team to prepare for government.

And Sydney’s famous New Year’s Eve fireworks show will have restricted access this year. Revellers will be blocked from the CBD and only frontline workers will be given tickets to watch a shorter version of the midnight fireworks from the harbour.

I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am. See ya tomorrow.

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