FINANCE and PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION REFERENCES COMMITTEE Domestic Violence & Gender Inequality
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
SUBMISSION TO THE SENATE STANDING COMMITTEE: FINANCE AND PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION REFERENCES COMMITTEE Domestic Violence & Gender Inequality Thank you for agreeing to receive this report after the official date. For more than 24 years, since escaping escalating-to-savage Domestic Violence myself, I have worked tirelessly in the field of criminal and societal victimisation. Frankly, at the time I found the available services and legal system to be gender biased (even the nature of questions asked of me in court were frequently gendered / boys games) and quite unsuited to the task of dealing with the reality of Domestic crimes. It was that experience that brought me to my work in the developing field of crime victims. I regret to say that I observe that much the same bias remains today, as evidenced in our daily work. I am more than happy to attend any hearings to bring case studies or answer any questions. Note please, that my Organisation serves men, women and children. Men of all ages report the most awful, sensitive and cruel experiences of life. They make up 25% of our clients. However, men who complain about family law do not, I repeat DO NOT, report anything resembling the consistent, awful stories of the women seeking help to protect their children from the person they were required to leave to protect children. That, of itself, identifies there is gender bias. Let me also explain, that to the ordinary lay person, uninitiated into ‘the system,’ what they find they are expected to know, do and comply with when actually caught in these systems is oppositional to what they ever expected. They expected to be helped, made safe, not blamed and punished. They embark on a whole, new, challenging, frustrating and fragmented chapter of new learning. This is not an academic paper. This is the story of people caught in systems that are inadequate or non-existent, and legal processes that do not serve. Because of the increasing flow of protective mothers seeking help not available elsewhere, I began the Family and Child Safety Unit of the NSW charity, the Victims of Crime Assistance League Inc NSW (est 1989), almost ten years ago, with private funding money. Neither state nor federal funding streams even yet capture the real and long plight of women and children escaping relationship violence. In this paper I could talk about the disappearing perpetrator and all the state services that blame the mother, while serving his needs and controlling her. I could talk about the abysmal failure of developing any effective system that identifies and makes safe children exposed to incest and child pornography. Or the fact that Child Protection strategies are out-dated and under-resourced so sexual abuse of young children by fathers generally doesn’t qualify as ‘at risk of serious harm’ which then leads to unsafe access with sex offenders and violent fathers and subsequent mental health issues for the children and protective mothers from preventable trauma. I could talk about the agony of the protective parent when they realise the state can’t , or won’t help their child. I could speak about my community’s concern that these behaviours continue as if the experiences of children sexually abused, currently the topic of a Royal Commission has had no impact at all on a preventative, early intervention safety strategy for today’s kids. Then I could mention the cases where federal judges make idiotic rulings about how children can be kept safe while living in the same house as convicted, multi-sex offender fathers. Or how there is either a clear ignorance about what Domestic and Family Violence is, or a pro- father/men’s rights agenda that does not understand that violence to the mother is violence to the child. Or how many mothers are diagnosed with a flaky mental illness during Family Court matters using improper testing, and lose the children to the violent, abusive father because the father claims the violence to be ended. I could talk about what those decisions do to the women and the children, especially where the violent behaviour continues and the mother is ordered by the court to seek no help for the child, but the court has no obligation to follow up to see the child is safe. I could talk about the desperate children and their lack of rights, and champions. I could talk about the obvious flaws in using antiquated Family Systems strategies to provide services for people caught in Coercive Controlling Violence and the Vengeful Father Syndrome; about the impact of Narcissistic Control and why a charming narcissist is an effective con-artist, who must win, irrespective of the cost, all of which continue to perpetrate gender bias against women and children escaping violence. I could talk about Parental Alienation Syndrome, junk science that is in common usage here in Australian Family Matters, barely disguised. These are the things that real people we see contend with, daily.. I don’t intend to source other people’s research for this short paper due to time constraints, and of course since very few actually see what we see since so few ‘cross’ the state federal divide, or even look at court actions because of siloed services. And yet, the numbers of women from across the country are unending. Crying for help from my tiny agency, to help them protect their children from criminal acts. They may have left of their own accord, or been warned they could lose their children to Child protection (and do) for not leaving early enough. Once Child protection is involved, the women are caught between victim status and that entitlement to be helped to heal, and perpetrator status where they are blamed, controlled and subjected to threats for non- compliance. Essentially, these women might also access Domestic Violence services to manage the long road back to confidence, autonomy and a positive future. State services often have no strategies to prepare these mothers for the state-federal divide of politics, services and the very different legal processes of law. This is a gender issue as most victims escaping DV are women. This paper is brief. The issue is huge. Essentially I will describe why National and State plans to prevent and address Domestic and Family Violence will fail unless these gender, ignorance, and service issues are addressed. Recently, Victoria's Minister for the Prevention of Family Violence, Ms Fiona Richardson, a survivor of Family Violence as a child herself, spoke of her visit to the Victorian Magistrate's Court to observe the treatment of victims of family and domestic abuse in court. Her observations show how different one’s position, role, responsibilities, 2 expectations, beliefs and realisations, even from someone with the power to affect legislation, with her own personal experience, may be. Ms Richardson stated: I saw the usual victim silencing and women not really being listened to in terms of their particular experience...and it just occurred to me that this adversarial model, this putting women in a sense on trial as they're trying to actually deal with some very challenging behaviours in their life, it's the reason why you hear consistently from victims that the whole court process is a re-traumatising process’. May I suggest that Ms Richardson is right, but still has a lot to learn? And’s that’s just if a case ever gets to court. Most don’t. Domestic Violence is a lesser crime, with different rules, in a system it doesn’t fit, can’t fit and never will. It sets them up to fail, and can’t protect children until aged probably about 8-10. Political Interest and knowledge. In the past year, my organisation has had conversations with many other politicians about the position of ‘victim/witness in court – AVO, criminal matters/ appeals/family courts. Like Ms Richardson, the meetings identified a lot of lay comprehension, assumptions, and expectations and ignorance, just like our individual clients. • No politician had realised that a victim was not entitled to be privately legally represented in a criminal case and what that actually means in practice, compared with the very different rights and position of an accused. • No politician comprehended that the victim was not a party to the criminal proceedings, and they had no decision-making or management rights, or right to sue, or what that means in practice for victims, or when things go wrong. • No politician really understood that the law around Domestic Violence and child abuse was incident-based, rather than an accurate reflection of the behaviour patterns of the abuser/accused. They did not easily comprehend why Domestic Violence and the sexual abuse of children just does not fit into the adversarial model of law, and ALWAYS favours the accused. Since in DV and sexual exploitation of children the assailants are more often men, this is a gender issue. • They were unable to identify any other crime type (fare evasion, traffic offences, robbery, assaults, murder) where instead of charge and prosecution, effectively a warning shot was court fired over an alleged perpetrator, (AVO – don’t do it again) or where many breaches could be rolled into just one matter, on one day in a court where the victim is tested and twisted on everything, and the represented accused can say nothing, or the particular challenges court efficiency measures and behaviours have on these unrepresented, traumatised victims, and why they might be reluctant to ever trust the system again. Again, a gender issue because it empowers male offenders over female victims. • They seemed shocked, admitting to assuming the system ‘usually worked’, and had little awareness of systemic failures and complications that mean so many cases of real people, real victims seeking safety, never get responded to, are downgraded, fail in court, are poorly managed by magistrates, or the ongoing impacts of those failures in subsequent systems and courts, over time.