Hansard debates

Ms MAXWELL (Northern Victoria) (14:03): I move:

That this house:

(1) recognises:

(a) the prevalence of coercive control in family violence offending;

(b) that perpetrators of family violence may offend against multiple family members and intimate partners;

(c) that disclosure of relevant information about the criminal history of a perpetrator is a key indicator in family violence risk assessment and management;

(2) calls on the government to:

(a) review legislative and procedural frameworks in relation to family violence to consider how evidence of coercive and controlling behaviour is available to illustrate the experience of family violence; and

(b) consider the suite of initiatives and opportunities available to enhance the understanding of coercive and controlling behaviour in our community and the justice system.

I rise today to speak on my motion 676, which calls on the government to examine the abhorrent behaviour known as coercive control and the potential for evidence of such behaviour to be used in court cases. My motion today is to represent victims who have suffered and endured the effects and impacts of coercive control and to seek much-needed changes to how organisations and our justice system respond to the impacts of coercive control and the traumatic implications that are often irreversible. I am not going to dance lightly around this subject today, nor am I going to refrain from highlighting serious concerns about the insidious behaviours that ruin lives and leave lasting scars on victims, scars that for some will never heal. Some of this information may be overwhelming, and it should be. I am not here to sugar-coat the reality of the consequences and impacts of this appalling behaviour, which is nothing short of inexcusable, controlling and ultimately an expression of the inadequacy of those who inflict it on others.

The murder of Hannah Clarke and her children in February 2020 broke the hearts of our nation. It was a watershed moment in sparking the national conversation around coercive control. We need to determine how this conversation is going to happen in Victoria, and that is why I am putting this motion to the Parliament today. One woman every week dies at the hands of her current or former partner. I am going to say that again: one woman every week in Australia dies at the hands of her current or former partner. According to the Victorian homicide register there have been 110 family violence homicides in this state—in this state of Victoria—in the past five years. There were more than 174 000 family violence offences reported in Victoria in the year ending 30 June 2021. This was an increase of 18 per cent on 2018–19—18 per cent; that is enormous. The men’s referral service recorded a 90 per cent increase in calls in April 2020, when stage 3 restrictions were introduced. Police were called to 92 251 incidents in 2020, and those are the ones that were reported. These are big numbers.

Before I speak more specifically about coercive control, I want to take a moment to pay my respects to the victims, victim-survivors and their families and loved ones. I also pay my respects to the staunch advocates for those who do not have a voice themselves, and some of them are in Queen’s Hall today—these victim-survivors who advocate for the deceased, for those who are silenced by grief and for those who are living with violence and silenced by fear. As MPs for Derryn Hinch’s Justice Party, Mr Grimley and I have the privilege to advocate for those who are impacted by crime, whether they are survivors or it is in their memories. We speak with people every week whose lives are forever changed by the offences committed against them or their loved ones. Some are here today, and your courage is truly inspiring and is at the centre of our work. I also note the efforts of frontline police, family violence specialists and the broader social services network who work at the coalface, who try to help people access safety, pick up the pieces and achieve justice. We know it is a complicated and heartbreaking job for some.

Coercive and controlling behaviours are a form of violence involving repeat patterns of abusive behaviour. They can cause enormous harm, leaving victims isolated, insecure and fearful. Coercive controlling behaviour is pervasive by nature. It increases the likelihood of escalating violence within a relationship, and it is likely to persist after separation. Controlling behaviours might include any combination of measures, such as withholding money, tracking a phone and reading emails and texts. It could be regulating what someone wears, who they hang out with or where they go; following them, isolating them and making things so difficult that friends and family pull away; or gaslighting, making threats, manipulation and intimidation. As a victim of coercive control becomes increasingly isolated the patterns of abuse can escalate. It is no wonder they refer to coercive control as invisible chains. Many victims report that the psychological abuse is often worse than all but the most extreme physical abuse because of its persistent and enduring nature.

Going back to the case of Hannah Clarke, one of her closest friends reported having spoken to her husband on many occasions to effectively pull him up on the controlling behaviours that he exercised over his wife. This friend said that he only heard the term ‘coercive control’ after Hannah’s death and that if he had known more about coercive control he would have done more.

Here in Victoria our courts recently considered the horrifying abuse suffered by Michelle Skewes at the hands of her ex-husband—and I met with Ms Skewes in preparing this motion. In fact she is in Queen’s Hall today watching this very speech. Coercive controlling behaviours were pervasive throughout her marriage, and she described trying to make herself a small target and keep a public mask of normality in order to hide her private life of misery. For more than a decade Ms Skewes was stripped of her independence, her vibrancy, her dignity and her sense of self-worth. And the manipulation and denigration extended to extreme physical and sexual violence.

Excerpts noted by the judge from Ms Skewes’s victim impact statement included that the possibility of vomiting triggers panic, she apologises for everything, her self-esteem is still broken by humiliation and shame, she is hypervigilant, naturally distrusting of others, anxious about her physical health and plagued by nightmares and exhaustion. If you read the transcript of her court case, you would indeed concur that this is probably a very underestimated sense of the trauma that has been inflicted upon this woman. She suffered the besmirching judgement of others as if her abuse disturbed an idyllic public picture of her marriage, and we see that so often in relationships where coercive control is used to manipulate a partner.

Ms Skewes’s courage to share her story in the face of all that she has endured is remarkable. Her offender was sentenced to more than a decade in prison. The judge said, and I quote:

This sentence must send a clear and unequivocal message of deterrence that those who are like-minded to offend in this way, particularly men in the context of coercive control and domestic violence, must understand that their behaviour will be met by condemnation and denunciation as utterly unacceptable conduct and with stern and just punishment.

Now with much ahead to rebuild her life with her children, Ms Skewes is in this Parliament today hoping that she can help prevent the abuse she endured from happening to others.

These offences are quite hard to imagine, but the work of police, social workers and our courts is littered with cases of intimate partner and family violence. Can I just make a note in there that very recently it was also published that an enormous number of Victoria Police members have been found guilty or have been charged with these offences. It does not discriminate. There are people, men and women from all walks of life, that perpetrate this controlling, coercive behaviour, and it is simply unacceptable.

We know the New South Wales Joint Select Committee on Coercive Control has recommended a criminal offence for the patterns of oppressive behaviour that are coercive control. This committee heard evidence that 111 out of 112 cases of intimate partner homicide—99 per cent—had been preceded by elements of coercive control. We are dreaming to think that domestic and family violence offending stops when one relationship ends. You only have to look at data from the domestic violence disclosure scheme in South Australia for verification that abusive partners can repeat their offending from one relationship to the next.

South Australia launched a domestic violence disclosure scheme in 2018 where people with a concern about their safety could apply to know information about a partner’s history of domestic offending. More than 900 people have applied through the scheme for information since its launch. In an analysis of just 221 of those applicants, more than 100 men had a history of abuse of up to three people, while 15 had harmed between four and 10 others. That is nearly half that had repeated their offending across multiple partners. Keep in mind that this history will only include what has been reported, so it is a bit like an iceberg and there is likely to be a lot more under the surface.

There are tragic cases in our country of victims who were killed by a current or former partner where there were red flags and only when it was too late did the criminal history of the offender emerge. Rekiah O’Donnell is one such case. Rekiah died at age 22 when she was murdered by her abusive partner. Only after her death did the family become aware that he had previously offended and had a former partner and two children who were hiding from him.

The Centre Against Violence in my home town of Wangaratta has done extensive work over decades with victims of violence, including family violence. In their experience, understanding the past behaviour and character of an offender is absolutely an indicator of future offending, but often they cannot share that information or there are substantial limitations on what they can share. Issues raised about our justice system are not always about the laws that exist but are often about how they are applied and how they can favour offenders to the detriment of their victims. That is one thing that I hear constantly, time and time again: victims feel the offender’s rights outweigh the victim’s rights, and we have an enormous amount of data which supports that argument.

One of the principles of our criminal justice system is the concept of ‘de novo’, which effectively means ‘new’. Every incident is considered in its own right, but this single-incident approach does not fit with the enduring nature of coercive control and some other family violence offending. It effectively means that offenders avoid accountability for the complex and enduring ongoing behavioural patterns that occur in abusive relationships. Coercive, controlling behaviours in isolation might be viewed as minor and not criminal. When considered in the total context of control it is a completely different picture, and this is what we need to capture. Our existing criminal systems are described as ‘too narrow to capture the patterns of coercion and control’. Without consequence or when behaviour is downplayed or dismissed the behaviour is reinforced in the mind of offenders and blame is often shifted to the victims.

Kerry Burns is the former CEO of the Centre Against Violence in Wangaratta and a highly experienced and respected practitioner. She was also a witness at the Legal and Social Issues Committee inquiry. In one of our first conversations after I was elected Ms Burns spoke to me at length about the need to make the court system more victim centred, including our courts taking into account the whole picture of offending when it comes to family violence. As a service they might have considerable information relating to family violence for their client, including coercive, controlling behaviours, that has never been considered by our courts. If an organisation like the Centre Against Violence or a GP or health service has information about that history, it should be required to be put to the courts when offending is against an intimate partner or family member to provide a consideration of the broader context in which the offending occurred.

With me in Parliament today is Lee Little, and I have spoken about Lee in this chamber before. Lee’s daughter Alicia was killed by her partner as she attempted to leave the relationship. We know that that for many is the most dangerous time in their relationship. Alicia’s body was crushed against a water tank by the car her partner was driving, and he left the scene without assisting her. She died. Alicia’s offender was charged with murder. This was later plea-bargained down to a charge of dangerous driving causing death. Can you imagine how Alicia’s mother feels hearing that sentence when she knew of his past offending, she knew of his controlling behaviours? And yet the Office of Public Prosecutions indicated to the family the plea bargain guaranteed them a guilty verdict. It saved them the trauma of a trial. For the family, not only did they lose Alicia, they felt they lost their justice.

Alicia had interactions with the Centre Against Violence before her death and had reported to her doctor. The court noted their relationship was volatile within their four-year relationship and had been marked by episodes of family violence, yet there was no opportunity for the records of the Centre Against Violence or the evidence of their caseworkers to be presented to the court, so there was little consideration of family violence in the context of this offence, not to mention that he was subject to an intervention order by a former partner. The plea-bargaining process, by reducing the charge, took family violence outside the scope of the incident, so the court never obtained the full picture.

Plea-bargaining is seen as a necessary and efficient part of our justice system, most often the horsetrading of a guilty plea in exchange for a reduced charge and lower sentence. Courts often justify this by saying that victims are not traumatised through the court process, which might be true, but victims and their families often say they want their day in court, they want their story known. This is certainly the case for Lee Little and her family, and from discussions that I have had today with these victims who have come in to tell their story, they often feel judged, because if they are not sitting in a courtroom crying, if they are not curled up in that fetal position, then they are often judged and it is deemed, ‘You’re not traumatised by this violence, because you’re not externally showing it to everybody’. People deal with trauma in many different ways, and it is incumbent upon us all to listen, to hear those stories and to never judge, because I am sure that we have all in this chamber had something in some way that has happened to us, and we may respond completely differently to how people expect us to.

We know the coroner indicated to Lee Little’s family they would conduct a review of Alicia Little’s death, and a systemic review of family violence deaths forms part of coronial proceedings. But Alicia died in 2017, and it could still be years before the inquest takes place. That leaves Lee Little’s family lying in wait, waiting every day to hear if something is going to happen for them.

Another victim-survivor of family violence can attest to the adverse impact of plea-bargaining on her case, and that person is watching today also from Queen’s Hall. They say that coercive control often first presents itself as an expression of love, of interest and of protection. For this survivor charm turned to coercive control and later sexual and physical violence. The offender was charged with 70 criminal offences, which were reduced once he pleaded guilty. In the end he was sentenced to just three months jail, which was further reduced on appeal to a two-year community corrections order.

The long-term impacts are not just for the intimate partner but extended to the children. Let us call this child Liam. Liam was eight when his mother met his stepfather. He was fabulous at first and would play footy with him. Later he would be mean to Liam—call him names, constantly criticise him, be rough with him. Liam did his best to just stay out of the way, and this went on for years. We know that in these stories there are often children who are impacted by this violence.

Moving forward, thank you, everyone, for listening. I look forward to hearing the contributions today, and I hope people will support this motion. It is a very important motion, and once again thank you to the victims who are here today. And thank you, everyone, for listening.