Day One: 16 Days of Accountability

#IDEVAW DAY ONE 16 DAYS OF ACCOUNTABILITY?

Today marks the start of 16 Days of Activism against Gender Based Violence/Violence Against Women. The men committing these crimes against women and children are hiding in plain sight. They are sons, brothers, mates, bosses, coaches, people in positions of power. They are often enabled by their family and friends. YOU KNOW THESE MEN!?

They choose to abuse and cover it up or lie about the crimes they commit behind closed doors. They groom their victims and everyone else around them. They are master manipulators. The abuse is sadistic and purely grounded in self satisfaction and gratification. The damage done to victims is life altering and many times life ending.?

When women seek help or expose their perpetrator we commonly experience a second round of more excruciating torture and backlash. Perpetrators flip the narrative after the controlling relationship ends to the destruction of the victim; he must protect his image at all costs and will stop at nothing - including harming his own children - in order to get his way and get away with his crimes.?

Perpetrators have very warped, entitled beliefs that they are justified in controlling and abusing their victims. Patriarchy drives Gender Based Violence. Silencing victims enables and protects?perpetrators.?

I am a survivor of 30 years of domestic and sexual violence. He only hit me once, he struck me across the face knocking me to the ground. There was a witness, his friend, who did nothing and said nothing. I was laughing at his friend which obviously infuriated him. I was humiliated, belittled, and controlled in that moment, which was, I now realise, the point of that assault and all of the other degrading abuse I endured.?

I suffered severe physical ailments due to the ongoing and escalating abuse in the relationship and in the final year I could barely function at all. Tellingly, as soon as he had moved out of our home the chronic pain I had endured for a decade completely disappeared. Though?the PTSD did not.?

As we were beginning to separate he started running up debt in my name. I could see he was doing this and sought help from the bank, Suncorp, but they refused to listen to me or understand the financial abuse I was living under. In fact they enabled continued coercive control and financial abuse.?He also used the ATO to create debt in my name.

Prior to separation it got to the point where he had taken my credit card that I had often had to use to purchase groceries or items for the kids. I was only allowed a key card to our joint account that he was controlling. I had to ask him for money for groceries by the end of the relationship.?

To describe how a primary school teacher, a once seemingly confident, autonomous, financially literate person who created a business and for two thirds of the relationship, had the responsibility of paying all family bills and overseeing all business accounting, became the victim to such underhanded and abusive behaviour, I just do not know.?

I kept putting up with worse and worse behaviour. It is very much a slow and insidious undermining and take over of everything. I used to give in to get along, mostly because he had very rigid and almost toddler- like-tantrumming wants and needs which gave way many times to my complete disbelief at what I’d just experienced and many times complete dissociation or leaving my body as what was happening was untenable.?

My hyper vigilance in the end was on overdrive. My cortisol levels would have been through the roof as I was always waiting for the next attack, trying to hide it from kids, trying to live with one foot in the functioning motherhood, community and work world and one foot in the trauma world. No one ever saw this behaviour other than us. To the outside world he was a great bloke.?

As we separated he told me he was taking the business. He said to me “your not getting this house”. He said to me “no one will believe you”. He said to me he’d been advised to “deny, deny, deny”.?

I had tried to leave him numerous times but could not find any support. The first friend I asked for help said our husbands were friends, she could not help me, that I needed to try another friend for help.?

The next time I left just months after first asking for help, I took my children with me to seek refuge with another friend who told me it took two to tango, whose husband spoke to my husband and he’d explained things and he came to us to work things out. I went back to the relationship realising I had no support or means for safety.?

When I later told my mother about the abuse, as I had tried to in the past, she victim blamed me, asked why did I stay and put up with that? She then said it would ruin his reputation if I continued to try to tell people what he’d done and that my children would resent me for leaving him. She said she would check with my husband and later chose to believe he was incapable of the crimes I’d endured for three decades and told me this in no uncertain terms. Having your mother choose to believe your rapist is an unbearable pain but helped me to understand why I was such a people pleaser and so vulnerable to coercive control and abuse. I was, each time, invalidated, harmed enormously and left unsupported and traumatised further.?

I had thought leaving the relationship would be the hardest thing I would ever do in my life. I knew I would likely lose everything. My need to protect my kids from escalating abuse took over. I had no idea of the sheer horror that awaited me. I had listened to government education and advertising about domestic violence and leaving abuse. How wrong and misleading that was.?

The year following separation saw the narrative flip. Thirty years of abuse spewed out of me after he’d left, I had exposed the perpetrator purely by finally leaving the relationship. He had begun the wind up of the relationship six months prior to this point though I had clung on due to fear, ingrained feelings that children needed a traditional family and also trauma bonded reasons. I finally took the bait and ended the relationship after months of continuous abuse.?

I had witnessed his hatred of the girlfriend he had before me. I had seen him interact with her on one occasion they had come into contact at a party and I saw the fury and dark side he had demonstrated to her that I also knew by then and that moment of seeing him seething with fury at her was exponentially multiplied when I finally told his family and friends a very small part of the things he’d done to me over three decades. He took great pleasure in letting me know they already knew I was crazy and none of them believed me. I fell into trap after trap after trap, like a well practised dance. I see his satisfied smirk in my sleep. I realised that no amount of evidence or proof would dissuade his enablers from supporting him to harm us. I will never understand this cruelty.?

He got away with taking all money, the business, the house, part of my family, many friends, my neighbourhood, my reputation, my community, my post separation earnings that should have been spent on the kids needed to attempt to defend myself through three years of constant, unrelenting, legal abuse through Kirstie Day of Naughton McCarthy Family Lawyers, by monopolising my time through unnecessary and ongoing legal abuse. But the most traumatising and damaging of all his efforts; he got away with forcing my children into unsafe situations with him. His family bankrolled our torture.?

I found that there is zero practical supports for victims of post separation and systems abuse. There was no legal support for me. I didn’t qualify for legal aid because the house was an asset and I was working when I could. There was no financial support in order to secure legal representation. There was no police support to charge him for constant breaches of the DVO the police had prosecuted for continuing to enter my home without consent, stalking and harassment. Financially abusing your wife and children is not a crime. Sexual assault and coercion in marriage is also not something police pursue. I was told the problem with rape in marriage is it’s “he says, she says”. Domestic abuse is not a crime in Queensland or Australia.?

I found I was one of huge numbers of women suffering PTSD, made homeless and financially decimated by domestic violence. I was one of countless mothers who was forced to co-parent with their rapist and hand her children over to a perpetrator of abuse.?

I am forever grateful I managed to stay until my children were older. I have now met more mothers than I can count who have lost their children entirely to the perpetrator. The institutional abuse of women and children is abhorrent, staggering and unfathomable. I would not have believed such misogyny possible unless I had experienced it.?

The price for leaving an abuser of losing children, homelessness, detachment from community, financial ruin, revenge debt, systems abuse and lawfare, is unconscionably the norm.?

This is gendered violence. This is domestic, family, sexual abuse. This is happening in every second home in Australia. I am lucky to have survived it. My kids are lucky. Many are not so lucky.?

We currently live in a society that tolerates male violence. We must change for the sake of countless women and children like us. The acceptance of family violence stops today. Bystanders are complicit.?

I have ended the cycle of violence in my family. My children know what healthy and unhealthy relationships look like. I have taken back my power, my autonomy, my agency but it has been extraordinarily difficult and painful.?

None of what we had to endure should have happened! None of it was okay!?

Help to hold perpetrators accountable. Help to hold systems accountable. Help hold government accountable. Please sign and share this campaign.?

https://www.change.org/p/how-dare-she

#howdareshe

#victimsurvivorvoice

#16daysofaccountability