Why too many men are getting away with it

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He tells me that if I break up with him he will always find me because he has a private investigator’s licence, and a shotgun.

I finally make a break, which I think will be the end of it all. But that night, using a key he still has, he comes into the house, grabs me and pushes me up against a wall, pressing his forearm across my neck. He throws me to the floor, rips my phone out of the wall, then rips all the wires from my computer.

I sit by myself in the foyer at the Magistrates Court in Heidelberg, as I wait for the hearing to apply for an intervention order. To keep him away for good.

The police prosecutor speaks to me before the hearing. He tells me the other party has now explained everything to him. Obviously, I have overreacted. Surely, I don’t want to go through with it – the hearing, the intervention order.

I advise him that, yes, I will be proceeding.

The judge takes five minutes to issue a 12-month intervention order. My ex-partner must now legally stay away from me.

But he doesn’t. It only takes a week.

I step out of my local supermarket and there he is, standing next to his car, smiling at me. He lives nearly 30 kilometres away. I ignore him, go home and then go to the local police station to report him.

I should have gone straight there.

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The young policewoman I speak to explains that he has already come in and spoken to her. It is obviously an innocent mistake. He was there to buy special dog food from a pet store across from the supermarket. She smiles at me and tells me he was very nice and maybe I am overreacting.

He contacts me by email the next week. I ring the police and explain the situation.

This time the male police officer tells me that maybe I am just being a bit of a bitch, trying to get some sort of revenge on him, by reporting him. The man who has been legally mandated to stay away from me.

I try ringing his boss to warn him of this man, a 58-year-old social worker, who works with vulnerable young women. This works. I never hear from him again. I am lucky.

This week I was reminded of my experience, and of my mother’s experiences, after reading about the horrific actions of the individual who committed a double-murder in Floreat, Perth. His daughter says police repeatedly failed to listen and take effective action. The police insist they took appropriate steps each time, but the daughter’s story is hauntingly familiar. Has anything changed in 60 years?

So, we remain in abusive relationships, exhausted from desperately screaming into the deaf ears of those who fail to hear us.

It seems like the only time our stories, our voices, are heard is when one of us is murdered. Suddenly everyone can hear, but it is too late. Each time there follows the same earnest public conversation about what went so terribly wrong.

It is always obvious what went terribly wrong. Someone with the means to act, maybe a doctor, maybe a police officer, failed to listen when someone told their story the very first time.

Safe Steps 1800 015 188. National Sexual Assault, Domestic and Family Violence Counselling Service 1800RESPECT (1800 737 732). Lifeline 131 114

Jennie Hollamby is completing a creative practice (life-writing) PhD at Swinburne University with a research focus on transgenerational complex childhood trauma and literary representations of trauma.

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