In the past year, Safe Steps received 68,661 calls – from victim survivors, police, hospitals and schools – all reporting cases of family violence.
Angela Cook is the Intake and Assessment Manager at Safe Steps – Victoria’s only 24/7 domestic abuse centre – and her team are recovering from what has just been an exceptionally busy few days.
Sometimes she receives calls from men masquerading as the victim.
She says those men – who have worked in the department or the police force – have called in their official capacity to obtain information, “but we’ve got systems in place so that we don’t share them”.
Then there are the lesser-spoken aspects of family violence, like elder abuse – often adult children who perpetrate physical, emotional or financial abuse of their parents.
There has also been a rapid increase in technological abuse, with women being tracked, bugged and secretly filmed by cameras in the home.
Angela shares the unique challenges faced by women of culturally and linguistically diverse communities.
“People think honour killings happen just overseas. No.”
“We’ve had quite a few burns victims too. They’ve ended up in ICU after being set alight with petrol.”
With no refuge accommodation available, a young woman was sent to a motel.
There she took her own life.
Yet staggeringly, suicides as a result of domestic violence are not captured in the statistics. And thus, the true cost of domestic violence – and its ripple effect – is not documented.
“Throughout COVID, courts offered bail rather than remand for many perpetrators, therefore sending them back into the home. Also, the threshold for proof is too difficult – it’s so much harder to prove abuse in the home, as opposed to if it occurred in the street.”