Domestic Violence and Child Abuse - Intro

The first part of a deep dive into the domestic violence narrative, and why it matters for child protection

I got a bit distracted in the last article, addressing something that came up re the Helga Lam decision. Prior to that, I had promised to look at academic views on domestic violence, and how the popular narrative of ‘men abuse, women suffer (children witness)’ is supported - or not - by the literature. First, let’s start with something child centred, before we dive into the deep end and consider the Rosie Batty case and how that act of child abuse shaped (and was re-shaped for) the domestic violence discourse.

A couple of weeks ago, a Perth woman named Holly Anne Maxwell "pleaded guilty to assaulting and choking her seven-month-old baby" [SOURCE] She had done so while filming the acts, and then sent video and photos to the father (her ex) and his mother (the grandma). The images she sent included, "an image of her hand around the child's neck", "the child with a sock stuffed in their mouth" and "a white cord wrapped around the child's neck". She plead guilty to four charges.

Here she is, looking penitent, outside the court.

The judge said she had, "used the child as a weapon".  But the judge also said, according to the article, that the footage may have just been intended to "alarm" the ex-partner. I mean, you want to paint this in the best possible light, right?

Her lawyer said she was "struggling as a new mum and had been crying out for help" (a quote from the article, not the lawyer), that she was in a vulnerable state, and she had felt "trapped" in the relationship with the dad, which subsequently broke down. She had also been going through an investigation of allegations made earlier when she lost her job as a nurse (she was found "not guilty" of the allegations, though whether this was a court process or internal review, I don't know.)

She was diagnosed after the fact with post-natal depression. The judge gave her "an 18-month intensive supervision order, where she will be required to engage in the relevant services from parental lessons to anger management and drug rehabilitation programs". No gaol time.

Who gets custody? It doesn't say.

Did the father or grandmother get to read a victim's impact statement? Apparently not.

Can they sue her in civil court? I very much doubt anyone would even think of that.

Now, the fact that she got sentenced to "get better programs", not gaol, for actions she took while suffering post-natal depression is fine, in fact, it's appropriate. I have no problem with that - it's not why I brought this up.

My point is that while the child was unquestionably the victim of her actions, the father and grandmother were the targets.

These were acts of domestic violence, not just against the child, but against the father.

They were not charged as such. I have no reason whatever to believe they were ever recorded anywhere as such.

This is the problem: because we have a narrative that men commit domestic violence, and women are victims, even when it is the woman who commits the act, if there is a reason to define her as a victim - in this case, suffering post-natal depression - then the narrative ignores the man and focuses on her victimhood.

Even when, as here, there is a completely different victim - the child - and she is the only perpetrator.

Now, compare this to Australia's most famous incident of domestic violence, the death of Luke Batty, Rosie Batty's son, in 2014 at the hands of his father Greg Anderson.

Anderson had mental health issues, as we might almost say one can imagine after bludgeoning his son with a cricket bat before stabbing him to death and committing suicide. According to Rosie Batty's statement the day after the murder, "“What triggered this was a case of his dad having mental health issues,” she said. “He was in a homelessness situation for many years, his life was failing, everything was becoming worse in his life and Luke was the only bright light in his life.”" The same article also says, "coroner Ian Gray heard that Anderson suffered from delusions and probably an undiagnosed mental illness". (It also has the police portray him as an "intelligent and calculating figure" who cunningly used his irrationality and homelessness to game the system somehow, such that they could not possibly have seen coming how this violent and unstable individual should eventually commit such horrific acts, and if that sounds ludicrous to you, HERE'S an even more detailed account of the authorities trying to justify their own failures to stop this on so many occasions).

Anderson threatened many people, from Rosie Batty herself to a friend of hers he tried to sexually assault to a flatmate to his son's coach, he accessed child pornography, and as well as the criminal behaviour he had all the various 'trappings' of the seriously mentally ill: religious fixations, delusions, drug abuse, homelessness, violence.

Ultimately he killed his own son, despite Luke being someone he did not have a history of violence toward, and then as mentioned committed suicide, partially by knife, partially by cop.

Was this recorded as an act of domestic violence against Rosie Batty?

Ummm, yes. In fact, it is remembered almost exclusively as an act of violence against women, as Batty herself used her unfortunate celebrity to campaign against domestic violence. (I don't blame her, I thank her for her attempts to do something about this scourge and recognise that parents often attempt to make some sort of sense of tragedy by trying to stop others going through it). Batty's genuinely heroic efforts to oppose domestic violence were recognised as she was made Australian of the Year in 2015, a role which she again made full use of to oppose domestic violence, and she was then made a member of the Order of Australia in 2019.

The problem is, it was violence against women that all this was understood as referring to. Violence against children, except in the context of "women and children" (or, "WOMEN (and children)") was not reported, and if Batty spoke about it, the media did not see fit to amplify her on that point.

Let's be clear about the point I am making here, no more, no less.

When Holly Maxwell assaulted her baby on multiple occasions and sent photos to attack the baby's father, she was charged with actions against the baby, her mental health was taken into account to the extent that she ended up facing no gaol time, and the domestic violence aspect of her attacks against the baby's father were ignored (as far as the reporting tells us).

When Greg Anderson killed his son and committed suicide, the mental health drivers of this terrible act were downplayed and this was decried as an act of domestic violence against the mother. This may well be true - Batty testified at Luke's inquest her belief, born of grieving contemplation on Anderson's act against a son he had always loved, despite his many problems, that he had killed Luke because he wanted to punish her - but ultimately, it was the 'violence against children' aspect that was ignored. So much so, that in one of Australia's most shameful media moments in many long years, when feminist filmmaker Cassie Jaye (a foreigner, unaware of the details) was informed of this incident on The Project, and she responded that it demonstrated that males like Luke could indeed be the victims of domestic violence, the panel of The Project were incredulous.

"Sorry, that's the lesson you took from that?" asked Waleed Aly after a stunned silence. I suspect Waleed and co. had used Rosie Batty's story to promote the narrative of men perpetrators / women victims for so long that they had forgotten that the victim in that instance was a boy.

Anything that differs from the narrative is ignored - that's my point. This means child abuse sometimes just gets ignored, and acts of domestic violence against men sometimes just get ignored.

And this is important not because men are the real victims, or any such nonsense, or because men don’t commit most acts of violence - they do - but because when we downplay women as perpetrators because that doesn’t suit the narrative (and contrary evidence is ignored) we make it so much harder to get action on the significant proportion of child abuse that occurs at the hands or connivance of the mother. “Women hurting children? Nooooo, women-and-children are the victims, women are the victims!”

It’s bad enough trying to keep children safe without having to fight the media as well as the system that preferences the group most likely to abuse. So the narrative has to be exposed and called out, or we turn even the simplest attempts at child protection into insane uphill battles.

Anyway, am I stretching too long a bow, to compare a post-nataly depressed woman like Holly Maxwell who hurt but did no lasting damage to her baby (in the opinion of the judge) with a violent man like Greg Anderson who killed his child? All right, let's compare tragic apples with tragic apples.

You may remember in March 2017 the horrific case of a mother drowning her 5 year old in the Murray, and attempting to drown her 9 year old. Boys again, of course. The 9 year old escaped, despite her sitting on him in the river in a very deliberate attempt to kill him, only to be mauled by a dog, was rescued from that, and made a statement from hospital to police, despite having injuries from the dog and pneumonia from aspirating the river water. Give that boy a medal. Give him all the medals.

The mother was later seen floating, face up, in the river, in some performative act that people are politely calling a suicide attempt. The 5 year old’s body was found further downstream two days later.

The mother did not have custody, her mother did, but she seems to have regular access to the kids. We are told she “was on supervised parole after having been released from prison, on aggravated break and enter offences, just four weeks earlier”. (Read that article for her mental state and movements before the fatal events, as well as the custodial grandmother’s efforts to alert police and prevent this). She appears to have had a long history of mental health issues, including hearing voices since 7 and self-harm, as well as crime and drug abuse - she was caught shoplifting twice in the period leading up to killings, but no-one seems to have believed this violated her parole - and her background included a family disposition to schizophrenia and a being sexually and physically abused as a child. The judge at her trial was reported as saying, “that mental illness — including borderline personality disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder and major depressive disorder — had caused her to “fail to appreciate what she was doing was wrong”.” We are told in the next paragraph that, “during the four-day trial, the court heard from two psychiatrists, who had supported claims the woman was suffering from undiagnosed mental illness at the time of the incident.”

Was she only formally diagnosed after the event? The very fact that she had not been given custody suggests someone somewhere had already concluded she had problems.

She was found not guilty, of course, by reason of mental defect, and placed in the custody of the Mental Health Review Unit, “until it’s satisfied the accused will not endanger (anyone else) or herself”. She is at least in Silverwater, a maximum security women’s gaol, while they figure it out.

The children’s father is described as ‘estranged’. What did the judge say of him?

Nothing worth reporting, if anything at all.

Victim impact statement? Apparently not. The judge did though offer the mother, the perpetrator, his condolences for her tragic loss.

DId the father even know, or care? Well, according to news.com, the only media organisation who seem to have bothered to speak to him, he “described the woman’s actions as “despicable and vile (acts) committed against my innocent children … which resulted in my son being (killed)”. “(It was) the evil, twisted act of a monster,” he said.”

If you’re wondering why I keep saying, “the woman”, her name has been suppressed. Not because she was found not guilty - it has been suppressed all along. Ironically, it seems to be because one of the children survived, so he is being protected with anonymity. That makes sense, but means we never get to name the offender, or remember the name of his lost brother.

But back to the dad. (His name is also suppressed - that I can understand). He seemed to think this was something she had threatened to do before. He told news.com, ““Upon (the woman’s) release from prison and despite numerous threats she made to kill our children, (she) was released into the care of her mother, our childrens’ grandparent and guardian,” he said. “Not only did this put my children in grave danger and at high risk, but also gave (their mother) every opportunity to plan and easily follow through with her premeditated resolve.” She made one of those threats in a phonecall to her mother before the incident (the grandmother called the police) and at least one of those previous threats was known to police. The grandmother had also raised objections about the mother being placed so close to the children with Corrective Services, but they were insistent after the event that they had done nothing wrong. [SOURCE]

Much is made in the trial of the woman claiming that she had a delusional belief that another ex-partner was coming to hurt her and the children, with her lawyer arguing, “She thought she was saving them from being killed (in a worse way). She believes that she actually kept them safe”, and the judge apparently accepted this in his decision. But when being interviewed, “the accused told detectives the day after the tragedy, that she had “blacked out and drowned her babies” because one of them “turned evil””, so we may never know what was really going on in her head.

Back to the dad again: THIS article fills in some of the gaps. Dad hadn’t been in touch in five years, had never seen his younger boy, remembered the woman as a good mother but someone who became completely different when they argued. If we are to believe him - and I don’t like taking anybody’s one-sided version of events - then somehow he found out about the problems the mother was having and, ““I applied with (the authorities) for them to be with their grandparents 18 months ago when I found out (there were problems),” he said. “I was hoping that would lead to me being able to see the children.”” This sounds slightly self-serving to me - I doubt his input was needed by the authorities - but there’s not nearly enough information to be sure. In another article he says, “I’ve been alienated. I’ve had no address, no phone number (for the children) for five or six years.” How did he find out there were problems, then? I don’t know. Presumably the “18 months ago” was when the mother was arrested, or arraigned, for the crimes she ended up spending nearly a year in gaol for, and the authorities had to decide what to do with her children, but how much dad was involved is unknown. That article also mentions that mum’s crimes included assault, where every other account says only aggravated burglary - you wouldn’t want to stigmatise her as violent, after all.

This is all news.com again. The progressive Sydney Morning Herald mentions in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it comment that dad had travelled (pretty much immediately, it seems) from Queensland to “be with his son at the hospital” in Melbourne, but focuses on the grandparents keeping ‘bedside vigil’ and working with their lawyer to hold Corrective Services to account.   From the latter we learn that the woman got “mental health care and substance abuse counselling”, but since she didn’t take her meds, she deteriorated. The Herald wrote multiple articles trying to blame Corrective Services, but the much touted AVO in place was only for when she was substance abusing - she had nothing in her system when arrested - and the grandparents seem to have let her use the caravan on the property and possibly the car (and let me make clear, I do not blame the grandparents in any way, they alerted the police immediately when she said she was not bringing the children back). The Herald also made much of the mother’s above-mentioned fear of an ex-partner - whom she had not had contact with in a year - being the reason behind her actions, and stays silent on her comments about killing one of her boys because he “turned evil” even when discussing her statement to police.

The even more progressive The Guardian tells us something interesting: “The father of the two boys, who reportedly had not been in contact with the mother for some time and had not met the youngest child, told Fairfax media he was “numb”.” What is interesting about this is that Fairfax is the owner of the Sydney Morning Herald - so they did speak to the dad, they just didn’t care to report that. Wasn’t important, I guess. (A quick check of Fairfax’s other major mast-head, The Age, just shows the same two articles as found in the Herald).

Finally, when we look at the ABC (this is all very tricky to do with all the names suppressed, for the record) they covered both the events and the subsequent inquest in nearly a dozen articles.

They never mention the father once. He was simply irrelevant, apparently.

What is focussed on, is the various failures of agencies such as Corrective Services and Family and Community Services [HERE and HERE] to coordinate their efforts to keep these children, known to be at risk, safe. The coverage by and large is fair and balanced, albeit it does give us some strange comments like, “The matter was closed (by FaCS) despite the children being considered at a "high risk" when in the company of their mother, who had the legal right to care for them”. Am I the only one who thinks that sentence doesn’t actually make sense?

Certainly the inquest found ways the various authorities could have communicated, especially since the woman, to her credit, reached out to a mental health team the day before the incident, realising something in her behaviour was seriously wrong. The person she dealt with did not communicate that to anyone else if I understand it correctly.

What is relevant about this style of coverage is it frames the death of the children as a ‘systemic failure’, rather than laying the blame squarely at the feet of the mother, who instead is portrayed as protecting her children (in her own deranged mind) from some ‘former partner’ who, the ABC admits, there is no evidence whatsoever posed any threat.

And yes, I understand it was her belief, not a rational fact, but it was not the only belief she expressed. It’s the one that was amplified.

Why do I have a problem with this? Well, there’s a couple of reasons. Firstly, it’s the defence that the lawyer pushes in every interview. That in itself suggests this is the way of framing this horrific incident in the best light (since the fact that the mother committed the actions is not in dispute). It portrays the mother as acting altruistically - yes, ‘altruistic’ killing is a thing, even if the ‘altruism’ is only in the deranged mind of the perpetrator - and it also subtly shifts the framing of the incident in line with the narrative: “well, the mother feared there was an ex-partner coming to do even worse things to the children, because of previous abuse, some man somewhere is really to blame!” This is an almost standard response since it is on the basis of this narrative that women consistently get lesser gaol sentences than men, or get found not guilty, or just don’t get charged at all.

Of course, this could still be true, and there is certainly evidence that the mother had these fears in her mind. The other reason I have my doubts is something that the judge pointed out, regarding the horrific nature of the deaths: the fact that the poor five year old died terrified with his last minutes being unimaginably horrific. A mother seeking to ‘save’ her children pain would not, we might argue, choose such an horrific execution method, particularly with the evidence of premeditation (telling the grandmother ahead of time she would not be seeing them again) and planning (buying fishing gear to disguise her actions) that went into this.

For an example - still horrific - of painless killing, compare what happened in Davidson, where a father of two children with autism painlessly gassed himself, his wife and the children (and the dog) while the family slept. To achieve what the coroner’s report (link below) described as, “to end the lives of his wife and children painlessly and quickly” (pg 22), he apparently built pipes throughout the house. A pity he didn’t put that effort into seeking support, or, well, doing basically anything other than killing four people. (If you can be bothered going down the rabbit-hole, the media response to this incident, as opinions swayed back and forth between eulogising the mother and demonising the father as everyone struggled to figure out if the mother had been an accomplice or a victim (or even, theoretically, the perpetrator) has to be seen to be believed. The coroner finally concluded the mother was simply a victim.)

Anyways, that’s why I have my doubts about the reasons for the Deniliquin woman’s actions: as I said above, we will probably never know what was going on in her head. But, compare her portrayal to that of Greg Anderson. The various failures to act against his mental-health driven violence are fairly stark, but that is actually portrayed as “that cunning irrational homeless drug-user outsmarted us again, what a wicked fella!” Despite the numerous opportunities and reasons to do something about him - like put him in gaol for accessing child pornography, or for domestic violence against Rosie Batty, or threatening others - nothing effective was done. But that is not the focus, any more than his mental health is the focus - that’s usually put in inverted commas, because it’s impossible to get a formal diagnosis against someone now deceased, so no-one has to admit he was mentally ill (see finding 15 of Luke Batty’s inquest, pg 3) - and his violence against Rosie Batty is the focus. Always.

The similarities between the Deniliquin woman’s actions and Greg Anderson’s should not be laboured, but in some senses are striking. In both cases they were homeless - the mother in the latter story was set up in a caravan on the grandparent’s property (apparently over their objections - yes, such things happen, I can think of a young chap with a disability I knew who was released from prison into the custody of his poor mother, also with disabilities, which was ridiculous but the agencies involved all decided it was the right thing) but in reality she was “largely itinerant”. Both deliberately acted in an apparently normal, parental manner to get the victim(s) alone: Anderson offered to play cricket in the nets with his son after a game until bystanders had dispersed, the woman specifically purchased fishing gear and said she was going fishing with her boys, so no-one thought anything of it.

In both cases, these were a pretence to what must therefore be concluded to be a premeditated intent to kill, and once there was no-one to intervene the pretence was dropped and the respective children savagely murdered.

But look at the different ways they were reported, and framed.

Anyway, back to the unnamed dad - we haven’t gotten to the bottom of that sad story.

You see, as I mentioned, dad travelled from Queensland to Melbourne, the length of the continent, to be with his surviving son when he was in hospital. This seems to have depleted dad’s resources. So dad started a Go Fund Me to allay the costs and put him in a position to contribute to the younger boy’s funeral, for $5000. People ask for so much more money, with so much less justification, every day. Surely no-one would object?

Well, if you’ve ever been near the internet, you’ll know the answer is otherwise. (Aside - this is pretty much why I have never had social media. Seriously, it's a toilet). The headline says it all: Father of boys involved in Murray River tragedy blasted for trying to crowdfund money.

(That’s from the Daily Telegraph, a part of the news.com stable which is usually behind a paywall, but for some reason they let me read it).

Yes, people let fly - “you’re not a father, the boys needed a father, where were you?” etc. Trolls gonna troll. What I found rather disturbing was that a domestic violence survivors’ platform felt the need to weigh in:

“The Red Heart Campaign, a platform for survivors of domestic violence and familial child abuse, has also taken to its Facebook page to encourage people to think twice before donating.

“It does not cost $5000 to fly anywhere in Australia, we know the little lad’s funeral will be covered by the State Government funeral fund or Share The Dignity’s Because We Care program, the father has not indicated that this money will be used to support the victim’s brother, he acknowledges he has no relationship with the children and we’d feel more comfortable if the people behind the Fund are the children’s legal guardians,” the organisation wrote. “We encourage everyone to think twice before donating.””

What the actual fudge? They seriously attacked a man whose son was just killed for trying to raise $5000 for travel and funeral costs? I hope there is a justification behind that.

Now, you may think there is. You may also find the father’s actions despicable. I’m not at all impressed that he was never in his boys’ lives. When we look at the later ABC articles about the inquest, there is again no mention of him, only the grandmother being present, but then he was recorded in news.com as “sobbing” at the mother’s trial, where the ABC did not acknowledge his existence.

Was he at the inquest? We don’t know.

Has he been involved in his surviving son’s life? We don’t know.

The mother told the grandmother from gaol that she wanted to move the boys away from Deniliquin (a dinky little town in the middle of southern NSW) and go to Queensland, was it to reconnect with the father? We don’t know.

There are a thousand questions we might have about this father and his lack of involvement in his sons’ lives, but there is just not that much information. And there is just not that much information because this is not being reported as being about the dad, despite him having just lost a son, a son he had never met and never will.

So, what do we conclude? That everything is framed around women and men get screwed? Well, we already knew that. But that’s not my point.

My point is this: whether an action is understood as an act of domestic violence is heavily influenced by this gendered approach. If a woman is the culprit, then it is not necessarily understood as domestic violence even if, as in the case of Holly Maxwell, a man is the direct target of the actions. Also, a woman will be regarded as a victim - of mental illness, of systemic failures, of previous partners, of, well, whatever it takes to frame her as a victim - whereas a man in an identical situation is just a monster.

This is the point I am making, before we dig in to the domestic violence studies I promised. And the child-centred reason I am making it will become clear shortly, if I have not already spelled it out.

Actually, I will leave that until next time, as this was meant to be the opening couple of paragraphs, and it has gone eight pages. I do waffle on.