I visit Annika at her unit, which she rents with her teenager. When I enter Annika’s small courtyard, she is warm and welcoming, all smiles and flowing summery dress. She invites me to sit down and starts to make us a cup of tea. The phone rings and she is now diffusing a situation with a client, a young person with autism, and their family. A busy, working woman. Annika, in her forties, is a NDIS support coordinator living near Melbourne. She identifies as autistic, and has physical impairment, including a permanent back injury, and a brain injury caused by an aneurysm. While she takes pride in her autistic identity, she has struggled at times with social phobia, rumination, low self-esteem, and undervaluing herself. These issues, she notes, are common for people with autism. Annika situates herself both as a victim-survivor with disability and a practitioner in the disability sector. She answers questions tying together these threads of herself. As an autistic woman, she is creative-minded, always finding the nearest analogy and using her visual mind to think things through. She is also a ‘tangenter’, she explains with a laugh; to mean during our conversation she may embark on lines of flight into her inner world and thoughts on related topics. Annika regularly participates in research and advocacy projects, including a recent focus group run by a disability peak body. ‘They were um, uh, pitching a new website talking about domestic violence and disability. And, um, I was astounded at the lack of accessibility on a domestic violence disabled website.’
Issues of accessibility and equity within service systems sit close to her heart. Her firsthand experiences have informed her understandings. Annika was in a ‘complicated and volatile’, on and off again relationship with Tristan in her twenties, which lasted about three years in total. He controlled all aspects of home life, eroding Annika’s confidence, and sense of self. He was extremely jealous and sexualised Annika in front of others, claiming ownership of her. ‘I found myself struggling with really simple decision making. Like I felt like I didn't have a right, um, he had tried to control my career.’ Rigid gender norms informed Tristan’s attitudes towards work and domestic life, including that women should be at home raising children. Work had been a safe place where Annika did what she loved but she began to feel guilt and shame around parenting while at work. ‘I was blamed for my [son’s] speech impediment [that] was later diagnosed… there was a lot of, um shame around my, um, parenting because my son was different and [Tristan] rejected him’. After partnering the second time, Tristan’s violent and controlling behaviours toward Annika escalated; ‘there was a lot of uncomfortable stuff [and] then when I was pregnant with my son, he was incredibly awful. So, I left’. While Tristan used physical violence, including fracturing her wrist so she could not drive or work, it took her a long time to identify his behaviour as domestic violence ‘because it wasn’t physical until the end of the relationship’. Annika felt herself ‘ebbing away’. During a conversation with one of her closest friends, she came to tears suddenly. ‘I said, I actually don’t even know who I am right at this moment’. ‘It wasn't until I had no sense of myself left and no life of my own, that I realised I was in an abusive relationship. It would've been a further three months before I could end that relationship.’ The end of the relationship, however, did not spell the end of Tristan’s abuse. Tristan felt himself losing control, and his behaviours escalated. One night, after she had told him to leave, he broke in while they were out. He left items around the house, went through her car, and left all its doors open. When leaving, he attempted to run into a neighbour with his car. The neighbour called the police; however, no further action was taken despite a DVO being in place.
In one incident, Tristan beat her for over an hour. She had been thrown across the room onto a glass table, landing on her back. There was blood everywhere, she tells me. The injury to her back still causes pain all these years later. She paints a particularly chaotic scene at the hospital after she had sustained a back injury from being beaten. She was waiting for her child who was receiving medical attention in another room. Knowing her son’s particular communication needs and not being allowed in the room to assist, Annika felt overwhelmed and overcome by feelings of powerlessness. She was also receiving threats to her life from Tristan. ‘I couldn't wait to get out of the hospital. Well, he was also threatening to come into the hospital and kill us there if necessary. So, the hospital was blaming me for a potential threat. Um, the police had taken my phone so that they could track the threats.’ As is common for people with autism, Annika has developed ways of stimming (or self-stimulatory behaviours) which allow her to cope and self-regulate when feeling overwhelmed. While she was pacing in the hallway and rocking to calm herself, police and medical staff misinterpreted Annika’s behaviour an expression of mental ill health and considered sectioning her under the Mental Health Act; ‘it wasn't mental health, it's my stimming, it's how I regulate and judging that wrongly was really hard to cope with’. Nurses tried to get her to lay down and stop her from talking, which amplified Annika’s distress. Police were yelling at her to calm down and to hand over her phone. She felt blamed, disempowered, invalidated, infantilised. She felt like she was failing to protect her son. Annika emphasises that her experiences of Tristan’s violent behaviour were compounded by her treatment with police, justice, and medical systems. Police and court processes were retraumatising, adding insult to injury, allowing Annika to blame herself and her disability for Tristan’s use of violence. She also notes the failure to act on DVO breaches reflect this inequality. ‘I was left feeling further invalidated and [with a] lack of worth. The whole system added further to trauma [further] impacting years of recovery.’ Tristan’s behaviours exemplified that he felt entitled to control Annika’s life (and that of her child). He showed no remorse or responsibility for his violent actions, including his use of weapons to threaten them, a high-risk indicator for intimate partner homicide. Moreover, justice and police responses largely failed to hold him accountable. ‘This is the level of narcissism. This person, my ex-partner had, he represented himself in court, <laugh>, he didn't hand himself into the police station. He was out having fun with his mates, went into work, got arrested at work, um, then he goes to court and represents himself and takes no personal responsibility and says all this bull crap and blames me. And the judge called him a good man. “You seem like a good man”. “You're brave to be representing yourself”… He held his son at knife points. Forget about the hour of like beating me senseless and holding a knife to my throat. He held a knife to a five-year-old and threatened to kill him. And the judge called him a good man. Like, he did me a favour to have a relationship with me.’ This highlights a lack of awareness of the dynamics and impacts of DFV within the justice system, as well as a lack of value placed on the lives of people with disability, says Annika. ‘Look, it has changed a little bit since my experience, but still not enough from what I hear from the community… so there is a bias towards inequality when you are disabled.’ Annika emphasises, it is not just people with disability who need to be met with care and understanding. There are significant impacts from DFV for all people, and the experience of trauma necessitates accommodations are made within service systems to respond to these needs.
‘I felt very unheard, unseen, undervalued, um, but not just that for years to come, I felt invisible. Like the damage that was done through that whole process, like it still stays with me today where I feel invisible a lot of the time. Um, not simply because I'm disabled, but because, um, I was never really allowed a proper voice at the time. And, um, and you know, um, not ever properly kind of recovering myself from the experience because at no point was I given that validation.’ Court processes also happened too fast; Annika was in court on a Monday after being discharged from hospital that weekend. She was still dealing with the immediate effects of the crisis, did not have time to process what had happened, and was physically injured. She did not have time to seek her own legal representation and facing court was extremely difficult. At the time, few people in her life knew the extent and nature of Tristan’s use of violence. Annika reflects most people in her position at the time would not have been doing so well. She adds, ‘a lot of the time, people with disability already have some level of trauma. Um, when you have trauma, it takes time to process what happened.’ Whether from her personal or professional experiences, it is clear she holds a systemic lens when considering her experiences of DFV as an autistic woman. She uses information and statistics to bolster her understanding of what happened to her. Autistic women are more likely to experience violence, while also experiencing greater barriers to accessing support, Annika tells me. ‘So, autistic women are four times more likely to be in a domestic violence relationship [sic]. Um, and being an invisible disability, there's a lot of miscommunication, misunderstanding in the community of [your] susceptibility to gaslighting, coercion, um, predatory behaviour.’ She also notes that autistic women will generally be in relationships with violent men for longer, compared to neurotypical women. It is also less likely they will receive support which meets their needs; ‘domestic violence organisations aren’t accessible’ she adds.
Annika is clearly personally and professionally invested in preventing the mistreatment of and violence against people with disability. She is a caring practitioner with a strong focus on accessibility; as she fields call during my time there, I sense Annika is an empathetic support person for her clients as well as their families. While Annika’s own experiences may have contributed to her capacity for empathy, the shadow of violence and abuse over her life has been long. She has not had a partner since leaving Tristan, due to her experiences of gaslighting and minimising. It has not been easy to talk about the past and some of the experiences Annika shares in our time together, she has not previously disclosed to anyone. I reflect on the personal toll it has taken her to talk about violence and abuse. It speaks volumes of the sense of responsibility Annika feels to share her story to address the invisibility of women with disability, and improve their treatment within service systems, and society broadly.
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