This is a story about a destructive, punishing, volatile man. His criminal connections and vagrant disregard for women, children, and the law. This is the story of a domestic terrorist. Perhaps this would be the synopsis of a Hollywood movie, if portrayed in film. Centred around a hero or anti-hero. The experience of those he subjected to violence and abuse, a peripheral detail. I have heard it said the woman’s story is only heard if told through the perspective of the man. As I listen to Jane, who was the peripheral detail of his story, it is an illustration of the extent to which this is true. Existence which was mediated through others; starting with her parents who controlled her access to disability support and accommodations, and then a violent man who controlled her parenting, access to health care, money, justice, and every interaction she had with the world. I enter Jane’s house, a hive of activity with kids running around, on the cusp of the metro area in Western Australia. She tells me a friend’s son, wife, and three young ones are currently living with her. She has offered up her home while they are doing it tough, while also noting she needed others to move in to keep the rent affordable. Jane, 59, is used to lending a hand where needed, as the lead of a state Peak Body for people with disability, she is both a group facilitator and disability advocate. Jane was born prematurely and a lack of oxygen to the brain caused ABI, leading to vision impairment. However, as a child, when doctors could not find the cause of vision impairment, they advised Jane’s parents to treat her ‘normally’, effectively denying her experience of disability. She also experiences chronic pain, osteoporosis, and arthritis. ‘The acquired ones, um, have been the onset of, um, arthritis Yep. Due to bones being broken. So just about every bone, um, has been broken. Yeah. So everywhere that those bones have been broken, I've now developed arthritis.’ Post-traumatic stress impacts Jane’s daily life. She would like mental health to be acknowledged as disability, though notes it is often considered separately. One of the impacts of post-traumatic stress has been her ‘fight’ response, when she feels she is unable to get her message across. ‘I find myself starting to perpetrate violence. And I've had lots and lots and lots of counselling for that stuff.’
Jane and I speak about a turbulent time in her early adulthood on the East coast of Australia. Jane met Jeff while visiting her brother in prison; the two men were incarcerated there. He was charming to begin with. Jane believed he saw something ‘that was so vulnerable’ in her and ‘just kept working on it’. That is to say, he targeted her using coercive control. When he was released, they lived together. Jane, her small children, and Jeff. He would have parties constantly, inviting strangers into the house, ‘putting [Jane’s] little girls at risk’. He was a drinker at the time, but Jane was not aware of the extent of his illicit drug use. ‘When they were kids, [my daughter] walked in on him in the bathroom with a syringe and he yelled at her to get out and, you know, shut her mouth.’ ‘…trying to still be a mum and raising my children and all this craps going on around me. And all I knew is that one minute he would be okay and then he'd go off and work, apparently - never bring any money home - but he'd come home, and he was different, angry, different, stay up all night. Different.’ Jeff received an allowance to be Jane’s carer - ‘the person that was supposed to be caring for me’ – though far from providing care, he denied her experience of disability. He forced her to get a learner’s permit and learn to drive, despite her vision impairment. She could barely see the speedometer or gear stick, let alone what was on the other side of the dashboard. ‘I thought, if this is normal, how the hell does everybody else on the road do this?’ This was an illustration of Jeff’s dismissive, minimising, and denying attitudes towards Jane’s experience of disability, and how he used disability as a means of control, creating fear for Jane. The onset of Jeff’s behaviours to harm, isolate and control Jane happened quickly. ‘So many injuries in such a short time’, Jane describes ‘being so isolated away from my family, um, the people that were most important to me and my children’. She is bewildered when thinking back. ‘I'd studied, you know, I had a master's degree in community management. I'd worked in women's refuges’. At the time, she struggled to understand how she came to be in a relationship with such a violent man. In retrospect, his intentionality is clearer. Jeff’s jealousy was intense. If anyone was friendly toward Jane, he would take it as a cause for suspicion and further measures to isolate her. Suspecting Jane was having an affair, he forced her to change TAFEs multiple times. Studying photography at TAFE, Jane felt accepted with her vision impairment; ‘everybody was quite happy to help me. Everybody celebrated my wins when I had wins’. One photo Jane shares with me is of the two of them (which has been cropped for privacy purposes). The photo was taken at TAFE on a day when Jeff took Jane to class and stayed the whole day. A friend behind the camera wanted to photograph Jane for an exhibit, to capture the colour of her skin. When the friend told Jeff to get in the photo, Jane explains, her expression turns to one of quiet terror. For her, this photo is symbolic of all that he took from her. She was at TAFE to study her art and learn new techniques, meet likeminded people, and get away from him. Jane later found out, her skin tone that her friend sought to capture was in fact jaundiced due to having acquired Hepatis-C. ‘I was complaining about him and his friends shooting up where we were living. I wanted to go to sleep, I just didn't want him to party anymore. [He] held me down and shot me up with a dirty needle and I ended up with Hepatitis-C from him.’ The physical violence perpetrated by Jeff against Jane was extreme and sadistic. He had broken her nose every year they were together, shattered her hands, ribs, skull. Chained her up, locked her in confined spaces, hung her from her head. In the rural place they lived, Jeff had connections to friends and police. When called, police stopped incidents of physical violence but Jane notes, their responses were lacking. ‘I tried to cry for help, [but] it was him that they spoke to first’. To the police, Jeff would portray her as the ‘crazy lunatic, disabled woman’. Jeff was often charged, then ‘he’d always get off’, over and over. This left Jane feeling like collateral damage: ‘he was a local drug dealer, um, and the little country town we lived in had some pretty [serious] corruption happening um and he just seemed to be protected’. Jeff had taken so much. There was her freedom and independence to study, socialise and spend time with family. She had lost her children when they had visited their father in Darwin and were not allowed to return, due to the children’s exposure to violence. Parenting payments were subsequently cut off, escalating Jeff’s behaviour further. She was forced to lie to Centrelink ‘for fear of getting chained up’. Debts needed to be paid. Choices are limited, as Jane highlights the constant and overlapping shadows of DFV and poverty. ‘[T]he poverty side, [it’s] the hardest thing to get out’.
After 14 years together, Jane was sure Jeff would kill her if she stayed. She considered her options and planned for a miracle. She notes her spirituality as a source of strength and resilience for her. While Jeff tried to undermine this by throwing out her sacred objects, he could not take away her belief system, the only thing she could take ownership of at that time. ‘There was still always this little fire in my stomach that you can't treat me like this. Yeah. You can't keep doing this to me’. While she reflects now that people around her would have been aware of Jeff’s use of power and control, but nobody was brave enough to speak up. ‘You know, not even to say to him to leave and let us study, let us do our, our work, let us pass our course’. Jane relates this to her experience of being shut out of society, she tells me as we look at a photo depicting steel chains shrouded in cobwebs. ‘We are shoved away, locked away. So the cobwebs grow and we’re just forgotten about’. She notes people with disability are not given space ‘to be ourselves’, not listened to, and not believed. Childhood experiences have led Jane to believe abuse is enabled and normalised within society. From Disney, peddling ideas ‘real love and romance’, to watching parents and others struggle and be victimised by violent men. Compounding this is attitudes which tell women ‘you deserve better, you deserve better, you deserve better. And of course we all deserve better when you’re trying your hardest to get better and you keep getting knocked back down.’
Accessing cane training and having a guide dog opened up Jane’s life; ‘that gave me the scope to be able to realize the miracle’. After this, Jane found the strength ‘to stop the whole thing from the bigger, the bigger picture from happening’. With the help of police, she escaped to Darwin where she was reunited with her children. After 10 years out of the relationship, she had a loving partner of six years, who unfortunately passed away. Jane has gone on to become a strong advocate for women with disability. She is passionate about listening to women, raising awareness of social exclusion and barriers people with disability face. However, she continues to struggle with the mental and physical impacts of severe and prolonged violence, abuse, and control to which she was subjected, as do her children.
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