The Real Nice Bloke – Masks of Domestic Violence

This is long. I’ve written this mostly as my own cathartic therapy, but there is an important message about domestic violence.

CONTENT WARNING: This article contains details of domestic violence, sexual abuse and trauma. Please decide carefully before reading if the topics discussed here may cause distress.

 

 

These last few days have been hard and yes, I’m well aware I’m triggered, thanks for that guys. There are so many cases that come to mind when we discuss the extreme horrors of domestic violence. This recent event of the Baxter family, like so many other cases, brings up so much for me and here I am reading comments and rhetoric of people excusing or justifying the offender’s actions asking myself who in their right mind can seriously justify in any way the actions of a person setting not just another human on fire alive, but their own children. That’s not humanity. It’s not natural.

I find it hard to repond to the people who make these justifications, because I have lived it. The violence, abuse and the justification.

Just recently in a phone conversation with my mother I had the dismissal of my experience. (Background: I have not seen my mother in 15 years and I choose not to have contact with her. I’ve had 2 phone conversations with her in the past 10 or so years and neither has gone well. On this occassion I needed information and reluctantly called her.) On the subject of my first ex husband she said “Well, (that ex husband) has never done anything bad to me.” It stunned me because I haven’t had to deal with that in a while. It hurt me because of all people I thought I could expect empathy from my mother. My childhood was lived with domestic violence throughout it. My mother will tell you if you ever complain about our childhood, it wasn’t all bad. Which it wasn’t. There were of course good times. It didn’t negate the trauma we have survived.

So when she said what she said I was shocked. I wondered how she’d feel if someone said that to her of my step father. I also know that she covered up  and excused his behaviour too. Truth is, people do say “He’s a nice bloke” about him. This is often how abusers work. They don’t let others see the REAL nice bloke. That privilege is reserved for the victims. I entrusted family members with my account of some of the abuse we suffered. They don’t let me talk about it anymore. “It was a long time ago. None of that matters any more.” It does matter. I fear that the behaviour never stopped. It was just directed at new people.

When people say “she must have done something to provoke him” I feel enraged. It makes me so angry to think the violence against myself and my siblings was justified in any way. We did nothing to provoke it. We were children. We were trying to protect our mother, each other, from this maniac’s outbursts. I still have nightmares about hiding my mother and siblings in my mother’s room at one end of the house while my little brother, just a child, stood in front of my step father at the other end of the house, trembling in fear but refusing to let him pass. The sounds of him yelling at my brother to hit him. “Go on big man, hit me! You want to hit me do it! Go on!” The pounding sounds of him punching himself in the face as he screamed at my brother to hit him. Then, the horror of him smashing his own head through the walls and door. It was psychotic. We were terrified but there he stood, my brother, unwavering in his determination to protect his mother and sisters. I was never prouder of him more than that day.

We called the police that day. We’d had enough. The violence had gone on too long. Living with outlaw bikers coming in and out of the house. Drugs. Alcohol. Our poverty levels fluctuated depending on whatever his latest expensive hobby was. We wanted to be safe.

Police came. Somehow through his volatile outrage my mother had made it out into the front yard with some of my siblings to wait for police. One of the neighbours who had obviously heard the commotion, yet again, came out and struck up conversation with my mother, keeping an eye on things. My stepfather at the top of the stairs trying to coax everyone back inside. I stayed in the bedroom with the phone reciever in my hand (we didn’t have mobile phones back then) in case I needed to call 000 again. It probably only took them 12 minutes or so to come but it felt like eternity. They spoke to my mother, looked at her swollen eye and bruised face, asked if she would press charges. She said she wanted him gone from here. They arrested him and took him away. She had to make a statement. It would help if one of us children at least were willing to give a witness statement. I didn’t hesitate.

At the police station an officer came out to where my mother and I were giving statements separately to different police officers. He told my mother that my step father wanted to see her. I remember looking over to them and saying NO. “It’s okay,” the officer told her, “he’s locked in the cell. You don’t have to go in there just talk to him from outside it.” He’d managed in just that short time to garner sympathy from the police. He was just a good bloke. He’d made a mistake. Just like he did to my mother every time he did this. The officer taking my statement could clearly see I was distressed as I watched my mother being escorted out to speak to him. “She’ll be safe” the officer tried to reassure me. “You don’t know my step father.” I told her. I begged her not to let him out. An hour after we left the station he was released.

Sure enough it wasn’t long before he was back again. And not all that long before the next drug fuelled or drunk rampage.

I’m sad that every one of my siblings ended up at some stage in their lives, in an abusive relationship. “Can’t you see this is generational?” I said to my mother? “We keep following the same patterns of behaviour because we were taught to excuse what the abusers do.” They’re just nice blokes.

I know people say that of my second ex husband. He loves to be generous. I’ve written about this before. It’s hard to hear people say it. I know why they do, still it’s hard. They didn’t see the bad side. In my case the domestic violence wasn’t beatings. Nothing was obvious. Not to say he never struck me. I refused to accept that violence though and if hit me I hit him back. It didn’t make it right. It’s just how I dealt with it.

No, my domestic violence was covert. It was psychological. When I left my son behind with him after our break up, it wasn’t because I thought it was best for him. I was worried for him. I still am. I left him behind because my ex husband had convinced me I couldn’t take care of my son. Any time I said I was sick of his shit and I was leaving he’d tell me “You’re not taking my son.” He owned everything. Even me. I would say the children could decide for themselves. After all that’s how the court would deal with it. They were old enough to make an informed choice. The discouragement would begin. Nasty. “How will you look after him? You can’t even look after yourself! How will you support him? If you leave don’t expect child support from me. I’ll go on the dole so I don’t have to pay it. You’ll get $5 a month.”

I believed I was incapable of looking after my own child. I left him behind. It is something I regret deeply.

The violence was finanical control/manipulation. I tried to keep control of my money for a long time. That stopped when we were forced to get a joint bank account because we bought a house. When he had gambled away quite a significant amount of money. It put my capacity to pay our mortgage in jeopardy. I didn’t know how to handle this. I thought my safest option until he got help for his addiction was to take control of our finances and only give him limited access to the money. I was planning my escape then. I didn’t want to live the same cycle as my mother even though I was already there. He convinced me to go to marriage counselling. The counsellor scolded me for my behaviour. I was the offender for controlling the money. I was committing the financial abuse. If I ever wanted to be able to trust him again, I had to let him have the chance to prove himself. To me what she was saying was I had to give him the opportunity to screw me over again.

It wasn’t the end of his addiction. He just got better at hiding it. He also got better at manipulating financial control. When I worked and he was on Centrelink, he’d tell me he needed my income to report it. I didn’t really understand how all that worked but I had given him my salary and said I was paid the same amount each week. He made sure he budgeted for that. Every last cent. I had to pay my way. I didn’t tell him about the commissions I was earning. I was trying to save that money. When I had enough to start over without him I’d leave one day. I didn’t count on the tax office telling Centrelink how much I earned and Centrelink sending us a debt. He was furious. I tried to get my head around it all with the person on the phone explaining it to me. “Why does my income affect anything? I can’t tell him what I earn or he takes it” I told the customer service person. “That’s just how it works” he told me. My ex husband told me I’d be the one paying that debt. So that was the end of my escape fund.

Soon after that I became unwell. So unwell I was unable to work. It took a long time to get Disability Support Pension approved. Almost 4 years. He got a carer pension though. How ironic. I was proven disabled enough to need a carer but not disabled enough to get a disability pension. Once I did get it, he knew how much I got. It was there online to look up. So he budgeted for that. Every last cent.

No, he didn’t beat me. He did and said awful things. Not just to me, also to our children. He threw dog faeces at our younger son. It hit him in the face. I was there in the shower helping him wash it off as he was gagging I could hear the ex husband outside laughing about it saying my son deserved it for not doing as he was told. I discovered later after the relationship ended, that my older son endured continuous violence by my ex husband on work sites. He had machetes and other tools throw at him. Verbally abused and physically threatened. He threatened to hit my son one day during the removal of my belongings from the house. I told him if he so much as raised his hand again to my children I’d see his arse in jail. My ex husband never saw me as an kind of real threat. He still thinks I’m a joke.

He would drive in a dangerous or erratic manner and laugh at me. He would message people who had contact with me to stay away from “his wife”. Simply because he didn’t trust me and didn’t want me talking to them.

There was so much more. Yet there are men, and women, out there who would say to me, I must have provoked him. I probably won’t have contact with my youngest son for some time. It’s complicated. It always is when my ex husband is involved. Yet, I cannot fathom with any shred of my humanity that killing my children would any way be justified by the traumas I have suffered. Justified by the fact that I can’t see my son. So I find it really difficult to listen to the conversations of trying to justify what Rowan Baxter did to his wife and children. And all the other offenders before him.

I’ve been living with mental illness for some time. Depression, PTSD, Anxiety Disorder. Yet it’s not driving me to set another human I love alight and burn them alive. I’m not saying I’ve never done some irrational shit. I’ve taken ownership of my behaviour and apologised time and time again. I just cannot ever accept that there is any justification to make a choice like that. If my mother had ever tried to stop our father from seeing us, (which she didn’t), it would have been because we were scared of him. We didn’t feel safe with him. I would never have begrudged her for trying to keep us safe from men whose violent outbursts were dangerous and uncontrollable.

If a person leaves a violent situation, and that person is then killed by said violence, they are the victims. Stop blaming them for doing what we keep telling the to do. Leave.

IF YOU NEED HELP PLEASE CALL

1800 RESPECT (1800 737 732)

Lifeline 13 11 14

beyondblue 1300 22 4636

Family violence support services:

• 1800 Respect national helpline 1800 737 732
• Women’s Crisis Line 1800 811 811
• Men’s Referral Service 1300 766 491
• Lifeline (24 hour crisis line) 131 114
• Relationships Australia 1300 364 277