By Casey Neill
“I will never forget the birthday that he held me hostage at gunpoint and refused to let me leave the house.”
Rebecca, not her real name, shared her harrowing story of physical, emotional, sexual and financial abuse at the fifth annual Walk Against Family Violence in Dandenong on Tuesday 21 November.
“Family violence is everyone’s responsibility,” she told the hundreds of people who’d made their way from Dandenong Market to Harmony Square via Lonsdale Street holding placards and wearing T-shirts bearing slogans opposing family violence.
Rebecca has volunteered with the Safe Steps Family Violence Response Centre since 2007.
“Safe Steps has helped me to reclaim my voice and allowed me to channel all that hurt, anger and frustration I was feeling regarding structural and systemic failures into being part of positive change,” she said.
She met the man who would abuse her for three-and-a-half years when she was 22 years old, in 2001.
She’d just returned from backpacking around Europe, was living with her two best friends and was studying at uni.
“Like many abusive men, he gave me no reason initially to think he was capable of extreme violence against me,” she said.
But a month later he started making jokes at her expense to his friends and calling her derogatory names.
“This escalated fairly quickly into threats and violence, with the first incident being him chasing me down the road with a knife,” she said.
“He was extremely controlling of who I spent time with. It suited him to isolate me from my friends and family.”
He turned her friends against her and they moved out. His brothers moved in.
“It became a completely male-dominated environment and none of his friends or family would intervene when he was being violent or abusive towards me,” Rebecca said.
“He even threw boiling water at me one time.
“Each day became about survival and I felt like I was living in a war zone.
“Home became a prison for me.”
She dropped out of uni and explained away injuries at work, humiliated.
Rebecca tried to leave several times.
“Every time I would start packing to leave, he would hold a knife at my throat and say that if I left him he would kill me and bury me in the back yard,” she said.
She developed depression and became suicidal. Once she did escape he stalked her for 10 years.
One night she felt it was not safe to return home, landed in a vulnerable situation and was raped by a stranger.
Rebecca said the system consistently failed her. She developed post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
She said family violence was the biggest contributor to ill-health and premature death in women aged 15 to 44.
“It is the consequence of discrimination against women in law and in practice and a persisting inequality between men and women,” she said.
“Violence against women and girls is not inevitable.
“Prevention is possible and essential.”
Rebecca said White Ribbon Day, on 25 November, was also the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women.
Until Human Rights Day on 10 December, there’ll be 16 days of activism against gender-based violence to generate public awareness and bring about change.
Rebecca urged anyone experiencing family violence to call Safe Steps on 1800 015 188 for help.
