By Cam Lucadou-Wells
A husband’s controlling nature escalated to a terrifying bedroom assault on his wife, Dandenong Magistrates’ Court has heard.
The 33-year-old pleaded guilty to assaults and breaching a family-violence intervention order in the sustained attack on 23 December.
That morning, he had started on a torrent of verbal abuse in Hindi.
He checked social media accounts and emails on his wife’s phone. Angry that she was contacting her family, he told her she should get a divorce and go back to her country-of-origin, the court heard.
He left the house with her phone in hand.
He later returned, berating her in the laundry for doing housework. It was his house and she shouldn’t do anything in it, he told her.
He dragged her towards the bedroom, grabbing and ripping off her shirt.
She begged for her husband not to hit her.
“What can you do? You can’t do anything,” he replied.
As she held their 12-month daughter, the man grabbed the victim around her neck and face and pushed her to the bedroom.
He beat his wife on the bed, repeatedly striking her legs, shoulders, buttocks and back. He then started strangling her with both hands.
“Before the police comes, I’ll kill you,” he told her – adding he’d be glad to go to jail when she’s dead.
He left with her phone, warning her not to “make any drama”.
On his arrest, the man denied the assaults and threatening to kill the victim.
“If I said I was going to kill you I’d kill you,” he told police in an interview.
“If I used two hands to strangle her, she’d be dead.”
The man’s defence lawyer noted that a previous assault conviction was not against his partner – but against his parents.
However a 2018 conviction was against his wife, the lawyer conceded. The assault on that occasion was from eliciting her fear after he broke a security door, the lawyer said.
He had completed a mens behaviour change program on a previous community corrections order.
During the incident, he had followed the program’s advice to remove himself from the situation by leaving the house twice, the lawyer said.
Born in India, he’d suffered mental health issues since being a passenger in a serious car crash in which a friend drove through three red lights and careered airborne off a bridge at 150 km/h, the court was told.
On impact, the car’s roof crushed upon the accused’s head. He’d since been treated for schizophrenia and bipolar disorders as well as an acquired brain injury.
Magistrate Jack Vandersteen said on 16 July that the underlying issue was about control.
“It would be so suffocating and daunting for her,” he said. “The isolation of her increases his ability to control her.”
The wife applied to dilute the full intervention order on the grounds that the man and daughter were her only local family.
Mr Vandersteen said he wasn’t minded to vary it.
“What has to be done is to keep her safe and her child safe.”
On the other hand, given the man’s mental health, there was no utility in jailing him, Mr Vandersteen said.
“But it will get to that point if he is breaching intervention orders. You’re very close to that line at the moment.”
The man was assessed for a community corrections order.
