Anonymous: The hidden victims of the domestic violence crisis

It’s April 2021, and Georgia*, my recently married 21-year-old daughter has just messaged me. It’s a message that should have triggered alarm bells.

“Hey Mum, if I were to come home, what would be the best option on how to do it? Love you.”

At that stage Georgia had been in the US for two months, on a 90-day visitor’s visa. When she got married in January 2021 she told no one, except me. Not her siblings, not her friends, she shared no photos or status updates on social media. Again, alarm bells.

But for you to understand how she got to that point, I need to wind back the clock a little.

Georgia met her husband when she was only 15. She was working through a challenging personal time which involved sexual abuse, intravenous substance use and for a short time, homelessness. To her credit Georgia had so much internal strength that she almost singlehandedly turned her life around. She went back to school, was working and started counselling. Her life was getting better every day.

The relationship turned intimate when she was 16, when she was still quite vulnerable. For the first few years, although there were hints of coercive control, she maintained a level of independence through her work and other relationships.

Just before the pandemic hit in 2020, her boyfriend, a dual US-Australian citizen, moved to the States. Georgia didn’t go with him, and didn’t seem to have any desire to do so. Over the year they were apart their relationship broke down, and Georgia started seeing someone else. For the first time in her adult life, she seemed happy and motivated to fulfil her dream of becoming a teacher.

But, in November 2020, an exemption for Georgia to leave Australia during COVID came through from the Australian Government. Georgia told me her (then) ex-boyfriend had made the application. She wasn’t sure she wanted to go, but he bought her a ticket anyway, and just one week shy of her 21st birthday she was on a plane. She was in a foreign country with no family or friends for support, she couldn’t work, study or drive.

In the conversations that followed that April 2021 message, Georgia told me they were arguing a lot. That her husband called her names such as whore, slut, pathetic, stupid, ugly. I told her that was an unacceptable way to talk to the person you love and of course I’d help to bring her home. But I also spoke to her about how to fight fair in relationships, gave her guidance on responding and not reacting. I thought I was helping by giving her relationship advice.

Over the next 15 months Georgia tried to come home six times. They were arguing regularly, there were further signs of abuse, which I didn’t fully appreciate. The gas cut off in winter, so she had no hot water or gas cook top and she didn’t have enough money to buy essentials such as tampons and toilet paper. I gave her money to help.

If Georgia’s death can make some positive changes to the way we view domestic violence in our society, then my daughter’s dream to teach will be realised posthumously.

Each time she wanted to come home, I said I’d help.

But I also gave her relationship advice. And each time I did this, I mistakenly thought I was helping her develop emotional maturity.

Devastatingly, Georgia ended her own life in July 2022.

The previous weekend she’d decided to leave her husband, after a heated argument where he said he was having sex with another woman. I’d counselled her at length, talked to her about the relationship being emotionally abusive, and told her to leave.

But for reasons that only became clear to me after her death, she was unable to leave. She had endured 20 months of relentless domestic abuse. The derogatory language she’d told me about in April 2021 was just the tip of the iceberg. Her phone, which I briefly had access to after her death, showed he’d sent thousands of abusive messages to her. She was suffering verbal abuse, financial abuse and physical abuse at the hands of the man who said he loved her. My strong, resilient daughter was broken.

And for 20 months, I’d treated their arguing like a normal relationship issue. She was only giving me hints of what was going on, never fully revealing the extent of the abuse. So, I misguidedly gave her advice on what she could do to improve their relationship.

I didn’t realise the advice was futile or what kind of danger she was really in. My advice didn’t help her recognise the abuse for what it was, it minimised it. It didn’t help her understand that the abuse wasn’t her fault, and that no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t make the relationship better. I didn’t have the full picture and I didn’t understand why she couldn’t just leave. Four months after Georgia’s death the WA Ombudsman released a report on its investigation into family and domestic violence and suicide. The conclusion it came to was that more than half of all West Australian women who died by suicide in 2017 were known to the State Government as victims of domestic violence. It acknowledged that this is likely to be an underestimate given the low rates of reporting.

This equates to about 400 Australian women per year who die by their own hand because of domestic abuse. These women are the unrecorded statistics of domestic abuse.

There’s so much we can do to end domestic violence, and the murders and suicides that result from it. It may seem like an insurmountable problem, but it’s not.

We can all help by becoming more informed about domestic violence, including the manipulative techniques used in coercive control to help victims recognise they’re experiencing abuse and are not normal in a relationship.

We can advocate for laws that make the details of court ordered family violence restraining orders, breaches of family violence restraining orders, domestic and sexual abuse convictions and any formal perpetrator rehabilitation undertaken publishable on a public, searchable register. Let’s make women’s safety more important than perpetrator’s anonymity.

And we can demand laws that ban the posting of all comments when the media is reporting on domestic and sexual violence on social media platforms. Comments are commonly hijacked by misogynists, and the victim’s motives, personality, behaviour, and character are torn apart.

My daughter’s life was destroyed by coercive control and sustained abuse. Losing a child to domestic violence is something no parent should ever have to endure. But if Georgia’s death can make some positive changes to the way we view domestic violence in our society, then my daughter’s dream to teach will be realised posthumously.

*Name has been changed.