Mandurah mum speaks up on the other side of domestic violence

“I’ll be in bed and I don’t want to go to sleep because I’m not sure if he is going to come in and do something to me while I’m asleep, so I’ll get in the car and go sleep down at the beach,” the woman, who did not wish to be named, said.

“It’s very uncomfortable, but I’ve got some peace.”

The woman is less concerned about being attacked in her car while sleeping at the beach than in her own home, where she lives in fear.

The woman is a domestic violence survivor, and a mother of three living on a disability pension.

She struggled with in a violent relationship for years, surviving bashings, abuse and even an attempt on her life while raising two young children. 

Eventually, she managed to get a violence restraining order against her partner, but six years later she is back to square one.

This time her abuser is her 16-year-old son.

Her son started smoking cannabis when he was 13 years old, but after a close relative died two years ago his behaviour worsened and he took refuge in drugs, sometimes spending up to $200 a week on cannabis. 

The woman said most of the abuse and aggression starts when her son wants money to buy drugs.

If she refuses to drive him to his dealer and risk getting arrested, arguments can end up in a physical fight.

She said she had been threatened, strangled, knocked unconscious and hit.

She has ended up in hospital with an injured jaw and bleeding from the ear.

“I can argue, possibly get hurt, ring the police, maybe they’ll get here in time maybe they won’t, or I could just go do it and go to bed,” the woman said. 

“So I just go do it and go to bed.”

Last week she had to call the police after her son slapped his younger brother for waking him up. 

Two days earlier, she had been to the police station after he sent her text messages threatening to kill her and her father, and “scalp drag” her down the street.

The family house, she said, is like a war zone.

However, her hardest battle has been losing the custody of her youngest son, only five years old.

“It’s the worst I’ve been in my life mentally,” she said.

“I can deal with being hit, I can deal with being emotionally destroyed, but I can’t deal with having one of my kids separated from me.

“Having my little one taken away from me was crushing and devastating.”

She said she understood the family home was not the right environment to raise her son, but she would like to be able to see him more often.

“Every week he asks me ‘When can I come to your house? Because I really really miss you and I love you’, and I just break down every time he says that because I have no way of explaining really what’s going on,” she said.

Peel Youth Services (PYS) family worker and youth violence expert Tanya Langford said the resident is one of many mothers struggling with youth violence in the home in the Peel region.

Ms Langford said in the past six months referrals from women’s refuges for youth violence victims had tripled, with data showing more than 20 per cent of police call-outs to domestic violence incidents involved a youth perpetrator. 

Mothers losing custody of their younger children after experiencing violence from their teenage children are also becoming more common.

Ms Langford and PYS are now taking the lead responding to youth violence in the home in Western Australia, being one of the only two WA-based organisations participating in a nation-wide research project.

The project hopes to explore how youth violence in the home is being dealt with across the country by interviewing service providers such as PYS.

By analysing data from police, legal aid, government agencies, courts, and support services, the project hopes to shed some light on how youth violence is being handled by different services in different states and what needs to be addressed.

“The purpose, the hope and the goal of the project is that the information is going to be disseminated right around Australia, and all governments from each state will come on board and offer more programs,” Ms Langford said.

She said WA was far behind other states in offering services to tackle the increase in youth violence, with only two service providers offering leading youth violence program Step Up.

“It’s appalling the fact that the government is not putting funding into programs for this issue,” she said.

“That we are only the second place in WA running [the Step Up program] is not good enough, it should be more.”

Ms Langford said she hoped the program would prompt youth violence in the home to be recognised as a separate form of domestic violence, and hopefully attract more funding for research, response services and policy-making.

“Understanding where adolescence violence in the home sits with that is really really important,” she said.

“This isn’t kids playing, teenagers being mad, this is not that.”