Content warning: This article touches on the topic of domestic violence, which may be triggering for some readers.
It was the year 2000. Jonty Bush was 21 and sharing a Maroochydore flat with her younger sister Jacinta, and Jacinta’s new boyfriend Kris Slade had just moved in. “It was this overwhelming gut instinct that there was something wrong with him, that there was a rage,” the Queensland MP says as she describes what it was like to witness coercive control up close.
“You’re trying to link things, minor things … you’re trying desperately to find something that you can link to back up this gut instinct that you’re feeling that you have to flee,” Jonty recalls. “It’s a weird thing because something in my body knew it was wrong.”
Jacinta was becoming more withdrawn. At the same time, Kris was buying her flowers and taking her out. He’d look after Jacinta’s daughter. “So, you’re constantly quietening that internal voice that says he is dangerous,” Jonty continues. “He had never hit her. He’d never threatened to hit her. There had been nothing physical at all apart from some weird, darkish broody behaviours.”
The only time she saw his mask slip was on the morning of July 29, 2000. Kris had booked dinner at a hotel for Jacinta, but she had learned that a girlfriend was going to be in town overnight and asked if they could cancel so she could see her friend.
“He really went right off that day,” Jonty says. “He was saying, in front of me, ‘I never asked you to do anything. I’ve asked you for this one thing.’” Jacinta capitulated and agreed to go to the hotel instead of seeing her friend. Alone in their flat, Jonty’s concerns hardened into a conviction that she had to get her sister away from this man.
“I thought, ‘Right, next time I get her alone, which was hard because he was always around, I’m going to say: ‘He needs to go. Something’s not right here.’
“That was the night he killed her.”
In the months and years of grief that followed Jacinta’s murder, people asked Jonty, ‘Didn’t you see anything?’ She saw everything, she told the Queensland Parliament last year. “I saw that he wouldn’t let her leave the house. I saw the love bombing followed by periods of silence. I saw that he was controlling the finances, and I saw that she stopped seeing her friends.”
Back then, there was nothing she could do.
“We had no language for coercive control and the language for DV (domestic violence) was really narrow,” Jonty tells The Weekly. “It was black eyes. It was broken arms. It was extreme physical violence. It wasn’t the subtle patterns we see that harass, harm and diminish women.”
This May, legislation criminalising coercive control in Queensland will come into effect. Conduct likely to cause physical, emotional, financial, psychological or mental harm will carry a jail term of up to 14 years. Jonty hopes the change will cut the rates of this type of abuse.
“What you’re wanting is to at least find a format to keep women safe and to help them escape,” she says. “That’s been the missing piece. So many women have been going to police and saying, ‘I need help; these are the things that are happening,’ but it’s just not been enough to constitute police involvement, so women have been floundering with how to escape and how to leave.
“Something like 97 per cent of the DV fatalities include coercive control.”
Despite how dangerous and pervasive coercive control is, it’s a form of abuse that is not well understood.
The new Queensland law is known as Hannah’s Law, in honour of Queensland mother Hannah Clarke, who was killed along with her three children Aaliyah, six, Lainanah, four, and Trey, three, in a heinous act of domestic violence, which followed years of subtle, grinding coercive control.
Hannah’s parents, Sue said Lloyd Clarke, who campaigned tirelessly on the issue, have said neither they nor Hannah understood what killer Rowan Baxter was doing as he stifled Hannah’s freedom, isolated her from friends, and slowly cut her off from those who loved her.
Speaking to The Weekly last year, Sue said the controlling behaviour had begun when Aaliyah was born.
“It was a gradual process, so you didn’t notice it. He started to get more controlling and more critical of Hannah. He would say she was fat and disgusting stuff constantly about how useless a mother she was.”
Then he shut down her Facebook page, saying they should have a family page instead, and began isolating Hannah from family and friends.
A coronial inquest found that government agencies had failed to understand the danger Hannah was facing because her estranged husband had not, until that final horrific day, used physical violence against her. The coroner noted that he had used coercive control, and alarm bells should have been ringing.
“I felt terrible,” said Lloyd. “I never saw it coming… Then they started saying it was coercive control. We go, ‘What the hell is coercive control?’ That’s when we decided to try to do something about it.”
It was evident that a better understanding of coercive control could save lives.
Sue and Lloyd worked with the government to establish the Women’s Safety and Justice Taskforce, which produced a sobering report that informed the new laws. They spoke to many victim-survivors. One commented: “I wished that I had been a victim of physical violence so that people would take my claims seriously.”
Others detailed the specific ways they were silenced, isolated and disempowered.
“He tracked my spending, and he received a text message whenever I spent money and would question me … He would hold me very tightly, and when I told him he was hurting me, he said he was holding me tightly as he loved me.”
“He watched my every move … Whilst I showered or went to the toilet, he watched through windows.”
“The threats as well as his physical size … were enough to be scared of him. There was no doubt that I knew he could hurt or kill me.”
“‘In my case, physical violence was not frequent, nor severe, it was the psychological abuse, and damage to my quality of life … which I suffered most.”
Jonty says she heard this sort of thing frequently when she was working at Queensland Homicide Victims’ Support Group.
“The terror and the stress and implied violence has such a psychological impact on people, and then you couple that with the fact that the system hasn’t recognised coercive control. You’ve got women feeling extremely gaslit. Very confused. Very invisible to a system and what they’re wanting is some kind of person to intervene. Or to help them flee or to help them keep their children safe.”
A common sentiment felt by victim-survivors was: What will it take before I can get a service to intervene? Jonty says the new law will mean services now can intervene.
“Historically, there has had to be at least one act of violence that a person can particularlise and attach a charge to. What this will do is open that up to say, actually, it doesn’t have to be an event. It can be a pattern or a series of events or behaviours that cumulatively form this pattern that we know coerce, intimidate.”
The passing of the law last year made Queensland only the second state (after NSW) to criminalise coercive control as a standalone offence. In Victoria, controlling behaviour is criminalised under general family violence laws. South Australia and Western Australia have committed to criminalising the pattern of offences and are in the consultation phase. Tasmania, NT and the ACT have general domestic violence laws that cover some aspects of coercive control.
The Queensland Government admits that passing the legislation is just the first step. The second is to educate people to recognise those coercive control red flags. To that end, the Department of Justice and Attorney General has rolled out an extensive public awareness campaign to increase understanding of coercive control and alert the community to the change in the law.
The campaign highlights the variety of abusive behaviours, including financial, psychological and emotional abuse, and stalking. It shows how the community can recognise the signs of coercive control, even when the behaviours are subtle or escalate gradually over time.
For the Jonty, the Clarkes, and many others, it’s a significant step forward.
“We didn’t want another family to go through what we had to go through,” said Lloyd.
Spot the Signs
Coercive control is a pattern of abusive behaviours over time that hurt, humiliate, isolate, frighten, or threaten another person in order to control or dominate them. Here are just some of the types of abuse that might raise a red flag.
- ‘Love bombing’ or over-the-top attention
- Gaslighting (making you question your own feelings, experiences, instincts and even sanity)
- Cutting you off from friends, family or services
- Controlling your finances
- Emotional abuse
- Psychological abuse
- Verbal abuse
- Physical abuse
- Stalking and surveillance
- Using technology as a means of control or abuse
- Sexual abuse
- Reproductive control
If you or someone you know has been affected by any of the issues raised in this article, help is always available. Call 1800 RESPECT on 1800 737 732 or visit their website.
Other resources:
- Need to Know
- DVConnect Womensline: 1800 811 811
- Mensline Australia: 1300 789 978
- Lifeline: 131 113
- 13YARN: 13 92 76
- Kids Helpline: 1800 551 800
- National Violence and Abuse Trauma Counselling and Recovery Service: 1800 FULLSTOP (1800 385 578).
- Rainbow Sexual, Domestic and Family Violence Helpline: 1800 497 212
- Don’t Become That Man helpline: 1300 243 413
- innerBoy app – innerboy.au
