4: An Image of Recovery

Illustration by Madison Griffiths

Content warning: This show looks at domestic abuse head on.  This particular episode uncovers Roia’s experience as a support worker within family and domestic violence services. It documents the burden put on victim-survivors to educate services on how best to support those recovering. It is heavy at times, so be gentle with yourself, listen with care, and know that support is readily available for any unpleasant feelings that might pop up. Check out our website for a list of people you can speak to if the going gets tough. If you or someone you know needs assistance, please contact: Lifeline (13 11 14), 1800 RESPECT (1800 737 732) or any of these support services. Listen with care.

“Working in the sector, and simultaneously existing as a survivor, means being looked at: being perceived, even if the woman on the other end of the line, or sitting before you, isn’t aware of your past. It means being an image of recovery, whether that image feels fully-formed or not.”

In episode 4 An Image of Recovery, Roia establishes a career in the family violence sector. Confronted by one particular client’s story and the way it eerily echoes her own, Roia is forced to reckon with the complexities of being a support worker as well as a victim-survivor in the space, especially when the client looking back at you for help resembles all that you once knew. 

Further information

Credits

Co-producers: Madison Griffiths and Beth Atkinson-Quinton
Lead Storyteller: Roia Atmar
Sensitivity Editor: Shakira Hussein
Assistant Producer: Danae Gibson
Sound Designer and Engineer: Jon Tjhia
Guests in this episode: Karina Hogan, Cat Kilpatrick, Ashlee Donohue and Maha Abdo. 

Karina Hogan comes from a big Aboriginal and South Sea Island family with strong ancestral ties to Northern NSW. She grew up in Woodridge, south of Brisbane, with a dynamic and colourful community that has heavily influenced who she is today. She has produced radio for the ABC on and off for the past ten years. Alongside this, she has worked as a board member for Sisters Inside working with women impacted by the criminal justice system. She currently works on the board of the Children’s Hospital Queensland and is writing a novel that speaks from the perspectives of those she grew up with. You can listen to Karina on 989fm’s Let’s Talk program with Boe Spearim.

Cat Kilpatrick is a social worker currently employed as a sexual assault counsellor/case worker. Cat is passionate about highlighting the gendered nature of the law, economies and social structures. 

Ashlee Donohue is a proud Dunghutti woman born and raised in Kempsey, NSW. Ashlee is an author, educator, advocate and speaker for the anti-violence message. With a Master's degree in Education, she was awarded with the UTS Human Rights Reconciliation Award. Ashlee has presented at the United Nations Status of Women Forums in New York City, and  been the lead writer and co-creator for numerous anti-violence campaigns. She is also a published author with her memoir titled ‘Because I love him’ a personal account of love, motherhood, domestic violence and survival. Ashlee is currently the CEO of Mudgin-Gal Aboriginal Corporation and sits on the ‘Our Watch’ Aboriginal Women’s Advisory Board, City of Sydney’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Advisory panel and is Chairperson of Wirringa Baiya Aboriginal Women’s Legal Centre.

Maha Krayem Abdo OAM is a passionate advocate for social justice and uses the common language of faith to clarify in the community how Islam regards justice and equality. She serves as the CEO of Muslim Women Australia (MWA), a representative body for Muslim women working to enrich humanity, advocating for equality and the rights of all women, through authentic leadership based on Islamic principles.

A special thank-you to Fiona Hamilton as well for sharing her wisdom and expertise for this episode.

Tender season two is Broadwave podcast supported by the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria, and proudly sponsored by the Victorian Women’s Trust.

Get in touch

We love hearing from our listeners. Stay in touch across Twitter, Instagram and Facebook at @broadwavepods, and @tenderpodcast on Twitter.

Download a transcript of this episode here (Adobe PDF format).

Tender S2, Episode #4: An Image of Recovery

[Music: ambient, expansive and sharp.]

Beth Atkinson-Quinton (content warning): Hey, Beth here. Just before you start: this show looks at domestic abuse head on. This particular episode uncovers Roia’s experience as a support worker within family and domestic violence services. It documents the burden put on victim-survivors to educate services on how best to support those recovering. It is a bit heavy at times. So, be gentle with yourself, listen with care, and know that support is readily available for any unpleasant feelings that might come up. Check out our website for a list of people you can speak to if the going gets tough. [Scene: ambience of Roia speaking uncomfortably to a group of men]

Roia Atmar: I am sitting patiently as men and women in blue gather in a small room, noticing tiny but discernible gestures of camaraderie amongst and between them: a smile, a tap, a nod. 

[Sound effects: people chatting and rustling in their seats.]

They are like one another, each in their matching ensembles, or at least they look similar. They are excited, too: fresh-faced and ready to join the Australian Police Force, wanting only one thing: to catch the bad guys. 

[Music: tense and expectant.]

But to understand the ‘villain’, the hooded lawbreaker, the enemy of the state, the police needed to ask around, to speak to—or at least observe—somebody who understands intimately what it means to fear for their own life in the way that I did. Their curiosity was laced with questions and concern: why weren’t they summoned earlier? What was I scared of exactly? How could they have stopped it? 

[Music: serious yet hopeful.]

You’re probably wondering how I got here, surrounded by newly enlisted police officers as they each eagerly wait for me to address them: to speak to them head-on about the state of domestic violence in this country, to offer them insight and perhaps even some kind of consolation that they’re doing enough, or at least that what is enough isn’t too far out of reach. Julie, the police officer who tended to my case, had invited me to talk directly to my experience, under the guise that that alone—my sheer existence—was able to offer a kind of expertise to those on the front lines. Something important. In many ways, the gesture itself—of standing before the force in a small meeting room at the Police Academy—suggested that I had all the answers, that they were embedded in my recollection of the events that took place, my understanding. That my ‘after’ was informative, was sufficient, was enough, or rather… was resolved. 

But the questions I was met with were larger, and more compound than I anticipated. What happened to me shocked an entire group of young enlistees fondling their badges, keen to source, or at least settle, the issue at bay.

The questions were obvious, offensive even, and centred around my identity in ways that seemed deeply unnecessary, as if the knowledge that I was a Muslim woman and a migrant was tied intimately to me being a survivor of domestic abuse.Karina Hogan: Police officers are not built to do this. What they’re built to do, and the standpoint that they come from is a violent standpoint. There is this notion, but also this ignorance in society, that says… let’s liken policing with safety. Roia Atmar: That's Karina Hogan, an Aboriginal and South Sea Islander woman, ABC journalist and a board director with Children's Hospital Queensland and Sisters Inside.Karina Hogan: When you take these violent systems and have an expectation that they’re going to somehow shift the deckchairs on the Titanic, then, you’re kind of shooting yourself in the foot and you’re making the situation worse. They cannot cope with what domestic violence is, because what domestic violence is well beyond their scope. You cannot solve violence with violence. It is just not a solution. 

[Music: shifts, eerie and bubbling with anger.]

Roia Atmar: See, in Australia, we are told that we occupy the land of dreams, the freedom country. That anything is possible. The project itself—of colonialism and a burgeoning free-for-all mentality—tells us that we can be whatever we want to be on Australian soil. I say this as somebody who believed that: who, in the midst of my confusion and abuse, felt obligated to remind myself that this is Australia. That nobody can hurt you here. The Australian dream.

In his 2016 address at the Ethics Centre, journalist and Wiradjuri man Stan Grant reminded his audience that at the heart of the Australian dream, an abstract ideology he describes fondly and critically, lives racism. Lives injustice. Addressing intimately the impact of colonisation and discrimination against First Nations people, Stan Grant cut straight to a complex and engrained source of strain in Australia’s side: that in this country, the Australian dream is reserved only for some. But I knew now, and knew then, that domestic violence was a pervasive and national threat that affected all women, Muslim or otherwise. And it was my job to educate, to cultivate, to help. 

Karina Hogan: When we talk about police and the responsibility falling on the victim, that’s how the system’s set up. That’s just how it’s set up. If you can’t prove yourself... then it’s not going to serve you. So, you’ll end up just becoming another statistic.

Roia Atmar: I joined committees. I talked in depth about child protection, about the nuances of a legal system that, more often than not, didn’t centre the safety and wellness of the women and children it vowed to protect. I was invited to speak at hospitals, to rehash my experiences in poorly air-conditioned public halls, to attend Perpetrator Behaviour Programs, observing men shift uncomfortably in their seats, struggling to look me in the eye, to make sense of my wounds.

As I wriggled my way into a sector I understood only from the perspective of a victim-survivor, as I was reminded—be it by my own admittance or the heartening encouragement of those around me—that my experience counted for something larger, something more monumental and telling, that my experience counted for more than the sort of thing you can learn in a textbook about women, power and control. My confidence grew. I was a woman who had seen a kind of Hell, who knew it intimately. I had memorised its architecture, and—given that—I could identify it. I could spell it out for others. It was a Hell I shared with Australian women everywhere, a hell I was determined to make sense of.

[Music: piano plays at a slow walking pace, reverbates, the eeriness continues.]

By the time I met Rebecca West, a police officer who was present during my trial, my voice had ballooned into something of significance. I was a survivor, and with that came an expertise, a knowingness. By the time I met Rebecca, who was on the board for the Patricia Giles Centre for Non-Violence, an organisation that delivered—and delivers still—a range of services and programs that respond to family violence and homelessness, I was ready. And I wasn’t the only one. 

[Music: shifts, dreamlike ambience, a lingering pain.]

Cat Kilpatrick:I guess when I first started there was this sense of heaviness in the collective narrative of sexual assault, and the frequency and proximity of sexual assault in my community and our community. I think that heaviness turned into a sense of comfort with lived experience in this field, that turned into comfort. And there is comfort in the collective of sexual assault and the collective of trauma. 

Roia Atmar: You just heard from Cat, a social worker based in Melbourne, who shares with me something intimate and fixed: both a desire to ‘help’, or rather to aid survivors and the institutional structures designed to support them, and an experience traumatic and taxing. Like myself, Cat is a victim-survivor, too—and this informs her practice, her passion, and her daily life. Like myself, Cat brings into her profession a kind of practical knowledge that cannot be summarised on a person’s resume. 

Cat Kilpatrick:I think that lived experience is really important in fields in social work. I think there might be a sense of preferred or maybe dangerous naievity if you’re assuming that workers in the field of domestic and family violence and sexual assault are there by coincidence. And I guess this naivety potentially negates or exists in denial of the overarching reality that whilst the vast majority of workers in the field are women and non-binary folk, this majority exists adjecent to the poignant reality that 1 in 6 women have experienced at least one sexual assault since the age of 15. 

Roia Atmar: Cat, myself and many women who work in the sector straddle all sides of the state-of-play when it comes to violence against women in this country. We hold the keys to ‘freedom’, we are able to help formulate what another person’s ‘after’ can look like. But we also stood on the locked side of that door, once upon a time, and demanded entry. We also survived. Cat Kilpatrick:Whilst there can be a sense of hopelessness and anger in the frequency and proximity of sexual assault in our community, I think, like a lot of collective traumas there’s a comfort in that collective and a sense of feeling seen and heard and challenging that denial and minimalisation together.

Roia Atmar: When Cat refers to ‘collective comfort’, she is acknowledging a truth that exists in spaces of crisis work: that, often, those answering the phones and tending to the anguish that exists in their communities already know what it feels like to make that first call, or to lock eyes with yourself in a dusty mirror and see a woman lost and hurt, the outline of who you once were.

Cat Kilpatrick:I guess that it’s worth noting that trauma is subjective and the healing of trauma is also subjective, and so there’s no expectation that victim survivors have to engage in that sort of thing, um, but a lot of the time what people have lost [in sexual assault] is a voice, so getting that back through doing a group or, or facilitating a group or writing a policy submission can be really impactful for people. 

Roia Atmar: As reported on The LookOut, a website initiative designed for workers supporting women’s safety in Victoria, given that one in four women will experience family violence in their lifetime, it’s not unusual that sectors made up predominantly of women will find that amongst their employees are those like us: those who have survived domestic abuse, or even experiencing it concurrently. It’s a complex line in the sand to draw when you’re met with a client who has lost the spark in her eyes the way you once did, who describes her husband in comparable ways, who looks to you for help. The human instinct is to hold, to share, to revel in your own tale of recovery. But, as the LookOut suggests, sharing your personal story can shift the focus of the conversation. Sometimes, you are expected to leave your background out. But how, when it informs every decision you make? 

[Music: fades out to almost silence, a sparkling ambient music begins.]

Roia Atmar: In the grips of abuse, victim-survivors often describe feeling a sense of absence, a kind of dull—and yet ecstatic—nothingness, the feeling of being far away from the woman you once were, the woman you want to be. Who was I, if not this? Who am I, if not surviving? When the shackles of that fall to the wayside, be it through leaving or otherwise, and you are left with a sorry reflection and the echoes of what once was, who is looking back at you? 

Cat Kilpatrick:You are both coming from a really similar story, that each of those stories have their own intersectionalities and levels of vulnerability, but there is this kind of shared chapter, shared narrative, that’s really empowering and really impactful.

Roia Atmar: But working in the sector, and simultaneously existing as a survivor, means being looked at: being perceived, even if the woman on the other end of the line, or sitting before you, isn’t aware of your past. It means being an image of recovery, whether that image feels fully-formed or not. But what happens when the woman looking at you, to you, for solace… resembles all that you know? All that you once were? Ashlee Donohue: The highest rate of domestic violence is perpetuated against Aboriginal women, and brown women, and Muslim women, and women of disadvantage. So, you know, we need those women… of all those nationalities and what not, at the table, making these decisions, writing these programs for their communities, looking through the lens that they see domestic violence through.

[Sound effects: Phone rings, busy sounds of an office, support worker at a refuge answers the phone on a headset]

Case worker (voice by Beth Atkinson-Quinton): Thanks for calling. I’m just going to ask you a few questions, if that’s okay? Are you in any immediate physical danger? Do you have any children? Are you safe?

Roia Atmar: Early in my career as a Housing Support Worker, I met Fatima*, a Muslim woman who—with three young children—required a refuge. There was something in her story, in the life she had tried to forge despite her husband’s relentless abuse, that reverberated through me. It was a familiar tale, a chapter in a long and enduring book I knew well. Her expression was knowing and curious, because—in me—she saw a depiction of recovery, of hope, that isn’t always readily accessible in how we make sense of abuse in this country.

[A scratchy, archived news headline begins]Celeste Liddle, Indigenous victims of domestic violence (The Feed, SBS at 2.53): The community is incredibly weary of legal systems and police systems and government services because they have also been the victims of those very things for such a long time. There is a reluctance to actually report… (fades out)

Newsreader: Roughly 50% of all domestic and family violence goes unreported. But for the indigenous community, that is predicted to be much higher.[Crossfades into a different news headline]Ngozi Fulani, CEO of Sistah Space (Domestic abuse: 'We get left at home with our attackers', BBC London at 0.55): When Black women report abuses, they’re often asked to prove it….(2:12) This in turn makes black women not want to report cases of domestic abuse. And this in turn drives up cases of domestic abuse. Perpetrators know that Black women are unlikely to report because of the responses they get, therefore, more abuse, more murders. The white woman was able to close the door and breathe a sigh of relief having been assured that her perpetrator is in custody. The black woman closed the door knowing fully well that he’s around and he’s in trouble and nobody cares. 

[‘Nobody cares’ reverberates. Soft piano starts to play, slow, wandering]

Roia Atmar: When Hannah Giorgis made sense of herself as a rape survivor, not once did she consider going to the police. Her rapist still occupied the campus grounds she once enthusiastically wandered through, the campus grounds that promised her a future laced with promise. 

Seeking legal assistance would be a game of roulette, a complex and deeply institutionalised pursuit of justice, as “to be a ‘good rape victim’, she writes in a column in the Guardian, is to immediately report your assault to the police, even knowing you will likely never see ‘justice’, but to be a good Black person is to avoid the police entirely because your life quite literally depends on it. The tightrope walk is impossible.”  

What is the tightrope walk that Middle Eastern women face in Australia? Which worlds do we straddle as we float above heights we can’t possibly understand? What happens when a Muslim woman needs saving from the hands of her abuser in a world that has decided still that her identity is up for analysis, that her ‘recovery’ or ‘liberation’ requires being ‘saved’ from her very own religion? 

Maha Abdo: It was very hard for people to understand and acknowledge that we could provide a service to a diverse group of women. Every time we were in a space, it was as if we were the service users instead of the service providers, you know? So we had to cross all of these hurdles.

Roia Atmar: When my client looked at me, though, she was able to see all sides of that chasing. She was able to understand what it looked like to waver about in the unknown, all the while having to home, love and nurture three young children. Three young children she shared with a man who met her with disdain and violence. Rather than promising to resolve each of her fears, I could promise her that I was familiar with them. I knew them well, and I would do everything in my power to help. 

Ashlee Donohue: You can have all the education in the world, you know,  around this topic, but if you haven’t lived it, then it’s a different level of knowledge when you’ve lived it. It’s like saying to a drug addict, you should just give up drugs but you’ve never touched drugs in your life. You don’t know what it feels like to have that feeling. Like, I don’t do anything now for the woman that you see before you. I base my experience and my education on the woman that was running from this man for, you know, 15 years.

Roia Atmar: I catch myself in parts: be it in the reflection of my car mirror, or in a passing window, or while washing my hands in the Patricia Giles Centre bathroom, where I have worked now for nearly a decade. Women enter my orbit at various stages of, or looking toward, their ‘after’. 

Cat Kilpatrick:We are in a very privileged position in someone’s life. We have been chosen or we’ve been reached out to to walk alongside someone is potentially one of the most impactful moments or journeys of their life. Um, and that’s a real privilege to be able to do that with someone.

Roia Atmar: They look at me, and I look back, promising only to see them, to help them flesh out what their ‘after’ ought to resemble. I see them, because they deserve to be seen. I see them, because I am them.

[Music gets louder, reflective]

I want to thank Karina, Cat, Ashlee and Maha for their contributions in this episode, and for their tireless work in the sector. 

This season is supported by the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria and UNESCO Melbourne City of Literature, and is kindly sponsored by the Victorian Women’s Trust, an advocate for violence prevention, fair wages for equal work, and the equal representation of women, men and gender diverse people in the decision making processes that shape our lives.

You are listening to Tender, a Broadwave production about what happens once women leave abusive relationships. This season is created by Madison Griffiths, Beth Atkinson-Quinton and me, Roia Atmar. Until next time. 

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