She tried to leave her abusive partner. It cost Sophia her children

Sophia* finally gained access to a women’s refuge while trying to leave an abusive relationship – but was then told she couldn’t stay. The news meant either returning to the man who threatened to kill her if she left him or becoming homeless with two young children.

“They were like, ‘Oh, we can’t really help you get a place,’ and I was like, ‘Well, I’m about to have open-heart surgery, and I’ve got a four-month-old little boy, what do I do?’ They were just like, ‘Oh, the father was not that bad’,” Sophia, 35, recalls.

Looking down at her baby boy, Sophia decided to return home. But about a year later, her seven-year-old daughter was punched in the face by her partner, who was not the father.

He launched her daughter across the room before turning to Sophia and battering her. All Sophia remembers, as she drifted in and out of consciousness, was the helpless cries of her baby girl and the paralysing fear of being locked inside a room with her children, desperately waiting for her partner to fall asleep so they could escape.

Sophia’s experience is shocking but representative of what is happening on a wider scale. Two in three women seeking domestic violence help can’t be allocated a caseworker, the latest report by the peak body Domestic Violence NSW (DVNSW) reveals. 

Caseworkers provide support to women impacted by domestic violence by assessing available options, helping them make decisions, discussing safety for them and their children, and supporting them with Centrelink, housing, education, police and community organisations.

However, the report says domestic violence staffing levels have fallen 12 per cent, while demand has surged. One in six new referrals requiring urgent support are told the provider has no capacity.

Domestic violence services are on average supporting 150 per cent more clients than they are funded for, according to a DVNSW member survey. Some services are supporting between 800 and 900 per cent more clients than their funding covers.

Whenever a woman dies from domestic violence – one per week in NSW last year, according to Counting Dead Women – An Le and her colleagues at Bonnie Support Services rush to their database, coursing with anxiety, to check if they had rejected her calls for help.

“We know that domestic violence – it’s not this rare, sudden event that just happens out of nowhere. It’s at the end point of an escalation that someone calls us for help, and we’re saying, ‘Sorry, we can’t help you’,” Le said. “It’s devastating.”

Le, who has worked in the domestic violence sector for more than 10 years, says her organisation can support only 17 per cent of calls for help to leave abuse. More than four out of five women wanting to leave get rejected.

“Everyone says, ‘Oh, you do this job for empowerment, for advocacy, for support’, but beneath all of that is this persistent anxiety for the safety and wellbeing of the woman we can’t support. Because we get those calls, we don’t know where she goes or what happens to her during the night.”

“The job doesn’t neatly end at five o’clock ... some of those cases, you bring it home, it follows you home, and it sits with you at dinner, and it sits with you in the middle of the night.”

Minister for the Prevention of Domestic Violence Jodie Harrison said NSW has a “no-wrong-door approach” for victim-survivors – they can receive support from a service, including crisis accommodation, developing a safety plan or access to programs to keep them safe.

“Domestic violence is unacceptable and a crime. Every woman and child deserves to live in a safe community, free from violence,” Harrison said.

For Sophia, leaving her abuser was the beginning of her worst nightmare. After her ex-partner was arrested, his mother paid his $20,000 bail and he was freed. Sophia was evicted from their home because his name was first on the lease.

During their relationship, she had two children with him, and began granting him visitations a year after he was arrested. One day, he decided not to give back their two kids. Since Sophia was technically homeless, having applied throughout the period to enter social housing unsuccessfully, the courts weighed in her ex-partner’s favour and awarded him custody.

She has not seen her two children for two years.

“It’s hell every single day, especially because I don’t know if they’re OK or not. I know what he’s capable of, but no one’s going to do anything or see it until it’s too late,” Sophia said.

As NSW records about 100 domestic violence-related assaults a day, soaring housing costs and a shortage of crisis accommodation are trapping women and children in unsafe situations for longer, DVNSW states.

In the most recent state budget, the NSW government invested $272.7 million over four years for frontline domestic, family and sexual violence services.

However, DVNSW Chief Executive Delia Donovan says that most of the previous budget’s commitments did not go towards baseline funding to enable frontline services to meet demand and retain staff.

Donovan is calling for an additional 50 per cent increase in core funding – $177.4 million – made into an ongoing investment as the lives of more women and children are at risk. She said the ignored calls for funding have become more than a budget issue – it is now a “political choice”.

“We live in one of the wealthiest and most well-resourced states in the country, yet women and children are being forced back into violence because we can’t commit just 0.1 per cent of the state budget to the services that save their lives,” Donovan said.

Harrison said the government knew there was still more to do and recognised that the work specialist domestic violence workers did was “incredibly challenging”.

Since coming into government, the domestic and family violence program budget has been 50 per cent higher than budgets leading up to the 2022-23 financial year.

Labor has also prioritised half of 8400 new social and affordable homes for victim-survivors of domestic and family violence – a total investment of $6.6 billion – and late last year, invested $130 million towards increasing crisis capacity by at least 200 beds.

*Not her real name.

If you are experiencing domestic violence call 1800RESPECT.