 It was mainly doing hair, choking, lapping, throwing stuff at me, like spitting on me. It was quite a lot, like, yeah. No, I still get shocked, yeah. Some cases still surprise me that people can actually do that to another human being. He would wake me up, twisting my ear, slapping me. Any little sound I wake up from, my heart starts beating very fast. I dwell on these things. I will think about them long after I've been to the job. Have I done enough at the job? Have I done the right things at the job? Like, I was told every day that, you know, I was ugly and that, you know, I could never find anyone better than him, like no one else would want me. It's like a tango where the perpetrator is enticing the victim back into this dance. You know what I mean? And it's going back and forth and back and forth and there's this tension building and building and building. You know, he'd tell me where he didn't like my friends. He didn't want me to have friends. Why doesn't she just leave? Well, it's easy to say that, but where's that person going to go? The very nature of domestic violence is isolation. I lost so much of myself. He just stripped so much back of who I was. The most dangerous place for Queenslanders is not outside nightclubs on and out streets in the dark of night. The most dangerous place is behind closed doors in residential addresses. It's justice in the eye. There was a temporary protection in the red place. We were actually known to each other. It's very difficult when the public are angry and people are hurting to get out what the true story is behind the scenes. For police to get their response right 100% of the time is a huge challenge. It is our job to protect people and it needs to be taken seriously. People call us because they need our help. I have a level of empathy for those QPS officers that are fronting up to those homes. I would hope that they're doing the best that they can. And if they're not, then I'd be saying you need to probably think about what we're doing. I used to see the world through rose-coloured glasses, so I can still remember it today. I thought it was more or less a movie scene. I'd never ever been exposed to such violence. I remember pulling up at the front of the house and there was a lounge halfway out the front window. And a respondent had their partner in a headlock and was smashing his head up against the tray of a trade-back ute. Yeah, that was my first exposure to domestic violence. On that last day, it was very intense. Even trying to leave, it was very intense. I was scared of what could happen. He came to my auntie's house, came to the bedroom I was sleeping in, knocked on the window and had a screwdriver and was stabbing it through the window to try and get me. That was the first time I spoke to police officers about it. Year on year, the amount of occurrences is increasing exponentially and now we're sitting at 107,000 occurrences a year. We respond to all of those. In situations where someone's ringing us when they pick up the phone and call 000, that is such a massive thing for someone to do, particularly if they're in a coercive control situation as well. This role here, the DFVC role in Brisbane Combs is probably my ideal role in the QPS. We see all the jobs that are coming in statewide basically, so it's real-time reviewing statewide 24 hours, 7 days a week of incidents that are happening across the board. So we will review those jobs, we'll tag ourselves into the job so that alerts the crew to know that the DFVC and Brisbane Combs is actually reviewing that job and we'll provide further information once we extrapolate the data and analyse the data. Police communications are good at trying to let us know what they can see and if we're not responding necessarily to lights and sirens, we have an opportunity to do some checks on the way, see who might be living at the address, see if there might be any existing domestic and family violence orders if there's any previous history for domestic and family violence but sometimes if you're going lights and sirens, we don't necessarily have that opportunity. These response guys and girls going to these jobs, they are going back to back. In this role, we have the ability to add value to what they're actually doing and support them to make sure that we're achieving optimal outcomes for victims. The domestic incidents that police go to where there is physical violence, they're probably the easiest for them to respond to because we clearly know our role. We can go in, we can take charge of the situation and put someone in custody and make the victim safe. But then sometimes you walk into a situation, no one wants to talk to you and you have to try and piece together from what little information you have, what's actually happened. There's two different ways that we can take action by civil proceedings and criminal proceedings. So basically if we go to an incident and we investigate, yep, there's a long history of domestic and family violence, there's all these risk factors present and we believe it's necessary and desirable to protect that victim from further domestic and family violence and that's when we look at taking out an application for protection or what we call a police protection notice. The application is heard before a magistrate who then makes the final decision as to whether or not, based on the evidence the police are putting to the court, whether or not an order is necessary and desirable and they have the final say as to whether or not an order is put in place. All domestic violence orders have one mandatory condition that the respondent is to be of good behaviour towards the aggrieved and violence against the aggrieved. If I went to a job where there's an existing order and the respondent has been physically abusive towards the aggrieved, I would consider that to be a contravention of that order and straight up we have powers obviously to arrest them for breaching the domestic violence order. The flip side of that is there's also the criminal element of assault. He has assaulted her. We have to ascertain with the victim whether or not she wants to make an assault complaint and whether or not the aggrieved's do, aggrieved's male or female necessarily want to make that criminal complaint. And the frustration comes from the fact that we might do everything in that instance to make the victim safe but ultimately that's their partner. They don't want this person to stop being their partner, they just want them to stop behaving the way they do. You know, if I've gone to a job and I can clearly see something's happened I don't want to come back and see that it's continuing to happen. Well, that has got worse. Well, that has got worse. Like, yeah, I don't want to see that happen. And in some instances, I know some of my officers they will see this a number of times through one shift let alone throughout, you know, the cycle of their roster and throughout the year. Lauren and I were working together the other night and in an eight hour shift we had two jobs we've attended that both had an element of domestic and family violence a result of that, that was six hours of our shift for those two jobs. It feels like a lot of the jobs we do at the moment. They're not signing up to be social workers but this is unfortunately a lot of the work that they're doing and domestic and family violence is such a complex matter that the training is probably just scraping the surface. Our practitioners and DV specialists do countless hours of training on various different areas of domestic and family violence. That's not a reality for a police officer to do that. As a general duties frontline police officer when you're out there at two o'clock in the morning and no one else is out there to help these people that is frustrating. What we see is that members of QPS want to really understand how to do this better and there is a definite passion for that to happen. I don't believe that anyone should be subject to domestic violence. We want to be able to help them and if we're feeling helpless or we're feeling like our hands are tied because we're not getting what we need in order to be able to help them or something like that then it is, it does affect you because at the end of the day that's all we want to do is help. DV isn't just one incident it's usually been built up over time based on a pattern of behaviours and controlling behaviours which has been designed to isolate one party from the other to maximise the control that person has over the victim. It kind of started as friends like Facebook friends, no boys. He would check my social media accounts see who I was talking to. I was paying rent, I was paying for the cars, paying for food, I was paying for everything. I didn't have any family, I didn't have any friends up there it was just me and him. It can be someone who has full control over someone's finances or they're controlling who they can and can't be friends with or the family members they can and can't see it's not always going to be, you walk into a situation and somebody is physically hurt are they being isolated from their family or controlled by another person they can't, they can't speak to the people or reach out for support that they need and people may not tell us that these are things that we ask them. And if someone's using strangulation suffocation to control them you would naturally assume they want to get away from that on the inside, absolutely of course they would can they do they or don't, plenty stay. I honestly thought that everything that he did to me was my fault but really when I looked at it and opened up to one of the officers when I put the order against him and I was just letting it all out I kind of realised like wow this is actually very bad, very toxic. There's more and more understanding of the complexities of it there's more and more insight into what the police role should be, maybe and maybe shouldn't be we have invested heavily as an organisation in this capability. When you have a dispersed and a very diverse geographic state you need a command to bring all of that information and that consistency together the new command is the capability owner and it really has that role of bringing all of this together it also has the role of interacting with other agencies and partners to see how we can work better and advising me of a way forward in terms of DFV. It's a command that's going to be relatively lean a small number of highly specialised people whose job it will be fundamentally to engage in that strategic setting and understanding what community and government expectations and the public policy settings are and making sure they're being translated into the directions being taken by our officers but it's also to learn from our frontline officers about their experiences, their challenges and on their behalf try and influence say policy and even legislative reforms to be able to enable them to do their job better. We've formulated now in eight different locations and looking to grow that domestic and family violence and vulnerable persons units specifically with the specialisation of knowing how to triage and identify those incidents of potential high risk extreme risk or extreme lethality in them. We now have a situation where you've got many layers to policing domestic violence first response like I said and they're dealing with a point in time and do the job extremely well. And their priorities are the safety of those people involved what the VPU do is we come after the critical incident We have the luxury of time here to spend time with people to support them to the point where they can get their lives back. Experts who have a deep understanding of the complex dynamics of domestic violence. Domestic violence incidents are reviewed with a view to sending our staff from here out to speak to the parties involved the respondent and the aggrieved to basically confirm what they've said on the night. It can also relieve some of the pressure from the first response officers because they might go to a domestic violence incident but they might not get the time to actually do the investigation or gather the evidence to get a successful prosecution. We then provide advice to those people as much as we can but we also offer referral to our support services. We actually have an embedded worker from a DV service who works with us that person with us to meet and speak with our aggrieves. The difference between now and five years ago was that there wasn't really an integrated response there wasn't shared information we weren't working as closely and developing those relationships. We've had the whole of government endorsement and creation of eight high-risk teams in eight different locations now in Queensland that have funded and supported and led by the Department of Justice and Attorney General operating within our space where we're bringing in non-police and even non-members of our organisation but come with a collecting background of connections to other government departments and NGOs. Essentially a case will be referred into our team either by us being police or one of the other agencies that sit on the team. Then what we're doing is basically providing information to each other within our legislative framework so we bring together basically pieces of the puzzle and then we're able to be able to provide a really good collaborative response to that DV situation. We are safety planning with victims we are holding perpetrators to account for their behaviour we are ensuring that all the servicers together have the big picture. We've had victims come into the police station and disclose significant concerns around DV that's occurring in the home for both themselves and their children and in those moments I was able to liaise with our VPU unit and basically say I really think that she would benefit right now from a wraparound response we can get this done really really quickly through the high-risk team. We were able to have that conversation with her I was then in immediate contact with some of our agencies she was placed immediately into safe accommodation that afternoon and then Jennifer Wimmer were able to contact her and do some safety planning have some great conversations even around seeking medical advice around recent assaults that had happened and her house was upgraded in terms of her safety so her locks were changed and we ensured that she had good CCTV footage Police were looking into the criminal investigations and he ended up being charged and held accountable really for that behaviour that had been going on for a very long period of time unbeknown to a lot of agencies. Victims come through other agencies where again police don't know when you think about that's been going on it's never been brought up we don't have any information that DV has been occurring in this home for these families but the persons felt very comfortable to disclose that to a social worker at the hospital because police have been so active in the HRT other services have felt comfortable to contact police and to reach out to the VPU and get some advice and seek support for us all the core members are working really tirelessly and we're really really committed to this work however there is just never enough the sheer demand on those teams just the amount of people that you have in your high risk category is extraordinary I don't think the public realises that so you not only respond at the front end we have a lot of interaction into the back end with these people that we're dealing with this group of people or this cohort that we're dealing with constantly See exactly what research has always known and always said it though it comes across every part of the social network low socio-economic up to the the upper echelons of society there is no specific breakdown of the type of person a DV perpetrator is we need to hold those people accountable for their actions so we want to find out in their mind what's going on so if you want to talk about their history what's their motivation what are their feelings what are they hoping to get out of the relationship basically trying to stop that cycle and stop the re-offending and stop the breaches from occurring because we've been doing policing DV for 40 years and locking people up and putting them inside doesn't necessarily stop the DV from occurring so that's what we want to get to we want to get the underlying reasons whether it's what they've been brought up with and it's all they know trauma particularly childhood trauma can lead a long way into those types of facets later on in life roughly 30% of our perpetrators would have a diagnosed or undiagnosed personality disorder or behaviour disorder if you look at some international research so we know this for male or behavioural change programs 50% of the men who might get a chance to go into those programs 50% of them don't start or complete those programs as well they actually do not believe that there's anything wrong with the way they behave and the violence that they inflict on people I remember the first DV I ever went to and female and male in a relationship and she had actually been strangled she had clear injuries and you could hear in her voice that she clearly had some kind of injury to her throat and vocal cords I guess it was pretty confronting for me I guess because I didn't understand how it got to the point of someone actually grabbing another person and particularly around the neck and throat area between four women will experience intimate partner violence of women who are high risk up to 68% will experience near fatal strangulation by their partner not only if you've been strangled once or you're more likely to be strangled by your partner again you're eight times more likely to be killed by that partner should you remain in the relationship so we know a lot about risk factors for future domestic homicide so it's about recognising that things are present in a person's life they're more at risk of committing domestic and family violence homicides well someone saying I'm going to put my hands around your neck and stop you from breathing shows how much control I have over you and I can take that away and I can put it back on this is just me reminding you your life is in my hands it's significantly high risk in situations where we've got pregnancy as well it might be that the respondent doesn't have as much control over that particular person because it's all about baby and mum and not about the perpetrator the moment when a partner is separating from their other partner is one of the highest risk times in a domestic violence relationship animal cruelty is another obviously risk factor that is of significant concern so if you have one risk factor and then you look at most of the time we're going to jobs where there's numerous risk factors present that really indicates that we have to be doing something to help this person the one that stands out of my mind the most is we've received multiple calls for service for a job we arrive there and we find her standing on the roof of the carport next door you could see when we went there and spoke to her the fear in her eyes the legitimate I felt like I was my life was in danger and just from the respondent the lack of understanding or remorse or that he had done something wrong it's always stuck with me DFV in the QPS is the most scrutinised role that we do not just internally but also externally if there are issues with the system and the process we need to do something about it I think best practice would be really well supported to have domestic and family violence specialists working alongside police officers responding we're actually looking at some of those models and I really believe that in the not too distant future you will see some of this come to fruition we need to look at each of the incidents separately and if we need to improve in those yes we need to improve and let's do that no matter how big or small the job might seem to a police officer attending a job we don't necessarily know the impact that's going to have long-term on someone's life so we have to respond to that incident in the same professional manner no matter what because this could be the time that they need us to give them the the freedom from their partners so that they can leave and if it's not we're just there to keep them safe on this matter particularly we can help shape the public's view of this problem, this epidemic this pandemic of domestic and family violence the language we use helps shape the narrative and therefore helps shape the understanding so that's a big responsibility I think education for sure is a massive thing making people aware of the difference between a healthy relationship and a toxic relationship educating people around what consent is what coercive control is how to stop that, how to feel better about yourself people's self-worth getting them to change their behaviour at a young age and not reaching the age of 50 where they've been perpetrating for the last 30 years for me it is actually about everyone responding and everyone being responsible for this we're just one part of the process we're one arm of the body to make changes when it comes to domestic and family violence as bystanders, as neighbours as sisters, mothers, cousins if you hear an incident happening next door and you think oh you know we'll just stay out of it that's when you need to say no I've heard something I need to make sure that everyone is okay make that phone call to us so that we can go out and investigate and make sure that our communities are safe if you've got someone wanting to talk to you about this ask questions and check in with them and make sure they're okay we need other people to the community come around and help us and support these people and be around these people because at the end of the day they're going to probably have a longer term more profound impact on the lives of the egregies than us if a victim needs to seek out help they can call police if they're not able to call police they can go online and request police assistance if they feel more comfortable they can contact a domestic violence specialist support service there's support services in every location in Queensland I honestly believe just go to the police as hard as it is though because it's hard that's the one thing I remember is that crying is weak so I held a lot of my problems in and didn't tell anyone I thought I'd be weak if I cried so when I finally could release it it was just it made me feel so much more freer and they did listen to me and honestly I've made so many good connections with the police and I will treasure that for like the rest of my life will we ever have a perfect model or a perfect system I don't know if that's ever going to be possible because we're dealing with humans we're dealing with human nature we're dealing in some instances with the most evil humans who doesn't matter what we do or how we do it we might not succeed but that should not stop us from trying to have the most perfect systems in place