For many women and children domestic violence doesn't end after you've run away. That is only the beginning. I'm 33 and I've been running away from my dad ever since I was 11.
We packed our bags in the black of an early morning. We ran from a house on the beach in Aspendale to a house in Frankston. Me, my mum, and my younger brother. He had four intervention orders to his name, a law degree and all the bravado and lack of empathy typical of a perpetrator of domestic violence.
He left us with nothing after the property settlement, despite mum working full time over their lives together.
If you've never personally experienced domestic violence, psychological abuse, emotional abuse, financial abuse, it's difficult to understand what it can be like. But imagine this.
Imagine that almost every birthday or Christmas, everything that ever mattered to you was intentionally ruined, laughed at or diminished. Imagine that every time your father made you cry, he laughed at you; that he denies anything ever happened, insists he was never violent, and has never been a violent man.
Imagine that this man uses his mother to manipulate his 11 year old daughter to fill out a competition in her favourite magazine so that he can get her address and begin stalking her again. Imagine then, that this man builds a house off the very same road you live on.
Also imagine this girl at 14, with newly short hair, discovering her identity, and him asking her 'are you butch or the other one?' with a loud snigger, and her having no idea what that meant but knowing it was meant to maim her. Imagine that every term he refuses to pay her school fees, in a power play designed purely to injure with his constant claim that he doesn't have any money, despite being a successful lawyer with his own practice.
Imagine this same daughter, her brother and her mum have memories of fist marks in walls, a dead fox in the driveway, the swimming pool slashed and emptied of water, of no rooms upstairs having doors because he ripped them all off their hinges.
"This is my history on repeat."
Imagine that this man uses his son, who now lives with him, as a pawn, to threaten my mum if she goes to the police, saying that he will put him in a home if she does; that he has