Hidden victims: Women on visas feeling trapped after domestic violence abuse.

By James Oaten

At any one time, up to half of the emergency accommodation being provided to victims of domestic violence are women on visas. In a foreign culture and unfamiliar legal framework, victims can be too scared to report the abuse for fear they will be deported.

After moving to Australia to start a new life, Sarah (not her real name) started noticing dramatic changes with her husband to be. He had problems with his former wife and needed money. His sleeping habits changed, his drinking escalated dramatically and a violent streak emerged.

“I didn’t do anything. But he started to hit,” she says about the first of his many violent outbursts. “I can’t scream. I can’t run.”

‘He started to slap me without reason’

Sarah arrives at the ABC late at night to help keep her identity secret. Darwin may be a capital city but it has a relatively small population and many faces are familiar.

She is with her case worker, who keeps Sarah’s toddler son occupied with videos on a smartphone.

Sarah begins by explaining with confidence that she hopes her story will inspire other domestic violence victims to seek help.

“I want to tell other women not to suffer,” she opens our conversation. But she holds back tears and takes regular pauses when our conversation turns to the physical and psychological abuse she suffered at the hands of her partner.

“In 2014 he had a problem with his family,” she says.

“He started drinking whisky and he took sleeping tablets because of his problem. Then he started to slap me without any reason. We had our arguments but he had never hit me like this. I was so upset.”

‘I’ve never before seen a father kicking their son’

The first signs of abuse began when she discovered that her partner had not broken off communications with his former wife.

Her husband became defensive and eventually struck Sarah in the face.

Initially Sarah wanted the relationship to move beyond the assault, believing it was in the best interest of their newborn baby.

But as the weeks passed, Sarah’s husband became increasingly aggressive, making more demands for money from Sarah’s family, telling her it would be used to help the couple apply for a permanent visa.

Rather than calling the police, Sarah called triple-0, pleading with paramedics who arrived to help her husband, saying he was “sick”.

One night the abuse extended to their newborn, prompting Sarah to flee the home.
“I’ve never seen before fathers kicking [their] son,” she says.

“I took the baby, I ran outside [but] I have no place to go.”

None of her friends knew her partner had been violent towards her, so she went to Darwin’s Casuarina Square Shopping Centre where she stayed for three days.

“I went to the cinema. I fed my baby in there. Then I was [with] my baby in the common toilet … How long could I stay there? Again I came back. The same thing happened. He started hitting me,” Sarah recounts.

Visa fears stopping violence from being reported

Sarah’s story is not uncommon for Dawn House, one of Darwin’s largest domestic violence shelters.

It has seen a doubling of calls for help, from 6,000 in the 2014–15 financial year to 11,000 in the year after.

At any particular point, up to half of the emergency accommodation being provided to victims of domestic violence are women on visas.

“Sarah came to us obviously really unsure about what her options were,” Dawn House chief executive Susan Crane says.

“She had limited access to finances, she had really limited access to support services, her family isn’t in the country, she’s isolated from her community.

“And that’s a common thread through all the women we see with domestic violence and immigration issues. Also she was really panicked about whether or not she can stay in Australia. And she still is.”

Sarah came to Australia as a dependent on a 457, a visa designed to attract temporary workers, and therefore has limited options for her and her Australian-born son to stay in the country since splitting with her partner.

Other women on partner visas have more options, as there are safeguards that help them stay in the country if they can prove their relationship was real and that they were victims of domestic violence.

Ms Crane says the spike in women on visas seeking help has created an additional pressure on Dawn House as it tries to navigate complex migration laws and help women with little to no access to welfare.

“A lot of the women come to us [and] their partners will be saying: ‘I’m going to send you back to the country you came from,’ and the women that we see, they believe that,” Ms Crane says.

“We have to do quite a lot of work then to make them realise it’s not necessarily the case.”

New law to tackle problem before Parliament
The Federal Government has introduced what Immigration Minister Peter Dutton described as a “very significant first step” to prevent women on visas being subjected to domestic violence.

The Migration Amendment (Family Violence and Other Measures) Bill, introduced in the March parliamentary sitting, seeks to screen Australians with a history of family or domestic violence from sponsoring a partner visa.

The proposed changes would also ensure any visa applicants are aware if their visa sponsor has a history of violence.

“If people have a history of family violence or they have a history of domestic violence then that should be taken into consideration,” Mr Dutton says.

“We have, in relation to domestic violence, a very strong position as a government and that is we are not going to facilitate these arrangements where we think there is a reasonable risk that there may be violence in the relationship.”

Department of Immigration statistics show several hundred people on partner visas seek help for domestic violence issues, but it does not keep statistics on people on other visas.

When questioned on what the Government is doing to further assist domestic violence victims, Mr Dutton says the Government is open to “sensible suggestions and reforms”.

“We want to do whatever we can within the law and to amend the law if necessary to make sure we can reduce the incidents of domestic violence,” Mr Dutton says.

But any reforms will likely come too late for Sarah and her Australian-born son, who are battling to stay in the country.

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This post originally appeared on ABC News.