Share on Twitter
Video above: Insight asks: what is coercive control and should it be a crime? Intimate Terrorism, Tuesday, May 11 at 8:30pm on SBS and On Demand.
Warning: some readers may find this article distressing.
Fourteen months after their daughter, Hannah and their three grandchildren, Aaliyah, Laianah and Trey were murdered, Sue and Lloyd Clarke have revealed they plan to set up gated communities to protect victim-survivors of domestic violence.
“Hopefully we can start organising some gated communities… So, once they leave the perpetrators, they ve got some sort of protection where it s harder for the perpetrator to get in,” Lloyd Clarke told SBS
DARVO is a tactic used to publicly discredit accusers and privately subdue victims with shame and a sense of shared guilt – however false. Like the term gaslighting , you may have seen it used in discussions about domestic and sexual violence, but what does it describe exactly?
DARVO stands for Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender.
Professor Patrick O Leary from Griffith University told
SBS Voices that perpetrators often use DARVO to shame victims into believing they are responsible for the abuse.
An abuser might say if you really cared about me, you wouldn t do that to justify an act of violence because he says his victim s behaviour provoked him – she was spending too much time with friends, for example. The victim believes that the abuse is their fault, at least in part, says Prof O Leary, and they could stop it if they behaved a certain way.
Sue and Lloyd Clarke believe coercive control early intervention could have saved their daughter Hannah’s life and the lives of their three grandchildren, Aaliyah, 6, Laianah, 4, and Trey, 3.
“We never knew about coercive control until after the fact. I think if we would’ve known we could have helped and maybe stopped an atrocity, says Sue.
Hannah had left her abusive marriage and escaped with her children to her parents’ house in Brisbane with just two garbage bags of clothes. Her father Lloyd had furnished bunk beds for the kids and secured the house with locks. A protection order was in place. They should have been safe.
9Honey
By
2 hours ago
OPINION Yesterday came the awful news of the death of 27-year-old Kelly Wilkinson. Her burnt body was found in her own backyard at Arundel on the Gold Coast; her three children, all under nine, were at home at the time. Just beyond belief.
Her former partner, 34-year-old Bryan Johnstone, has been charged with murder and breaching a domestic violence order. He was found with serious burns two blocks away.
RELATED:
Kelly Wilkinson was allegedly murdered by her estranged partner. (GoFundMe)
It raises the question: what is going so wrong with domestic violence in this country? What s the point of AVOs and domestic violence orders? They re not worth the paper they re written on.