Three months before Kardell Lomas and her unborn baby were killed in a horrific act of feminicide in Ipswich, she stood in the office of a support service trying to get away from the perpetrator, who was with her in the building.
Over the previous year Lomas had tried many times to get help. She had disclosed to another support service that she was suffering from brutal violence – including strangulation and threats to kill – and her partner was stalking her to the bathroom and other places, including to those same support service appointments. After her disclosures the violence escalated – the danger was growing.
Lomas had shown up at appointments with injuries and was trying to leave her abuser, for the safety of herself and her unborn child. She was clearly high risk and her attacker had a violent history.
Despite police being called to their home several times by neighbours who heard him yelling at her, the two – victim and perpetrator – were seen by police as “just as bad as each other”.
But that day, in the support service office, Lomas passed a note to staff, asking them to call the police on her behalf. This was an enormous act of resistance and courage. She wanted to escape her perpetrator and go to her aunty’s house.
When police arrived, they took her killer aside and laughed and joked with him. They clearly knew him, and that he had a history of violence, but they were jovial and friendly. In comparison, Lomas was treated as though she was wasting their time. One officer told her abuser: “To be honest, mate, I’m not even sure why we got called either.”
In the bodycam footage of the callout, released to Guardian Australia by police, Kardell is withdrawn, fearful and cowering. The perpetrator yells abuse at her. Before she is led out of the agency and into the back of a police wagon, in which police place her to drive her to her aunty’s place, she appears to have heard this message loud and clear.
It is the most heartbreaking moment of the footage. She turns and says: “I’m sorry for the fuck around.”
This is a message that is sent to every single black woman: be thankful, be gracious, cower into yourself, apologise for fucking them around.
This is a message given to black women even when we know the deaths of black women rarely make the front pages of newspapers, lead national debates or change laws; whose deaths are normalised and seen as routine, so of course are not newsworthy; whose deaths are not mournable, whose deaths are not worthy of inquiry, whose experiences of violence are secondary to the experiences of white women and even black men; whose disappearances are seen as “going walkabout” or “drug addiction” or their own responsibility, even when there are potential perpetrators involved.
These words should shame not just those there that day who failed Lomas but every person who watches this footage. Every Australian should be made to hear her words: “I’m sorry for the fuck around.” She speaks as if she is the problem, when it is those around her who have made her more vulnerable to death.
Police took no protective action for Lomas – such as taking out a domestic violence order – and there is no evidence they ever followed up with her.
Three months later her body was found in the back of a car at the house she shared with her abuser.
He was jailed for manslaughter and given a sentence of 14 years for the horrific feminicide of Lomas and her unborn child. Some people may think this is “justice” but it is far from it.
Lomas’s killing was not just a “DV death”. Its perpetrator was not only the man but the state that failed to protect her and even made her more vulnerable to violence.
I use the word “feminicide” because it widens the definition of “femicide” from a woman killed for being a woman to include state violence, which targets black women, particularly in Queensland, and which is routinely ignored by white feminists who refuse to centre black women.
In feminicide, a definition drawn from the work of activists and academics in Latin America, it is not just interpersonal violence but also the mechanisms of the state – the police, the media, the bureaucracy and the judicial system – which enact horrific violence upon black women.
Lomas was not only a victim of interpersonal violence, she was a victim of state violence. She had been routinely criminalised throughout her life and was regularly surveilled by police, which again increased her vulnerability and made her a target for violence.
Feminicide also incorporates impunity, and a part of this impunity involves the refusal by the state to further interrogate the deaths and what led to them. Impunity involves the refusal, for example, of a coroner to investigate the role of the state in the deaths of black women.
The refusal of the Queensland coroner to conduct a coronial inquest into Lomas’s death reveals again what many black women know: it is not a place for truth-telling but rather a mechanism to alibi the state and its failures.
I’m not shocked because it’s what I’ve come to expect from the Queensland coroner’s court; a place which has largely refused to accept the role of systemic racist violence in the deaths of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women.
Over the past five years I’ve sat in on many inquests alongside black families and have seen the effect of this clearly. Black families don’t leave with justice but further heartache.
I’ve also witnessed the absence of gender and race and how it works against Aboriginal women and their families, because to make racism and race absent is to deny and deliberately conceal the truth of Aboriginal women’s experiences of violence. And if race is made absent, then the responsibility is placed back upon the black woman. When race is absent, the police are seen as justified in their responses, or their failures to respond. When race is absent, police are automatically believed over Aboriginal women and their families.
In her non-inquest findings, the coroner in Lomas’s case suggests it was her “mistrust” in services and police due to her Aboriginality that laid part of the foundation for her killing. That’s even though Lomas could not go to services or police, because every time she did, the violence exacerbated – and this is clearly shown in every interaction she had leading up to her death.
Instead of interrogating the role of the state in the death, the coroner claims these are just “missed opportunities” between government departments, language she uses several times. But these “missed opportunities” are as callous as the message the coroner is really sending: that there are no further lessons to be learned from Lomas’s death. This is foundational to feminicide: the idea that these deaths are inevitable.
I reject that wholeheartedly. Kardell Lomas and her baby should still be here. And her family have every right to fight for justice, both in the coroner’s court and beyond.
• Dr Amy McQuire is a Darumbal and South Sea Islander academic whose work looks at media representations of violence against Aboriginal women. She is a co-founder of The Disappeared Project
• Indigenous Australians can call 13YARN on 13 92 76 for information and crisis support. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is on 13 11 14 and the national family violence counselling service is on 1800 737 732. Other international helplines can be found via www.befrienders.org
