When Caroline left her husband after years of emotional, financial and physical abuse, she thought she and her toddler were finally free.
But it was only the start of a new kind of trauma – the world of family law proceedings.
Ten years and $200,000 later, Caroline – who asked for her real name not to be used – finally secured orders that gave her full custody and meant that her daughter, now about to finish primary school, can decide if and when she wants contact with her father.
Caroline is, in some respects, a success story – a woman who left an abusive partner then fought for and secured protection for her child through the courts. But Caroline says the experience of navigating the family law system was “absolutely appalling”, causing her to use all her savings and accrue debt of more than $200,000 to pay legal fees – and it was deeply traumatic.
“It was like being a victim of family violence again,” she says.
Like most women in Australia, Caroline did not qualify for free legal assistance after she left her marriage. Legal Aid grants are available to only the lowest 8% of income earners, and community legal centres are also restricted in the number of women they can help. Last year they were able to assist 25,000 women but had to turn away an estimated 52,000.
After some initial advice and three sessions of lawyer-assisted mediation through Legal Aid, which she described as “futile – you can’t mediate where there’s not a level standing and one person has power over the other”, Caroline had to seek out private legal representation.
“You just start talking to people around you and asking, ‘Do you know anybody?’ and then you turn to the internet and you’re basically looking at profiles and just stabbing in the dark and saying, ‘Look, they speak to years of experience in this field, I just have to give them a go.’”
The costs were immediately huge.
“You pay for everything, you pay for the initial consultation,” she says. “You get billed by the 15-minute [increment]. It was ridiculous. I was paying, every month, bills between $1,000 to $2,000.”
Caroline believes that her ex-partner’s behaviour also drove up her legal costs, she says, by sending a barrage of messages and emails to her lawyer, who had to bill her for reading and responding to them.
“He would just send streams of messages, emails all the time, of non-important things,” Caroline says. “So you’d be continually being charged, you know, $150 here and $150 there.”
Caroline says her lawyer tried to minimise the harm of this behaviour, by batching the emails and reading them all in one go, to reduce the billable hours, and having a junior lawyer, with a lower hourly rate, read the messages. But the costs still added up.
“Or he wouldn’t prepare for legal appearances at court and so you get to court and they’d ask for an adjournment,” Caroline says of her former partner. “So, I’d have the lawyer’s appearance fees for that day and all the preparation I had done, and the leave that I had taken from work, all of those sorts of things. And then he wouldn’t be prepared and asked for an adjournment and so we have to go through it again and again.”
In some ways, Caroline was in a stronger position than a lot of women leaving an abusive relationship. She had a job and some savings, though these were quickly eaten up by legal fees. She took on extra work – “I’ve basically had to just work my guts out” – and turned to her family and friends for loans, though this has not been without its problems.
“It changes the nature of those relationships as well,” she says.
The costs escalated as her case approached its final hearing, which lasted for a week and involved her being on the stand for two days, something she describes as her “life’s worst experience”.
“I had a lawyer cross-examine me for two days,” she said. “Name-calling me, calling me a liar, laughing at me, yelling at me, the works … they replicated family violence. It was so not trauma-informed.”
Caroline says that in the lead-up to court appearances, she would spend all night working on the legal material, which she would pack away in boxes to try to hide from her daughter.
“I would have worked all day, would have to do all the night-time routine with her and then I’d pull it all out and I would work all night while she was in bed. You’re on the point of exhaustion and then you want things to appear as normal as possible for your child.”
Based on her experience in court she was “not confident at all that there was an understanding for what the whole experience had been like for my daughter”. After months of waiting, she received an interim order granting her full custody. She now has full orders in place.
“I knew, even though I wasn’t hopeful, that there would be a protective outcome, that I would have to one day be able to stand in front of her and say, ‘I did everything I could to try and make sure that you felt OK.’ Because the look of terror in her eyes at times, you never want to see that in your child’s eyes.”
• In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. If you or someone you know is affected by sexual assault, family or domestic violence, call 1800RESPECT on 1800 737 732 or visit www.1800RESPECT.org.au. In an emergency, call 000. International helplines can be found via www.befrienders.org
