Each day the Legal Aid lawyers rostered on to run the New South Wales domestic violence hotline log on to find 60 women waiting to speak to them.
The lawyers are part of Legal Aid NSW’s Domestic Violence Unit (DVU), a team of 70 lawyers, case workers, financial counsellors and others who, along with the teams in other states, make up the engine room of the legal response to family violence across Australia.
Each year Legal Aid duty lawyers take calls and visits from tens of thousands of women, giving them initial advice about legal matters and connecting them with further services. And the need for legal support is huge and growing. Calls to the hotlines have increased nationally by 36% over the last two years, while duty lawyer services grew by 61%.
“We start the day with 60 people waiting to speak to us and we don’t know who that first person we’re going to call is,” says Anna Baltins, the acting director of domestic and family violence at Legal Aid NSW.
“It might be someone who has had their child retained” – that is, the other parent has refused to return the child – “and we need to file an urgent application to get that child back. Or the other party’s got the passport to take that child overseas. We don’t know, maybe they need an ADVO or they need to vary the ADVO, they need to come and talk to us about their housing. And so we just don’t know what we’re going to deal with that day.”
Rather than calling, people with family violence matters sometimes just walk into the court seeking help. At the Parramatta federal circuit and family court of Australia, these people are sent to level one – women to the right to the DVU and men to the left to the Early Intervention Unit. Men go to the EIU regardless of whether they are perpetrators, victims or family members affected by domestic violence.
People often don’t seek help from Legal Aid as they believe they are not entitled to it because their former partner has Legal Aid representation, but Baltins says these teams are totally separate and have a firewall between them in terms of staffing and information.
In the DVU wing, two lawyers are sitting at desks in interview rooms talking to women who have come in to discuss their matters. The rooms have toys and colouring-in books because women are often accompanied by children, and coded locks on the doors – not to protect women and court staff from violent ex-partners but, Baltins says, with something of a wry look, to protect the computers.
Forced to self-represent
Anyone can access initial advice from the DVU but not everyone – not even close to everyone – gets free legal support. Legal Aid, which is federally funded, provides 40,000 grants related to family law each year. Data from the family and federal courts show 80% of family law matters have a risk of domestic violence.
Only the lowest 8% of income earners in the country are eligible for a grant of legal aid, which gives them representation throughout their family law matter. Women who are not eligible can seek help from women’s legal centres, which are also federally funded. In the past year they saw 25,000 women and had to turn away 52,000.
Women who have been unable to access free legal assistance have told Guardian Australia they have racked up more than $200,000 in legal fees, have signed parenting agreements they were warned by lawyers were “unfair” or have been forced to represent themselves in court.
“I didn’t really have any access to any money,” said Karla (not her real name). Yet she did not qualify for Legal Aid during a custody dispute with her ex-partner.
“So then I had to self-represent. [It was] horrific, it was the most, terrifying thing in the world,” she said of the court process. “Like I could barely speak in there.”
Her former partner, who she said was financially and emotionally abusive during their relationship, had his legal fees paid for by his wealthy family.
“I self-represented for two years and I couldn’t handle it any more. So I gave him everything on his terms.”
According to an independent report, National Legal Aid requires an additional $317m annually to meet the needs for family and civil law assistance, including for domestic violence services.Legal aid received an additional $10.8m in last week’s budget.
“The DVU do an amazing job,” says Katherine McKernan, the executive director of National Legal Aid. “And they could do so much more if we were resourced appropriately. … To be fair to this current government, this has been a long time of under resourcing.”
McKernan says the sector is looking forward to the release of the National Legal Aid Partnership review report, a huge piece of research that assesses the state of legal access across the country and the funding gap.
“We’re really looking forward to working with the attorney general on the recommendations in that report. It’s the one opportunity in quite a long time to really look at this issue.”
‘There are always more women seeking advice’
Back in Parramatta, upstairs at a long table in a court conference room, Melanie Alexander, a senior DVU solicitor, explains a case from her 10 years at Legal Aid that has stayed with her.
Via the duty service, she met a client with significant physical injuries. Alexander represented her in family court, obtained orders that kept her and her child safe, and then got orders for the sale of property and division of assets.
“That client has stuck with me for a long time, she’s a client who was then able to go on and lead a very fulfilling life as a result of – I probably shouldn’t say as a result of my work – but I was one part of the team.”
But that kind of outcome also brings the worst part of the work into sharp relief.
“The hardest part is knowing there are always more women seeking advice. So, we may have 50 or 60 people waiting for a phone call from our service and I might have spoken to 10 people that day, but when I come back tomorrow, there’ll still be a whole lot more people,” she says.
“You can see you are making a change and helping the individual person that you’re speaking to, but you know that there’s another person that’s also going through something similar … and that can feel at times like there’s a never-ending list of people that are seeking that advice.”
But she and Baltins want to make sure women know that if they call, they will get help.
“We don’t turn anyone away,” Baltins repeats, with slight variations, more than a dozen times over the course of the morning.
Alexander says: “The message is: call. Pick up the phone or come in and see us and you will get help.”
In Australia, the national family violence counselling service is on 1800 737 732. In the UK, call the national domestic abuse helpline on 0808 2000 247, or visit Women’s Aid. In the US, the domestic violence hotline is 1-800-799-SAFE (7233). Other international helplines may be found via www.befrienders.org
