“I was in my 20s and living at home when I entered into an arranged marriage. There were signs of his controlling nature right from the beginning – endless phone calls, morning, noon and night to ask where I was and what I was doing – but I mistook the ‘love bombing’ [a manipulative psychological tactic where a person bombards another with excessive attention to create dependency and exert control over the victim-survivor] for love and concern. It was only when he started telling me that he didn’t want me to talk to any of the guys in my engineering course that I started noticing that perhaps something wasn’t quite right.
In situations like these, you begin questioning yourself: ‘Is that the way I really heard it?’ That’s the thing about coercive control. It doesn’t start with a bang; it’s slow and insidious and they do it in a way where you think they’re behaving the way they are because they care about you. It takes a while to notice that he’s isolated you from your friends and family by creating situations where he makes you choose sides and even though you don’t agree with him, it becomes easier to avoid a fight. I felt exhausted all the time.
The abuse in my marriage escalated over time and showed itself in myriad ways, like him insisting we spend my salary while he saved his in a separate account I couldn’t see or touch. He also tracked every item I bought, often reprimanding me if he disagreed with how much I spent on lunch. Or he’d throw objects in my general direction to ‘keep me in line’.
I think my mind and body instinctively knew it was an abusive relationship but the good moments were so great that I’d cling to them. In the end, it took about seven years to understand that I had to get myself out of the marriage and two more before I took our child, called the police and ran to my parents for help.
I’m an educated woman but I still found the family violence landscape difficult to navigate once I’d left the marriage. Although I was able to move back to our family home while my perpetrator lived elsewhere, I experienced financial hardship during this period and accessed a range of support services, including the inTouch multicultural Centre Against Family Violence, Safe Steps Family Violence Response Centre and the Eastern Domestic Violence Service. Unfortunately, my court cases were long and three months is usually all you receive in support services.
I worked with my bank under financial hardship provisions to manage my mortgage, including reducing or pausing payments and cancelling my credit card to prevent further debt accumulation. I was also able to access hardship support, like interest relief and partial debt waivers. A one-off Escaping Family Violence payment of $5000 helped stabilise my immediate living and family circumstances.
Today, I work to educate agencies on the changes we can make in the family violence field. One of the first things I did was help redesign assistance forms to make them easier for victim-survivors to understand. I do it to give back after all the help I’ve received from these organisations but it’s also a way for me to keep the conversation going. Prevention is always better than cure and although there’s plenty of discourse about what good and bad relationships look like, the more we discuss ‘beige flags’ in a relationship – those colourless areas that could be either quirks or the first signs of control – the stronger the position future generations will be in.”