Using technology to empower domestic violence victims

Tuesday 29 October 2013 5:40PM (view full episode)

Those living in regional centres can often face real challenges in seeking legal assistance to escape abusive marriages or to simply take out apprehended violence orders against dangerous partners. Now a pilot scheme is using internet-based video technology to provide much needed legal services for those in abusive relationships.

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Now to family violence. Providing women with practical legal advice on how to make themselves and their children safe is a challenge everywhere, but the obstacles are definitely greater in regional and rural Australia. The Women's Legal Service in Victoria has come up with a new way to reach out to women in need. To talk about the obstacles and the new ways of providing meaningful legal advice I spoke with Elisa Whittaker from the Victorian Women's Legal Service. Also with Bonnie Renou, she's a lawyer with the Loddon Campaspe Community Legal Centre in Bendigo. And also Ayfer, a family violence worker based in regional Victoria. I asked Ayfer what are some of the difficulties faced by women who need legal advice?

Ayfer: One of the main things is isolation, and with that there's a whole issue with being able to access legal services. There might be only one or two firms in the country, and often that they might have a conflict of interest just to go to those law firms.

Damien Carrick: They might act for the father or the husband?

Ayfer: That's right. Also if there is financial abuse she might not have access to any money, so that causes lots of problems as well for her.

Damien Carrick: Lawyer Bonnie Renou, traditionally how difficult is it to give or provide women like this with effective legal advice and effective legal representation?

Bonnie Renou: Well, an issue with the rural courts is that they don't normally have the same sort of resources as you do in city or suburban courts, so that would be support workers for the woman or remote witness facilities or even a safe space to wait for your matter.

Damien Carrick: You're saying that often when you are providing advice to people it's often in, what, the corridor of the courthouse and you are going to be seeing the person, the male member of the family maybe in the other corner of the room. These are very stressful, intimate premises, aren't they.

Bonnie Renou: Yes, it can be, and none of the courts in our area have dedicated security. So we just hope something bad doesn't happen before the department addresses this problem. But yes, one of the courts I go to, Kyneton, it only has the courtroom itself, so there's no rooms for duty lawyers to see their clients and to discuss what has been going on confidentially. So at that court, if it's raining we sit under a tree or you squeeze into the courtroom, or some of my colleagues have just taken the client to their car. It's a real problem for intervention order applicants because obviously if you've got this victim and the perpetrator squished into the same court or on the same patch of grass outside the court it can be very intimidating for them.

So we had one instance recently were a perpetrator was following our lawyer and the client, trying to stop her from getting legal advice because obviously he didn't want an order, so that was a real problem. That lawyer had to go and take the client back to her car on that occasion.

Damien Carrick: Lawyer Elisa Whittaker, the Women's Legal Service of Victoria has been using technology in a very innovative, very interesting way to reach out to the women that Ayfer describes who are out there on the farms or in the small towns. What are you doing?

Elisa Whittaker: Over the last 18 months we've been involved in a pilot project taking legal advice to women in rural regional Victoria, and the northern suburbs of Melbourne via Skype. So we are running a virtual legal practice for women who have experienced family violence using Skype technology and using the internet via things like Google calendar to be able to organise appointments and what have you. So we've been working with nine family violence and community health agencies around that region of Victoria, and we stretch from Wodonga to the northern suburbs of Melbourne, and three mornings a week we are providing legal advice in a confidential, private, safe setting to these women.

Damien Carrick: Traditionally you or other lawyers would have had to jump into a car, maybe gone to a family violence shelter or a women's shelter and seen if anybody was there, and they might or ther might not be, for very good reasons, whereas now you can liaise with workers like Ayfer, and as long as she has a laptop you can cover the field far more effectively and talk to a far greater number of people.

Elisa Whittaker: Exactly, and in any one morning we might be dealing with people from…you know, one from Wodonga, one from Shepparton, one from the northern suburbs of Melbourne, so it means that we can, in a very cost-effective and flexible way, offer legal advice safely to women in these situations.

Damien Carrick: And you can even get out to, say, their homes if a family violence worker visits them in their home.

Elisa Whittaker: Exactly, we've had more situations where it's been more convenient for the client to have the worker take the laptop out to wherever they are. So long as there is internet connection we can really provide the advice anywhere, so wherever it is going to be most safe and most convenient for the client. Yes, it has even been done in a hospital bed.

Damien Carrick: Tell me about that case.

Elisa Whittaker: Well, it was a woman who had experienced some physical violence which resulted in hospitalisation, there were a number of issues, as there always are…

Damien Carrick: Very urgent issues, I would have thought.

Elisa Whittaker: Urgent issues, yes. And traditionally it's pretty difficult to actually get advice in that situation, and this enables us to do that.

Damien Carrick: I think it's so interesting that you have the family violence worker who is there, who's familiar with the client, who is familiar with the community, plus your legal expertise which is able to be piped in from a downtown office in Melbourne to make sure that women actually do get access. It's very interesting.

Elisa Whittaker: It's a very important part of the project actually. It's a model that has been developed by Women's Legal Service Victoria in conjunction with Women's Health in Goulburn North East, and Women's Health In the North. And the interdisciplinary nature of it is pivotal because it means that the woman is getting the support from the family violence specialist, but also the legal input.

Damien Carrick: Ayfer, tell me about some of your clients or some of the women that you work with.

Ayfer: Sure. Often it's a very daunting time anyway. Women are at the crossroads of many paths in their lives that they need to make choices about, and we know that when women are leaving an abusive relationship or when she is at that stage where she is thinking about leaving, that's the most dangerous period for her. So certainly in terms of her safety, the use of Skype legal service has been really, really powerful. We've been able to go to women's houses. I do outreach work, so I can take the computer into the woman's house, I can take it into another agency if need be. However, once again, it really depends on if we've got some facilities developed to use that, so that can be a bit of a question sometimes as well.

Damien Carrick: So you're limited a bit by the technology and the network.

Ayfer: Absolutely, so we're kind of ruled by that at this stage. But it's certainly something I can see being used a lot more efficiently in the future as well.

Damien Carrick: Presumably I would have thought that you are talking about people in very high-stress situations, and the lawyer is talking to you down a computer, it's a very important I would have thought to have you there at the other end with the woman, also taking it on board, what the advice is, and then maybe being able to reinforce and make sure that whatever steps are recommended enable the woman to make those steps or help her do them.

Ayfer: That's a really good point. I think having us there as workers is a really empowering part of our work, and she sometimes is not really taking in all the information. So definitely we as workers are gaining so much from the educational perspective and we are learning about the law as well. We are able to offer her…reinforce some of the things that she has heard from the lawyer and also work through and navigate the system with her so that she is not feeling so isolated. And isolation is a huge problem, as I mentioned, for rural women, and this is certainly something that we can use in our toolkits as workers, definitely.

Damien Carrick: There is in Victoria especially a big increase in demand for services around family violence and domestic violence, and that's substantially due to the greater seriousness with which the police give to these very important issues. But that also means that you have an increased demand but not necessarily increased resources to deal with this issue. What's the increase in demand, Elisa?

Elisa Whittaker: Well, I think our service, Women's Legal Service, has experienced something like a 30% increase in the number of clients accessing our services in relation to family violence since the Family Violence Protection Act came in in 2008, so that's pretty massive. Victoria-wide I think there has been a 41.3% increase in the number of intervention orders over the last three years, and over the last year it is 21.6% increase in the number of family violence incidents, taking us to 60,000 family violence incidents in the last 12 months, and 49,000 criminal charges coming out of that.

Damien Carrick: 49,000!

Elisa Whittaker: Out of family violence incidents, yes. So that's the extent of the problem. So at the moment we are looking at something like 40,500 intervention orders per year. It's a huge increase in the number of matters that we are all seeing, which is indicative I think that people are having now some confidence in the system, that they can actually come forward with their problems. I don't think they are problems that didn't exist before, I think actually people are now having the confidence to actually do something about it.

Damien Carrick: A wonderful welcome step, but I'm wondering, Bonnie Renou, how does that increased number of people going through the system impact on your ability to actually help them effectively?

Bonnie Renou: Yes, so we are seeing longer court lists, which means that some regions are adapting to this by having more days where they are sitting and hearing those matters, but that hasn't happened for us yet. So we've just seen the lists get longer, and on occasion the magistrates haven't been able to mention everything on the list, which can be a real concern if women have got immediate safety concerns and that delay can be really distressing for them. But we've just seen that either they have to sit for longer or the matters are dealt with quicker. So sometimes that means that they are not dealt with as thoroughly as we might hope.

Damien Carrick: How so?

Bonnie Renou: Well, we might want to raise some sort of issue and some magistrates respond to the pressure of the lists by saying 'this is a matter for the contest', or perhaps putting of issues that we might want addressed at that point, but because of that pressure they feel they can't give every person time.

Damien Carrick: You work for a community legal centre, so you offer your services free to women, but of course community legal centres, they can't help everybody. Legal Aid is the other avenue for free legal advice or free legal representation. Has the resources supplied by Legal Aid into this area increased in recent times as the demand has increased?

Bonnie Renou: We haven't had any increases, as I was saying, we've applied to the Legal Services Board to meet the need that we saw. So even though we are seeing these dramatic increases in people attending court we haven't been able to necessarily meet the need that we've seen. So that has been a problem.

Damien Carrick: And the same with Legal Aid, they are not filling in either?

Bonnie Renou: No, and in fact they have been reducing the help that they have been able to offer. With the funding cuts they've had to restrict the people that they can help. So we've seen that to be a problem, and the concern we have is that women will then be too frightened to go ahead with their application, which is a very stressful process in any case, but particularly if you don't have that legal help to carry you through it.

Damien Carrick: And can I ask you, you have seen women who have just said, 'This is all too hard, I can't get the legal help I need'?

Bonnie Renou: Yes, we've had women say, 'I'm so glad that your service is here now because I've been here before and I've decided to leave because I wasn't able to get a lawyer.' So if the man has arrived at court first, for example, they are the one who gets to see Legal Aid and the woman can't be helped in that instance. So, for example, at Swan Hill Court there wasn't anyone going before we came along for a little while, and the family violence workers there were telling us that they were finding it very hard to make sure their women got help where a man might be able to arrive earlier because the woman's taking the children to school, for example.

Damien Carrick: You're saying in terms of…there's this concept of a duty lawyer and they are a court provided lawyer who is at the court to provide people with help, and you're saying its first come, first served, and if both parties don't have a lawyer and the man gets there first, he gets access to that representation, the woman doesn't.

Bonnie Renou: Right. So Legal Aid are at all the courts, they are able to help out on a first come, first served basis. So obviously the committee legal centre wanted to also provide assistance to applicants in particular, so we've been trying to get to more courts and we have been able to, but we can't reach all the courts. So it's just the Legal Aid duty lawyer who's present.

Damien Carrick: And is your service specifically aimed at applicants, women generally?

Bonnie Renou: It is generally, yes.

Damien Carrick: Rural communities sometimes experience extraordinary disruption and trauma in the form of natural disasters, and I understand that that here in Victoria was the catalyst for the program that you've been telling us about, the new technology being used. Tell me about that.

Elisa Whittaker: Deb Parkinson is a researcher based with Women's Health In the North and Women's Health in Goulburn North East, and following the Black Saturday bushfires she did some research interviewing women following the bushfires, and particularly in the context of family violence, and found that there was a considerable spike in family violence, which is possibly the result of increased stress and crisis and what have you.

She spoke to one particular woman who discussed the difficulties she had following separation after the fires, and she was receiving death threats and dealing with a very abusive and controlling partner. And because of the lack of services around and the cost of services around, she was unable to access free legal advice. And it was from that example, that woman that she met, that she thought that perhaps something could be done to bridge that gap or break down that barrier. And together with Women's Legal Service we've thought that Skype technology might be a good way to go.

Damien Carrick: Obviously each bushfire is terrible in its own way, and of course the toll was terrible in Victoria, but New South Wales is now facing similar bushfire trauma, and presumably there will be an impact on family life.

Elisa Whittaker: Particularly families that have been experiencing difficulty prior. I think a crisis situation like that can be…

Ayfer: Certainly I think that there's usually pre-existing issues, and we know that family violence often starts to eventuate long before any incident like that has occurred. Certainly it accelerates whatever is going to come out from that relationship, and things do get worse in violent relationships, and maybe that's the catalyst, that whole natural disaster, for things to come out in the open, so to say. And I guess that's where the increase in family violence may have come about.

Damien Carrick: And that stresses the need for all sorts of different supports to enable women and children to be safe. I'm wondering, in conclusion, Bonnie, how useful has been the new use of technology in terms of giving agency to women to actually get to the next stage, which is the steps of the courthouse?

Bonnie Renou: In finding out what their options are?

Damien Carrick: Yes. How has Elisa Whittaker's program helped people get to where they see you?

Bonnie Renou: I suppose if women know what their legal options are then they are much more likely to be able to take advantage of what's on offer to them, whereas if they don't have such easy access to legal advice they might be a bit intimidated by the court system or…

Damien Carrick: They might just not front up in the first place.

Bonnie Renou: Right.

Damien Carrick: Thank you all for speaking to the Law Report: Elisa Whittaker from the Women's Legal Service in Melbourne; Bonnie Renou, a lawyer with the Loddon Campaspe Community Legal Service based in Bendigo; and Ayfer, a family violence worker based in regional Victoria. Thank you all for speaking to the Law Report.

And the Victorian Women's Legal Service is currently seeking funding to continue its Skype service once the 18-month pilot finishes in November.

That's the Law Report for this week. Thanks to producer Erica Vowles, and audio engineer this week Brendan O'Neill. Do visit us online where you can find podcasts, audio on demand, and program transcripts. I'm Damien Carrick, thanks for your company.


Family violence worker based in regional Victoria
Bonnie Renou
Lawyer with the Lodden Campaspe Community Legal Centre in Bendigo
Elisa Whittaker
Lawyer with the Victorian Women's Legal Service


Damien Carrick
Erica Vowles

Comments (2)

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  • Francisco :

    31 Oct 2013 7:01:25am

    Given the Eric Snowden revelations, would it not be better to develop a dedicated computer system that rather than to use Skype?

      • Michaell Bartlett :

        16 Dec 2013 11:44:32pm

        Yes, most probably!

        Though new to Skype I am sure it's general use is to communicate within families and with friends, not for issues of a more personal and legal nature like violence in the home, no business of anyone but the perpetrator, the victims and the police. In these and similar private matters it would be invasive and inappropriate.

        The Eric Snowden revelations suggest that privacy could easily be blown open to the detriment of the individual and of Society generally.

        As a technically savvy person and a lover of justice for all I would want us to develop a dedicated computer system rather than use Skype or other social media.