In regional Australia, many domestic violence victims have ‘nowhere to go’

Grace Holton may only be 17 years old, but she is determined to make a difference for Australians affected by domestic violence. 

Grace’s mother Jessica Kupsch was violently killed by her partner in 2012.

Matthew Patrick Tunks is serving a 23-year jail sentence for murdering Ms Kupsch, his de-facto partner, in a hotel room in Launceston in Tasmania’s north.

Grace and her three siblings now live with their grandmother and legal guardian Donna Kupsch who said she had become a strong advocate for them.

“That’s all I can do,” Ms Kupsch said.

Ms Kupsch is also helping domestic violence survivors across the country find help and is glad awareness of the issue is growing.

“Whenever we have a Red Rose Day [raising awareness of domestic or family violence related deaths] for my daughter more and more people are coming and that’s awesome because they’ve had enough,” Donna Kupsch said.

“There’s more people in numbers now than there used to be who are saying ‘no, this is not on’.”

Ms Kupsch will approach women herself to check if they are OK, something which she did recently when she saw a woman with a black eye in a supermarket.

“I said ‘don’t go back’, she said ‘nope, I’m not this time’.

“I said ‘how many times have you left’, she said ‘five’. It’s usually around seven that they will hurt you or kill you.”

She also wants others to step up. 

“Just think of yourself in that position … you only hope that somebody will come to you and ask you ‘do you need help, are you okay?’ That’s all you can do.”

Domestic violence support services stretched in regions

According to federal government figures, 23 per cent of women in regional Australia experience intimate partner violence, compared to 15 per cent in the city.

In Launceston, where the Donna Kupsch’s family lives, Tasmania Police were called out to 900 domestic violence incidents last year — the highest number of any local government area in the state.

Support services say that is only part of the story.

Their data shows about 70 per cent of victims who have recently sought support went straight to support services, rather than police, for help.

Ms Kupsch said it was a positive sign that police call-out numbers had increased because it meant more victims were seeking support, but she said more work was needed.

“There needs to be a domestic violence crew [with the police] who have been there and gone through it, not someone who has read it out of a text book, because no-one wants to talk to them,” Ms Kupsch said.

Grace said girls her age were not immune from the issue and that housing shortages were causing problems.

“There’s a lot of people out there now with problems with boys and stuff, and what happens if they need somewhere to go and they can’t?”

‘Our hands are tied’: Victims have nowhere to go

Crisis accommodation shelters in most of regional Australia are struggling to meet demand.

Rachael Robertson, a solicitor for the Western NSW Community Legal Service in Dubbo, said women were being forced to relocate “hundreds of kilometres away” or stay in violent households, as there were not enough long-term accommodation options.

“Housing is by far the biggest issue that we face out here and one of the reasons why women don’t leave a violent relationship [is] because of the uncertainty of housing,” Ms Robertson said.

“Our victims are saying: ‘Our hands are tied. We can’t leave.’

“I’ve had a number of clients say I’d rather stay there with him because he’s only going to hurt me but at least the kids will still have a roof over their head, and they have somewhere to go home to.

“There needs to be some specialist housing that’s emergency or crisis accommodation that’s [for] more than a couple of nights.”

The Salvation Army’s Western Australia domestic violence service regional manager Kristy Staples said its Karratha Women’s Refuge had turned away 80 per cent of victims needing support in recent months.

Ms Staples said the refuge could only accommodate four women and Western Australia’s housing crisis had made the situation worse. 

“We have less than 1 per cent rental availability at the moment and it’s a bidding war,” she said. 

“For a lot of women it’s actually easier to stay in the relationship in the home, especially if there’s children involved, than to uproot them and go where?”

Regional and rural shelters face problems with confidentiality

Mary Knowles, Mayor of Tasmania’s Northern Midlands, is a domestic violence survivor.

Cr Knowles fled an abusive relationship in regional Victoria in the 1980s and moved to Tasmania for a quieter life, but the domestic violence situation in her municipality has worsened.

According to Tasmania Police, the Northern Midlands has had a 58 per cent rise in domestic violence call outs since 2017. The neighbouring Southern Midlands had a 116 per cent increase in call outs in the same period.

Cr Knowles has long called for central Tasmania to have its own women’s refuge shelter, but police and some support service have raised concerns about how a rural shelter could remain confidential.

She has now called for Neighbourhood Houses to be established in all regional council municipalities to provide better support to domestic violence victims.

“We did think that Neighbourhood Houses are a really good safe opportunity for rural women in particular to be able to access services that they might need or information that they might need in how to get to be somewhere safer,” Cr Knowles said.

Australian Institute of Criminology research manager Hayley Boxhall said the situation in regional and rural areas was unique.

“We also need to think of alternatives outside of the criminal justice system because, particularly when we’re thinking about regional centres, individuals are maybe unwilling to go to the police because of close community ties, shame and privacy concerns,” Ms Boxall said.

“So for those women, how do we provide them with a service that doesn’t necessarily require them to make a public report?”

‘We’ve all got a responsibility to change the culture’

Discussions in the community about domestic and sexual violence is encouraging more victims to seek help, Tasmania’s Women’s Legal Service chief executive Yvette Cehtel said.

Ms Cehtel said the service had seen a 50 per cent increase in clients seeking support in the past year.

“We are all seeing more clients and more demand for our services but not everybody feels comfortable in reaching out to the police,” Ms Cehtel said.

“I think it’s really important that we respect that.

“For us it’s about empowering our clients, so that means sitting with women and helping them make the best decision about how the matter proceeds.”

The service has also started to trial new initiatives, including creating podcasts with freelance journalists and hosting free community workshops, to help the public understand what domestic violence actually looks like and how bystanders could call it out.

“People are still very fixated on what physical or sexual violence looks like and I think we’ve still got a long way to go in talking about the other aspects,” Ms Cehtel said.

“By that I mean the spiritual and cultural, the emotional, the verbal, the financial and social isolation.

“We’ve all got a responsibility to change the culture and the conversation, whether that’s … out on the street or at home, and we can all do that — that’s the only way out culture’s going to change.”