Trigger warning for family violence.
Over the course of my career as a journalist, I’ve made many requests under the Official Information Act. Last year, I wrote to Child, Youth and Family Services and did one on myself – to mark the tenth anniversary of the day I walked out of my ‘family home’, at the age of 14, after years of abuse from my mother.
She’d had me young – she was only 18 when I was conceived in 1988. My father was out of the picture before I was born. His parents were a part of my life until around the time of my third birthday – then, without much warning, they weren’t. My mother’s partner moved in with us around the time I turned nine.
When I left, I barely weighed 40kg. I was 14, and hardly a small kid.The abuse that had featured for most of my life peaked with the onset of my adolescence, aged 10. As I grew bigger and more rebellious and asked more questions about my father’s whereabouts, my mother’s violent outbursts escalated in both severity and frequency. I was regularly beaten, and often went without food for days at a time, save for a couple of Weet-Bix in the morning.
Domestic violence: Breaking the cycle Photo: Illustration: Giselle Clarkson
I’d been carried upstairs in a chokehold; made to sit in freezing bathwater for hours; forced to strip naked and teased about my appearance. Several times, my mother and her partner tried to prise confessions out of me using a terrifying technique I later learned was called waterboarding. I’d had enough of the torture I’d suffered at her hands, and would rather have died than spent another night under her roof.
Last year, I requested my file from CYFS – partly to make sure I had all the facts about my upbringing straight, and to jog my memory for things I might have forgotten. But the main reason was I had decided to share my story with friends, colleagues and associates on Facebook, one decade on from the day I walked out of that house – and I wanted an official document to back it up.
Usually when you make an OIA request, the government sends you as little information as possible within the scope of your inquiry. But the week before that tenth anniversary, I received every single note on my file, every photocopied document. It was several hundred pages long and took a day to read through.
The first record was of when I was four years old, and turned up to kindergarten with adult bite marks all over my body. To me, that in itself wasn’t particularly shocking – while the physical abuse was awful, the way she manipulated me had far longer-lasting effects. And reading successive social workers’ dry, factual accounts of their interactions with my mother, I saw she did it with them, too.
While the physical abuse was awful, the way she manipulated me had far longer-lasting effects. And she did it with social workers, too
Of that first incident, she told CYFS she had a written contract with the person responsible that said they’d leave me alone if she never revealed their identity. Given her predilection for biting, I don’t believe this.
When I was a teenager trying to get CYFS to help me, she spun a range of stories. Some – like that I was a “wayward youth” who wagged school, shoplifted, did drugs and disrespected her – were true (though by no means justified the abuse). Others weren’t.
She once told me that if I ran away from home again, she would stop eating until I came back or she died – whichever came first. When I did run away again, I spent two traumatic weeks trying to choose between returning home and subjecting myself to more extreme violence, or letting her die.
Seeing all of this as an adult, written down and catalogued in a file, was eye-opening. For years, I’d been somewhat ambivalent towards my mother, much to the confusion of those who knew the abuse and trauma I’d suffered at her hand. But seeing the way she twisted the system to keep me her prisoner for a decade longer than I should have been made me hate her.
Incredibly, the social worker I had for the final 18 months I spent in her care saw through her manipulation. My case notes are peppered with her personal observations – I’m told they’re not meant to do that – saying how she felt my mother was manipulative, a liar, not to be trusted. I truly believe it was her gut instinct that saved me in the end.
Domestic violence: Breaking the cycle Photo: Illustration: Giselle Clarkson
What I read steeled my resolve to post my story on Facebook. It was a difficult decision – I’m a private person, and most of my friends didn’t know. But it is a story I felt people needed to read.
It is too easy to dismiss child abuse as something that only happens within certain parts of society. I worried that people wouldn’t believe me. I’m a white, successful male, the son of a white middle-class woman – not exactly the poster boy for child abuse.
But what I went through as a child affects how I see the world today. It’s made me an intensely private person. It makes it tough to believe that somebody ever really considers me a true friend. It means I always have a nagging self-doubt – even as I write this, there’s a voice there saying, “Nobody will believe you”.
My mother has never been charged or convicted of a crime. I was given the option two days after entering CYFS care at 14 when a full police forensic report was conducted. But I didn’t feel able to really even think about potentially putting the person who raised me in prison, so I declined. It was only recently I found out this was still an option, but it’s expensive and I don’t believe it would achieve much, other than dredge up horrific memories. (This is why I am unable to name my mother, as much I would like to.)
I last spoke to her when I was 16. I’m 26 now. Sometimes when I go back to my hometown I see her. She might be sitting in a car at the traffic lights, or walking into a store on the other side of the road. But whenever, wherever it happens – even though I’m now a fully-grown man – I’m gripped by terror.
I don’t go weak at the knees; my eyes don’t well with tears. The easiest way to describe the feeling is this: you know when you go to cross the road sometimes, and all of a sudden you realise there’s a car coming and it might hit you? The deer-in-the-headlights feeling where you freeze, and it seems like you can feel every hair on your body stand on end, and you want to move but can’t for a couple of seconds? Yeah, it’s that.
Even now, I sometimes feel guilty for knowing that if my mother died, I would not go to her funeral, no matter the circumstances. Then I remember what she put me through, and how the fear I felt in my childhood still affects my life every day, more than ten years later, when we’re nearly one thousand kilometres apart, and think I’m perfectly justified.
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