‘I just kind of toughed through it’: Annie and thousands of others face family violence alone

It’s only now, about seven years after she fled a violent home, that Annie King, 23, can concentrate on starting to heal. From her mid-teens, she was focused on survival.

Memories of family violence from as young as the age of five still re-emerge, “but they are quite blurry”. How it felt to be turned away as an adolescent by people she thought would help her get to safety is far fresher.

“I was subjected to and witnessed violence,” said King, who was living in regional Victoria. “I initially approached my school counsellor, who didn’t believe me, which was very upsetting.

“After that, I had a period of time when I didn’t tell anyone because I thought they wouldn’t believe me.”

She found and called a crisis centre through an online search when aged 15 or 16, but was told an adult needed to approach the service on her behalf.

“When you’re aged 14 to 18, you’re in between child protection and adult services, so there’s not much out there to support those young people in a lot of cases where the mum isn’t ready to get support yet,” said King, now the co-chair of Victoria’s Victim Survivors’ Advisory Council.

King got out of her violent home by dropping out of school, finding work and living as a farm hand through the pandemic. “I never really got a response from the [family violence] system or support from services, I kind of just toughed through it and did it myself,” she said.

Data from Equity Economics, commissioned by Victoria’s peak family violence body Safe and Equal, shows King is among about 3750 Victorians a year experiencing family violence who cannot get help from services, mainly because demand is so high.

In 2024-25, Victoria Police recorded more than 106,000 family violence incidents, a higher number than in any of the previous five years – but the Equity Economics analysis revealed 5000 existing family violence clients could not get the services they needed, “mainly accommodation”.

Jocelyn Bignold, chief executive of Victoria’s largest women-only family violence and homelessness organisation, McAuley Family Services, said of the findings: “The danger is real. We’ve been telling women, especially in Victoria, for a decade to come forward, and we will help you, and we can’t help everybody.

“There’s nothing more dangerous in a family violence context than a woman making a move to leave and then being thwarted and having to go back.”

The research, to be published on Saturday, found it takes more than a week for most Victorians – 85 per cent – to be assigned a case manager for help with safety measures such as intervention orders. The average wait for people in the “at risk” category is 12.5 days.

“When demand goes unmet, victim-survivors’ lives are at stake,” says the report, The Cost and Benefits of Fully Meeting Demand for Specialist Family Violence Services in Victoria.

Violence against women is again in the spotlight after four killings of girls and women in one week in July, including Vermont mother of two Lavanya Chappa, and 13-year-old Layla Jeffrey, who lived in regional Donald. A third Victorian woman, Brooke Timmins, was also killed last month.

Timmins, a 29-year-old mother of two, was found dead in her Clyde North home on July 27 and her partner, Jorden Turney, 32, has been charged with murdering his partner of seven years while their two young sons were at home.

Nationally, the latest woman killed died on Thursday night in Queensland. Julia Brunsdon, 23, was pregnant, and her 18 month-old daughter was in the home in outback Charleville, when she died in what police say was an apparent murder-suicide. Her partner, Michael Waltke, 45, was found dead at the property after a siege with police.

Safe and Equal chief executive Dr Joumanah El-Matrah said demand for help from family violence services had increased because of greater awareness that women did not need to remain in unsafe situations, but the delay in finding services could increase their safety risk.

The research found some women trying to get help gave up after failing to find it on the first attempt and returned to dangerous situations.

“I spent quite a few years working with [frontline family violence] services, what I’ve seen happening a lot is women being too afraid to leave because they don’t feel they have options sustainable into the future,” El-Matrah said.

That 45 per cent of women and girls seeking assistance for homelessness nominate family violence as the cause was “staggering”, she said. “I don’t think Australians accept that this is OK,” El-Matrah said.

“When people understand the scale of the problem, they’re often shocked. Safe housing can’t be treated as an optional extra, or just too big a problem for us to fix.”

Equity Economics estimates that fully meeting current demand for family violence support in Victoria would require the next state government to increase funding from an expected $300 million to $487 million in 2026-27.

El-Matrah also warned that comments by One Nation leader Pauline Hanson on July 22 that domestic violence is a “two-way street” and women “shouldn’t put up with it” (so should leave unsafe situations) falsely painted the victim as equally to blame as the abuser. Hanson’s comments, El-Matrah said, were dangerous.

“Telling a victim to ‘just leave’ shifts responsibility away from the perpetrator. Leaving is often the most dangerous time for victim-survivors,” she said. “This year alone nine women and girls have been killed by men in Victoria.”

Professor Kate Fitz-Gibbon, a Monash University academic in violence against women, said funding of services for women fleeing violence should match the scale of the harm.

“The community is right to be asking why, after decades of reviews, inquiries and reform agendas, we continue to see women killed in circumstances that are so tragically familiar,” she said.

“The answer is that the actions taken have not kept pace with the scale of the crisis we are seeking to address.”

A spokesman for the Victorian government said it had invested $4 billion since the state’s 2015 Royal Commission into Family Violence “to strengthen how we prevent and respond to family violence”, and the state had some of the nation’s strongest legal protections for survivors.

Annie King did not finish secondary school, but put herself through a diploma of community services and a graduate certificate in family violence, and now works with children and young people experiencing it.

She has also just been able to find free trauma-support services. “Recently, I have reached out to the therapeutic side of services to start working on recovery and long-term healing, and connected with a really incredible counsellor who has helped me so much,” she said.

“When those services are available, it makes such a huge difference to how the rest of people’s lives will turn out.”

If you or anyone you know needs support, you can contact the National Sexual Assault, Domestic and Family Violence Counselling Service on 1800RESPECT (1800 737 732), Lifeline 131 114, or Beyond Blue 1300 224 636.

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