“Invisible victims”: Why Conor was forced to live in an unsafe home

When Conor Pall was just a boy he split his time between two homes. Only one of them was safe. So he did what most children in his position would do: he asked for help.

This was the first time the system let him down – but it wouldn’t be the last.

The day before, Conor had been hurt in a violent incident with a man he describes only as The Shadow. Conor broke down at school and revealed his circumstances to his teachers. Their response was to contact authorities, who called the man who had hurt him and shared details of Conor’s disclosure.

“They had called the perpetrator and quizzed him about what I had said and he denied everything. And from there on in, the violence significantly escalated to the point where I was fearful for my life,” said Pall on FW’s There’s No Place Like Home podcast.

Conor did not want to live with The Shadow, which he made clear to those around him. But, as a child, he was not allowed to make that call. Eventually, after another incident, he was finally removed from The Shadow’s care. 

“That was the point where we got an intervention order put in place and drew a line in the sand, and said enough is enough,” he recalled. “But of course, the violence and the abuse and the control didn’t stop there.”

For more than a year, Conor and his mother pleaded their case in the magistrates court to have a family violence order put in place. As was his legal right, the perpetrator contested that order. The final years of Pall’s childhood were pockmarked by court appearances that felt, to him, like a deliberate weaponisation of the legal systems designed to protect victims.

“I think perpetrators of violence seek custody of children living with them as a direct intimidation of the mother.”

Angela Lynch, the Executive Officer of the Queensland Sexual Assault Network, is a lawyer who has spent nearly three decades supporting women impacted by domestic and family violence or sexual assault. She says the type of systems abuse Conor describes is a way for perpetrators who no longer have physical access to a victim to continue to harm them.

“Perpetrators of violence are highly litigious, and will use that court to engage in systems abuse. And the data backs us up on that,” she said. “They make complaints to her employer, professional bodies, they make false complaints to police, to immigration, to child support, they don’t pay their child support, or they make it really difficult, they drag things out.”

In Conor’s case, The Shadow travelled to every lawyer within four hours of their regional town and consulted with them about the intervention order. In doing so, he made it impossible for Conor’s mother to engage their services because their previous meeting created a conflict of interest. This is a recognised tactic called ‘conflicting out’.

“That wasn’t recognised by the court as an act of coercive control or family violence,” said Conor. Angela Lynch adds that custody disputes are another way perpetrators harm both adult and child victim-survivors.

“I think perpetrators of violence seek custody of children living with them as a direct intimidation of the mother,” she said. “And many perpetrators deliberately try to harm the relationship between the mother and the children through their manipulation and abuse.”

This was certainly true for Conor, who feels a strong sense of injustice about the way he was treated by courts and the service system. Conor, now in his early twenties, is an advocate for systems to do more to consider the needs and rights of children and young people who are victims in their own right. 

“I just think we do a disservice to ourselves when we only talk about [adult victim-survivors] and forget about and ignore the invisible victims, who are overwhelmingly children and young people.”