There’s No Place Like Home Season Two Episode Five: Watched

INTRO: This series comes with a content note for anyone who has been through abuse or knows someone who has. Some of what you’ll hear in this podcast is distressing. Please check the show notes for phone numbers you can contact to receive confidential support.

In this series we will describe violence and abuse in different ways. Some people call it domestic violence, some family violence. We acknowledge that production took place on what always has been, and always will be, Aboriginal land.

KAREN BENTLEY: Intimate partners share a lot of information and they know a lot of information about each other. So it’s no wonder that somebody who’s got malintent will actually use whatever information they’ve got to try and access as much information about you as possible.

TARANG CHAWLA: My name is Tarang Chawla and my sister Niki was killed by her partner in 2015. I’m a writer, broadcaster and anti-violence activist. I’m also the host of There’s No Place Like Home. In this episode, we’re exploring technology facilitated abuse – where an abuser limits their partner’s access to the phone or internet, checks in on them constantly, surveils them, and expects them to always be available and responsive.

KAREN BENTLEY: The most common type of technology facilitated abuse in Australia, according to our survey of domestic and family violence frontline workers was abuse through messaging apps. 

TARANG CHAWLA: Karen Bentley is the CEO of Wesnet, and an expert in tech-facilitated abuse.  

KAREN BENTLEY: So either constantly messaging, like hundreds of messages a day demanding responses… right through to really abusive messages… through to making threats using messaging apps.

TARANG CHAWLA: Tech-facilitated abuse can be overt. Think threatening phone calls or constant messages. Or it can be covert – things you can’t see – where an abuser monitors their partner’s online activity, hacks their emails or tracks their location through apps and ‘find my phone’ services… or even sends threatening messages via online banking. When two people become romantically involved, they naturally share information about themselves and their lives. It’s a way of building intimacy.

KAREN BENTLEY: When you’re in a relationship, there is a desire to share. And that can lead on to things like sharing your locations or keeping tabs on each other. It might be that you show each other your text messages or messages that are coming in from other people. It may be that you share your passwords to accounts, your Netflix account, or something like that.

TARANG CHAWLA: Karen says a lot of this behaviour is really normal, but that abusers can also use the language of ‘sharing’ to push boundaries and collect information beyond what feels comfortable.

KAREN BENTLEY: There could be a point where it starts to be a bit sort of intrusive. And that’s not a very black and white thing. So it can happen very gradually.

TARANG CHAWLA: If your partner is asking to read messages that other people have sent you – and that you haven’t volunteered to share, that’s a behaviour worth asking questions about.

KAREN BENTLEY: When somebody else is starting to demand to see your communications, demanding your passwords, demanding for you to hand over the phone, so that they can see what you’ve been looking at on social media, what you’ve been posting, what other people are sending you then that is a red flag.

And that could be done in a very subtle way, where there’s no physical threat. But it could just be a bit of a, you know, ‘if you love me, then you’re going to show me this, what are you trying to hide.’

TARANG CHAWLA: Abusers may suggest sharing social media accounts, so that they can control and monitor their partner. Which brings me back to Hannah Clarke, who was killed by her former partner in 2020. You met Hannah’s mother, Sue Clarke, last episode.

SUE CLARKE: In the early days, he convinced her to have a joint Facebook page with him. Because they would have the same friends. They’d be doing the same posts. But again, that was to control who she could be friends with, who she could communicate with, on social media.

KAREN BENTLEY: When it turns into constant monitoring, when you feel like everywhere you go is watched, and you have to be checking in, or if you’re getting text messages saying ‘where are you right now? Are you with somebody else?’ or ‘are you where you say you are,’ you know, ‘prove to me that you are where you are.’ That might start out really innocently, but can then cross a line into something that’s more controlling, like you don’t necessarily feel free to do and be as you please.

TARANG CHAWLA: Tomas is a man who knows what it’s like to be under constant surveillance. More than a decade ago, Tomas started dating Jim – but those aren’t their real names. Jim had a gambling problem. He spent all their money, and told Tomas not to get the psychological support that he needed.

TOMAS: I’d started to see a psychologist about his gambling because I couldn’t understand how someone could blow thousands of dollars. And I’d get phone calls during the counselling from my ex partner now wondering how long I’d be, what am I saying, and the counsellor is like, ‘Oh, my God, this is like textbook, family violence’.

TARANG CHAWLA: Tracking is another form of tech-facilitated abuse. 

KAREN BENTLEY: There are lots of different ways that you can track where somebody is, be it, you know, because you’ve got Find My Friends or Find My iPhone turned on with your family.

TARANG CHAWLA: Karen says that tracking can be dangerous for people who have left a relationship but can also be used to stop someone from leaving. Sue says this is exactly what happened to her daughter Hannah.

SUE CLARKE: He had five or six phones hidden around the house to listen and monitor what she was doing at all times.

TARANG CHAWLA: Hannah’s children told Sue about other ways that their father was monitoring their mother’s movements.

SUE CLARKE: The kids would come over and they go, ‘daddy went through mum’s handbag again. And I’d say ‘well, you know, daddy shouldn’t do that. That’s naughty. And you shouldn’t go through other people’s things.’ There would be times that she wasn’t allowed to contact me. But Hannah was a mummy’s girl, she couldn’t go a day without talking. So she would make quick phone calls in the car. 

TARANG CHAWLA: Bianca* is a survivor you met in episode two. That also isn’t her real name. Her partner had already geographically isolated her, by moving the couple from a city to the small country town he grew up in. He then installed a program on her computer to monitor Bianca’s online movements. Bianca became further isolated; unable to safely communicate with her friends and family.

BIANCA: At home, I had very little privacy. My ex had placed a keylogger on my laptop.

TARANG CHAWLA: This computer program recorded every keystroke that Bianca made and sent the data directly to her partner.

BIANCA: I just kept wondering how he was finding out what I was telling my close friends over Facebook Messenger and other messaging apps. Initially, it actually made me think that maybe they were colluding with him. And that he was right, that they didn’t actually care about me, because clearly, they were violating the confidence that I had in them by going to him and telling him these things. 

TARANG CHAWLA: When it comes to tech-facilitated abuse, if you’re worried, and if you notice your computer, phone or tablet has started running slowly or the battery depletes more quickly, this can be caused by additional processes, such as malware and spyware, secretly running in the background.

BIANCA: I honestly didn’t even know that this Keylogger technology was even a thing until one day, my laptop just wasn’t working properly. And I Googled how to fix it. And I was taken through a series of steps to use the Task Manager function and find out what was running in the background. And I found a file that I couldn’t identify. And then I googled the file name, and found out what it was. And it was a keylogger. And then just the sense of guilt that I felt for mistrusting my friends.

TARANG CHAWLA: Karen Bentley says a lack of tech literacy amongst older generations is ripe for abuse.

KAREN BENTLEY: The younger generations are generally much more tech savvy. For older women in a relationship where there is technology being used, there might be a, you know, I’m in a relationship, he’s offered to take over and set up all the accounts and have control of all the technology in the house. It’s a bit like the finances, you know, sometimes, in a partnership, one partner will take over the finances and start to do most of the work around that. It can also happen in relationships around tech.

TARANG CHAWLA: Be especially alert to a new partner offering to set up accounts for you. This is most commonly a genuine act of care and support – but not always.

KAREN BENTLEY: It is a pretty common tactic that we see, which is that the abuser takes over control of the tech.

TARANG CHAWLA: Think about how transparent they are about what they’re installing. Are they teaching you how to use it? And how do they react if you don’t want to share your password with them? 

KAREN BENTLEY: It’s a very early part of the relationship, it might be a pattern of behaviour. An, ‘oh, don’t you worry about that, Ill take over that, I can set all that up for you, I’ll set up this account, I’ll set up that account.’ So they’ve got the password, they’ve got control to the email. That can happen, particularly for people who are less tech savvy, and who might feel a bit flummoxed by the new technology.

TARANG CHAWLA: Once Bianca knew her social media accounts were being monitored, she changed her online behaviour.

BIANCA: From then on, I guess, my social media was carefully curated, to present a certain picture of normality. To tell the world how wonderful my husband was. My husband used to crack jokes, interact with my friends that way, put memes on there that didn’t really convey what was going on at home.

Having to use social media in this way created a kind of effect of amplification of that isolation in a way of having people who love me, in reach, but also out of reach. I could see pictures of them and their families on Facebook and desperately wanted to connect. But it wasn’t as easy as clicking on the messenger icon and having an open conversation about anything, really, because I knew that nothing was private. 

TARANG CHAWLA: Social media platforms can often be used to shape and project a false narrative of ‘the perfect couple’. 

KAREN BENTLEY: There’s often a staging, or a presentation of a life or how things are going, which is very positive on social media. It is very possible to display on social media that everything looks very happy and very rosy.

TARANG CHAWLA: Tech-based abuse and surveillance may ramp up if a partner leaves and the perpetrator needs more creative ways to reach their victim. 

KAREN BENTLEY: Quite often, if there’s not even been any tech abuse before, what we have seen is that upon separation, once the abuser loses physical proximity to the victim, then the abuser starts to think about, ‘Well, how else can I get to them?’ 

TARANG CHAWLA: The New South Wales Domestic Violence Death Review Team found that 65 percent of women killed by a former partner between 2000 and 2014, had ended the relationship in the previous three months.

MOO BAULCH: We know when a relationship ends, often people go right, I don’t want to be connected to you through social media, or, you know, I’m going to change my phone number or I’m going to cut off these ways I’ve been connected to you we know that people who are abusive in relationships are always going to look for new ways of perpetuating that abuse. 

TARANG CHAWLA: Moo Baulch, a veteran frontline worker and the Chair of Our Watch, points out that separation is a time of great risk –  and a time when people ramp up their abuse. And this was certainly the case for Stacey.

STACEY: The technology-facilitated abuse skyrocketed after we broke up. He harassed me incessantly via any communication platform he could get his hands on. My phone would ding all day and all night with abusive texts, emails and social media messages. The content of the messages was obviously horrible but it was the constancy of them that was so unbearable. I felt like I couldn’t escape.

TARANG CHAWLA: In her 2014 research on technology facilitated stalking, Delanie Woodlock found that by stalking a person perpetrators create a sense of ‘omnipresence’ that ‘erodes [spatial] boundaries’ and makes victims feel it is impossible to escape their perpetrator.

STACEY: Probably the cruellest thing he ever did was threaten to publicise some deeply private information about me if I didn’t drop the IVO. When I didn’t comply with his ultimatum, he posted about it on social media and tagged me.

TARANG CHAWLA: An apprehended violence order, an AVO, or an intervention order, an IVO, which Stacey just mentioned, is a court-imposed protection order. What her ex did to attempt to get her to overturn it, is something called Doxing. It involves threatening to reveal someone’s identity, private information or personal details without their consent.

Here in Australia, we have a world leading body to hold perpetrators accountable. 

JULIE INMAN-GRANT: We’re the first online harms regulator.

TARANG CHAWLA: That was eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman-Grant.

JULIE INMAN-GRANT: We’re the first country that has a regulator like this – a programme called eSafety women which is really about training domestic violence frontline workers, whether they’re social workers or allied health workers or police, to look for and understand the signs of technology facilitated abuse, and how to help women experiencing that.

TARANG CHAWLA: Karen Bentley says that doxing is one of the many ways abuse can occur.

KAREN BENTLEY: So they might embarrass somebody deliberately using social media. And of course, social media has got this massive reach, hasn’t it? It’s one thing to be embarrassed by somebody at a party or in a small gathering. But it’s another thing to be embarrassed on social media where it might be to millions more people.

For LGBTQI people, it might be threatening to out them when they’re not ready to be outed, or for a Muslim woman who is caught in a photograph without her hijab on or that she’s unchaperoned with a male, any of those things can be used to shame and humiliate.

TARANG CHAWLA: An extreme form of doxing is when an abuser threatens to publicly share nude images of their partner.

KAREN BENTLEY: Sharing nude images can be part of the healthy relationship, but when those images are then shared without the consent of the person that they show…. we see a lot of that happen, where, particularly in domestic violence relationships, ‘If you leave me I will share, I will share those nudes that we took.’ We also see people being coerced into the nude images or into various other sexual activities that are recorded. 

TARANG CHAWLA: Both WESNET and the eSafety Commission have done a lot of work to not only stop people from sharing these images – but change how we refer to that behaviour – which has previously been labelled “revenge porn”. 

JULIE INMAN-GRANT: I’m not going to call it revenge porn – revenge for what? We don’t want to start using inherently victim blaming language. We should focus on the perpetrators who are perpetuating this distress – let’s call it what it is – image based abuse. 

TARANG CHAWLA: The commissioner says artificial intelligence is also presenting a worrying new frontier for image based abuse.

JULIE INMAN-GRANT: What we essentially mean by that is the non-consensual sharing and distribution of intimate images and videos. And this includes deep fakes, generated by AI, and we’ve just started to get some of our first, sadly, deep fake reports. All of these are a breach of the Online Safety Act.

In 2022 alone, we received close to 8000 image based abuse complaints. And under the Act, we can consider a range of removal and civil enforcement options when investigating image based abuse.

TARANG CHAWLA: The commission’s own research shows that men may share these images as a form of bonding.

KAREN BENTLEY: It has a particularly big impact on women, because there is a double standard we still hear this myth, which is, ‘if you don’t want to have your nudes shared, don’t take your nudes’.

But I think one in 10 young Australians who have had their images shared haven’t ever taken an image of themselves, and they’re still having nudes shared, because somebody else has taken a photo of them. And they may have taken that photo or image or video without their consent.

TARANG CHAWLA: When you factor in artificial intelligence creating photos that were never even taken in real life, the ramifications become even more widespread. Thankfully, the eSafety Commissioner has the power to help victim-survivors.

JULIE INMAN-GRANT: We know most of the people who come to us just want the imagery taken down. And the quicker we can get it down the more it relieves the distress of the victim survivor. And so we have about a 90% success rate in terms of getting all this content taken down – of content that’s exclusively hosted overseas.

TARANG CHAWLA: When an abuser realises their partner is about to leave – or when the relationships ends – they may also escalate monitoring behaviours to new levels.

This can include brazenly taking over their partner’s social media accounts and using that access to manipulate them and their life.

KAREN BENTLEY: It’s about things like ‘Well, what can I glean about you? You’re not with me anymore, but what are you doing on socials? Can I remember your Netflix password? Oh, and guess what, you’ve got the same password for every account you own. So I’m just going to use the Netflix password to, I know what your email address is. I know what your WhatsApp account is, I know what this is and just use them.

TARANG CHAWLA: This is what happened to Stacey after she left her former partner too.

STACEY: He digitally surveilled me, hacked into my emails, photoshopped obscenities onto my profile picture. He impersonated me by sending emails from my account. He even got into my browser to record a fake search history that supported his bogus accusations against me.

TARANG CHAWLA: This particular tactic is one of the more sophisticated and horrific forms of tech facilitated abuse. Julie Inman-Grant says as technology accelerates, so too does the sophistication of this abuse.

JULIE INMAN-GRANT: We’ve seen everything such as remote manipulation of home thermostats to heat a woman and her children out of the house by turning it up to 50 degrees. We’ve seen situations where a former partner has programmed the Smart TV so every time the TV’s turned on, there’s a menacing message that comes across. We’ve seen drones surveilling safe houses.

TARANG CHAWLA: As cars become more technologically advanced, Julie says that they’re also being used as a tool for abuse.

JULIE INMAN-GRANT: People can programme the cars to stall the moment a woman drives more than a kilometre or a specified area outside of her home.

I think the worst case we’d seen was someone who put a former partner’s address and said that she was soliciting sex so that people actually showed up at her door, which obviously presented some really scary physical potential harms.

So as loT devices and our refrigerators and our toasters and everything becomes connected and interconnected and can be traced, we need these IoT manufacturers to be thinking about how they engineer out misuse and make sure that it’s safe, secure, and it’s private, even if you’re talking about Alexa or Siri, because that can capture a lot of private information and location based information about a person. So that kind of menacing, harassing, quite interpersonal online abuse has a cumulative impact on a woman.

TARANG CHAWLA:  CommBank Group Executive of Human Resources Sian Lewis says there’s also another form of tech abuse. It was only discovered three years ago and is becoming more common.

It’s called abuse in transaction descriptions.

SIAN LEWIS: We discovered through one of our own customers who was experiencing domestic and family violence, that intimate partner was sending her abusive messages using very small transaction amounts, and using the messaging field to send abuse. 

TARANG CHAWLA: Moo Baulch says this is an example of just how creative people perpetrating abuse are.

MOO BAULCH: We’ve really only started to scratch the tip of the surface, in terms of tech based abuse. Most of the banks now in Australia have responses to, to abuse in transaction descriptions. And that’s a piece of work that has come from just somebody spotting it one day, which was quite incredible.

But as quickly as those sorts of channels of communication are cut off, people will find other ways of doing it, unfortunately.

TARANG CHAWLA: Sian Lewis adds that it’s also an example of how difficult it is to police tech-based abuse.

SIAN LEWIS : And so what we initially did in 2020 was to block abusive messages, which helped to an extent.

Unfortunately, a phrase like I’m watching you is not necessarily going to appear on an abusive language block, and could be very innocent. You might send to your teenage child, ‘I’m sending you the 50 bucks, but I’m watching you, spend it carefully.’

TARANG CHAWLA: As this area is constantly evolving, the avenues for abuse are ever-changing and everyone is potentially at risk. 

KAREN BENTLEY: Intimate partners share a lot of information and they know a lot of information about each other…

So it’s no wonder that somebody who’s got malintent will actually use whatever information they’ve got to try and access as much information about you as possible. So, you know, we’re all we’re all open to that.

TARANG CHAWLA: If you are concerned about safety within your relationship, or you’re considering leaving, there are some precautions you can take.

Of course, if you’re worried about a friend or family member who might be in a violent relationship, consider sharing these safety recommendations.

They’ve been directly adapted from the eSafety Commission.

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Disable location services on all your devices and avoid ‘checking in’ to places and venues.

Update your settings so that others can’t tag you in photos or videos.

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TARANG CHAWLA: Enable Bluetooth only when needed and ‘remove’ paired devices when you are not using them. On Apple devices, turn off Airdrop unless you’re actively using it.

Tech companies are also beginning to build safety into their products and apps to ensure that it’s harder to use them to commit abuse. It’s a concept called Safety By Design.

JULIE INMAN-GRANT: So Safety by Design goes back more than a decade. For me when I was working at Microsoft, I was the Head of Global Privacy and Safety. And I said, ‘Hey, we’re not doing anything here around preventing personal harm’.

The only way we’re going to really make the online world safer is if we are building in and baking in the safety protections at the front end. We’re assessing the risks and building the protections rather than retrofitting them after the damage has been done. 

TARANG CHAWLA: Some of the biggest tech companies are embedding this in their products.

KAREN BENTLEY: One of the things that we’ve seen recently with Apple on the iPhone, for example, is a new feature called safety check. So if you are planning on leaving or you have left, you can actually activate this thing called safety check. And you can either go through bit by bit to say, right, these people have got access to all of these bits of my iPhone info, you know, my location, or sharing my music or you can just go safety check, bang, I want everybody out right now, turn it all off, because I’m disappearing off the grid for a little bit.

So those types of features we’re starting to see built into technology platforms, as they realise that cyber safety isn’t just for a nameless, faceless, scamming fisher based somewhere offshore. It’s an intimate partner who’s got enormous amounts of information that can sort of give them access to information.

TARANG CHAWLA: If you believe that you are being monitored or stalked through technology, Karen says to trust your instincts and document your experiences. But only if you feel safe to do so. This will provide a record of what is happening for the future.

KAREN BENTLEY: Document what’s happening. And really importantly with that is how it makes you feel because that’s actually part of the legislation, which is that you feel scared or you feel intimidated or you feel threatened. And so just recording that might be just for yourself, it might be so that you can just sort of trace what is happening. Is it getting worse? Or did that really happen? Particularly if there’s gaslighting and stuff like that.

TARANG CHAWLA: WESNET has a stalking log which you can use to document what’s happening to you. There are also apps, like Arc, that help you record this information – which we will put in our show notes – to assist in any future legal proceedings.

KAREN BENTLEY: So, you know, I went out tonight, and I came back, and there were 50 text messages saying, Where was I? So just noting that not all of them will necessarily be illegal. But most states and territories in Australia have got cyber stalking laws which talk about a pattern of behaviour. Maybe you take some screenshots, if it’s safe for you to do so, but there will be circumstances for some people where it’s actually not safe to take the evidence.

TARANG CHAWLA: Hannah Clarke would forward abusive text messages that her killer sent her to her mother for safe keeping.

SUE CLARKE: She was very good at it, if there were nasty text messages or things from him, she would send them to me, so that she could then delete them, but there would be a record kept somewhere. So if you have someone you can send things like that, to safely send them away, so that there is somebody who has a record of it.

If you can keep it safely. It’s the best thing you can have, if you’ve got a diary, Hannah kept it at our house.

TARANG CHAWLA: Hannah also had a secret second phone.

SUE CLARKE: So she could do phone calls and do things without him being aware. But again, you have to be able to hide that and can be quite dangerous if you get caught with that. So it’s a matter of if you can do it safely.

KAREN BENTLEY: Technology is a two-edged sword for perpetrators. Yes, it might give them lots of extra tools to misuse for abuse. But it also leads a digital trail. And increasingly, we’re seeing police and courts starting to use those bits of digital evidence as a way to hold abusers accountable. 

TARANG CHAWLA: If you’re in a relationship and suspect technology facilitated abuse, please know that being unsure is perfectly normal.

KAREN BENTLEY: Sometimes it’s really hard to know whether or not it’s normal, it’s a very grey area, particularly when there’s no physical violence. If there’s just emotional control or psychological abuse, or that kind of power and control tactics, sometimes it’s really hard to know. And particularly if someone is gaslighting you, saying, ‘it’s all in your head’ or ‘I’m only doing this because I love you’.

TARANG CHAWLA: Nonetheless, there are some questions you can ask yourself – which we have again adapted from the eSafety Commission…

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Does your partner text you all day and expect an immediate response? 

Do they send messages asking what you are doing, who you are with and where you are? 

Do they want access to your passwords, emails or social media accounts?

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Phone dinging noise once

Do they stalk your social media to see what you post, like or comment on? 

Do they encourage you to delete your social media or insist on having a joint account? 

Do they buy you a new phone or computer and insist that they set up for you?

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Do they seem to know information from your private conversations, messages or emails? 

Do they pressure you to send intimate pictures to them or threaten to share intimate images without your consent?

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Do they control your finances or restrict access to your bank cards and online accounts? 

These are all red flags for technology facilitated abuse.

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TARANG CHAWLA: If you feel like you’re able to do so safely and without being monitored, you can also find support online – on websites like eSafety.

JULIE INMAN-GRANT: We also offer webinars and seminars on how women can protect themselves from technology facilitated abuse. The best thing that you can do, if you think this is happening is just take a look on the website. We’ve had a lot of people say, ‘Oh, I didn’t actually realise what was happening to me, you know, I thought I was going crazy, or I thought I was forgetting things’. But this is actually a thing that people do on a fairly regular basis. And what we try and do on the website is show specific ways that people can protect themselves online. 

TARANG CHAWLA: Anya*, who you met in the last episode, used the internet to investigate whether her partner was abusing her.

ANYA*: These threads say that if you were spending enough time coming up with various questions to ask Reddit about your dating life, about whether your partner who’s potentially sociopathic, narcissistic, has a personality disorder or behaves in controlling and abusive ways. If you think that question, then you likely have hit on something that is happening.

It might not be physical, it might be the beginning stages, but every form I’ve read. Every chat I’ve had with girlfriends, everyone I’ve spoken to, everyone who’s lived this and experienced it says the same thing. If you’re asking the question, it’s because there’s something wrong with the behaviour.

TARANG CHAWLA: If someone you love is in a relationship where technology facilitated abuse is occurring, Bianca says you need to carefully identify spaces where your loved one can talk openly.

BIANCA: Don’t assume that their phone or any other technology is safe.

If you’re worried about the person, approach them in a place, and at a time where it is safe for them to disclose or speak more freely about what’s happening. They may still not want to talk about it, they may still believe that the safest course of action for them is to say nothing.

TARANG CHAWLA: It took six months of planning for Hannah Clarke to leave her killer and move in with her parents.

LLOYD CLARKE: We had to start buying stuff without him getting too suspicious.

We had it all ready for her. And then every time she went to leave, he’d find out. So he would do a surprise, ‘Oh, we’re going to go away for the weekend.’ And you know, take her away that weekend.

TARANG CHAWLA: That was when they all realised Hannah’s killer had multiple phones around the house to record and monitor her.

LLOYD CLARKE: Hannah got to a stage, she’d go out into the backyard to talk to Sue when she went to talk to her. So there were six months in the planning for her to actually break away.

TARANG: When she was able to escape, Hannah left her car in a McDonald’s car park in case the vehicle was being tracked.

LLOYD CLARKE: She walked out with three garbage bags of clothes and belongings. Told the kids to grab a couple of toys each. That was it, in and out.

It doesn’t just happen straightaway, but you’ve got to be patient… when you’re ready, we’re ready to take you, come straight in.

KAREN BENTLEY: We need people to be sticking out when it’s not okay, we have to have that bystander intervention.

BIANCA: I don’t think it hurts to make it known that you’re there for them. And that you can tell that there’s something going on, that you don’t know what it is, you’re open to hearing it, you’re not going to run away if they do tell you…

And that if they wanted an ally, if they wanted someone to go with them to ask for help, or to make a phone call, or to hold their hand in any number of circumstances, you know, they might be in the future, that you’re there. 

TARANG CHAWLA: Next week on There’s No Place Like Home we’ll explore financial abuse.

ALEX BUNTON: It was my birthday. I woke up and he drained my bank account. And he wasn’t with me at the time. I went home. And I just woke up that morning and thought this is the moment that I need to call the police and not even second guess it.

TARANG CHAWLA: See you then.

OUTRO: There’s No Place Like Home is a Future Women podcast in collaboration with our proud partner, Commonwealth Bank, who are committed to helping end financial abuse through CommBank Next Chapter. 

No matter who you bank with, if you are worried about your finances because of domestic and family violence, you can contact CommBank’s Next Chapter Team. 

Contact the team on 1800 222 387, within Australia or visit commbank.com.au/nextchapter. If you need help or advice, please check the shownotes for phone numbers for confidential support.

If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate and review. It will help these important stories to reach more people’s ears. For more information about There’s No Place Like Home, or to join the movement, please head to futurewomen.com.

This episode was produced by Jamila Rizvi, Emily Brooks, Mel Fulton, Sally Spicer and Tarang Chawla. Editing by Bad Producer Productions. Artwork by Patti Andrews.