There’s No Place Like Home Season Two Episode Two: Isolation

INTRO: This series comes with a content note – some of what you’ll hear is distressing. Please check the show notes for phone numbers you can contact to receive confidential support.

In this series abuse perpetrated by an intimate partner is described as “family violence”, “domestic abuse” or “domestic violence”. We acknowledge that production took place on what always has been, and always will be, Aboriginal land. 

MICHAL MORRIS: We can’t pick and choose when we fall in love. And then when we give that power of where we live and how we live to somebody else, that can be abused, and be a form of coercive control.

TARANG CHAWLA: My name is Tarang Chawla and my sister Nikita was killed by her former partner in 2015. I’m a writer, lawyer and anti-violence advocate. I’m also the host of There’s No Place Like Home.

MOO BAULCH: Isolation is probably the most common thing that we see in abusive relationships.

TARANG CHAWLA: Moo Baulch is the Chair of Our Watch and an advisor to CommBank’s Next Chapter, a program committed to ending financial abuse in the context of domestic and family violence. Moo is also a frontline worker who has been working in the sector for decades.

MOO BAULCH: …Coercive control is really that insidious behaviour, which often just gradually chips away at somebody’s sense of self, their ability to make decisions, their ability to feel as if they’ve been in control of their lives.

TARANG CHAWLA: Isolation occurs when an abusive partner inserts themselves between the victim and the outside world – whether that’s psychologically, physically, spiritually, culturally, or financially.

MOO BAULCH: It might be doing things like picking fights with friends or family members. It might be within a queer community setting, for example, saying I don’t like it when we go out to parties or social events because you flirt with other people, or, I don’t like the idea that those people are putting in your head. Within a religious or cultural setting, it might be saying, How can you believe all of that stuff that you’ve been told within that institution?

That might be a very gradual thing, a very slow kind of undermining of those relationships, or it might be absolutely explosive: “I’m not going to be in the same room as your mum anymore.”

TARANG CHAWLA: Isolation undermines a person’s autonomy and self-worth. It shrinks their world down, stripping them of independence, and avenues for support.

In turn, this makes them more dependent on their perpetrator and more vulnerable to manipulation and control.

MOO BAULCH: Isolation is the thing that keeps people there and has them living in fear for a really long period of time. It really embeds those messages if you’re being told that you’re worthless, and you’re stupid, and nobody else is going to want you and no one’s going to believe you 

TARANG CHAWLA: We’ve all witnessed or been party to the “honeymoon phase” of a new romance. When a couple become so caught up in the thrill of one another that they shut themselves away from the outside world. Isolation can look and feel rather similar. 

Elisabeth Shaw, CEO of Relationships Australia New South Wales says that the warning signs arise when instead of wanting to enter your world, a new partner tries to shrink it.

ELISABETH SHAW: Seeing your partner with others is a really great way to start to check if you want to be with them yourself. One of the ways you do know that the relationship is going to work out for you – just in the most ordinary of times – is how you all fit together. You know, do they generally fit into your social circle?

TARANG CHAWLA: Alex Bunton is a professional basketballer who met her partner – who we will call Lucas* – at the height of her sporting career. While Alex had just won a World Cup silver medal, she was also vulnerable. She’d been through a breakup and also multiple knee surgeries. She was finding herself again and also worried about the future. 

ALEX BUNTON: He swooped in and kind of made the world seem like it was a better place for me. And I was completely taken from the moment that he wanted to ask me out for coffee. It felt like a relationship that should have taken a couple of months to form, happened within weeks. And I was moving in with him.  I was changing my life completely to be with him.  

TARANG CHAWLA: Alex had moved to Sydney not long before she met her partner, so didn’t have many friends in the city. She was extremely close with her family – who lived in Canberra – but slowly he discouraged her from going home to visit them.

ALEX BUNTON: He didn’t want me to talk to them. He convinced me that I didn’t need my family. And if I ever had anything to say about them, he would make me feel bad that I was saying anything about them. I didn’t want to let them know what was happening. I always considered myself to be independent and a strong woman and have my own voice. But slowly it turned into I had no voice.

TARANG CHAWLA: Bianca* is a writer and an avid reader. That’s also not her real name. While we can’t tell you too much, she’s passionate about justice and her professional life is centred around helping others. It’s been a rather long time now, but she was once in love with a man who hurt her. For legal reasons, we’ll call him Simon*. 

BIANCA*: He would repeatedly tell me that it was him and I against the world.

TARANG CHAWLA: At the beginning of a relationship, pseudo-caring comments like ‘it’s us against the world’ might seem romantic; and comments like ‘that friend isn’t good for you’ might seem like your new partner cares. But Elisabeth Shaw says that what they are actually trying to do is inflame difficult situations and weaken your connections to your support network, so that you are more dependent on them. 

At the beginning of the relationship, Bianca* noticed her partner was reluctant to let her have friends over. And when people did visit, he was aloof, which would create an awkward tension.

BIANCA*: He insisted that we move after he had become increasingly paranoid and upset about the time that I was spending with my friends and family, and he often complained about the fact that I spent more time with them than I did with him. And it just wasn’t true. 

TARANG CHAWLA: They moved to the small town he grew up in, where she knew no one, and no one knew her. Bianca* was cut off from her friends and prevented from making new ones. She was also recovering from an eating disorder – which made her more vulnerable.

BIANCA*: That had seen me hospitalised and very unwell. And I was moved away from the health systems that were keeping me afloat, the friends and family that were helping me. He made himself the single most important person in my life.

TARANG CHAWLA: Research confirms that people with a disability, chronic illness or a mental health condition are generally more vulnerable to abuse.

BIANCA: Disability and illness more broadly just amplifies your vulnerability to abuse…
If you think about a person not living with impairments or disabilities, and that their world is narrowed, and their options and their space for action is narrowed as a result of abuse in and of itself, when you add disability or illness on top of that, the vulnerability is amplified exponentially. 

The abuse is often so carefully tailored around people’s particular fragilities, and disabilities and insecurities…

My eating disorder was just such a source of vulnerability. For another person, it might be something entirely different and so the tactics of abuse are tailored so differently – so understanding that is a really really tricky thing.

TARANG CHAWLA: Research also repeatedly tells us that isolation is exacerbated in rural and regional areas due to the geographical remoteness, service limitations and cultural factors.

 Victims can be reluctant to seek help when the police and the relevant services know the perpetrator. They can also fear their story will become more widely known in their community.

BIANCA: I was never allowed to have anyone attend our home… He’d repeatedly respond to requests like that by saying things like, ‘this is my home too’. Or ‘I’m tired, and I don’t wanna have to deal with some stranger in my space.’ Or ‘you hardly know these people. It’s not like they’re real friends.’ So they never eventuated. I was never actually able to have those friends visit me at home. 

I think in the nine years that we lived in that home, I was allowed to have visitors on three occasions that I can remember. My home was not a place where my friends were welcome.

TARANG CHAWLA: Limiting how often someone can see their family and friends is a common isolation tactic.

MOO BAULCH: Really gradually or rapidly breaking off all of those different types of external relationships with people on the outside, who might be the check and balance, the voice of reason, or they might be just that actual connection with the outside world.

TARANG CHAWLA: Over time, covert forms of isolation can become overt. Seemingly innocuous text messages become brazen demands. ‘Who were you talking to?’ becomes ‘Don’t use your phone.’ ‘Where have you been?’ becomes ‘Do NOT leave the house.’ In Bianca’s case, her husband’s aloofness escalated into cruelty.

BIANCA: I remember an occasion when friend and her husband were travelling around Australia in their caravan. They turned up at our home while I was still at work and she was trying to enlist my ex’s help to surprise me. He just told them to get off our property. It wasn’t okay to surprise us like that. And I apologised to her and made up excuses for him: ‘You know, he’s not been feeling well, he’s not being himself lately’, or, you know, just tried to make light of it and minimise the situation.

TARANG CHAWLA: Elisabeth Shaw says that when you’re dating, and getting to know a new partner, you should observe how they interact with the people you love – and also how they talk about your friends and family in private.

ELISABETH SHAW: If, after the event, they start to critique and talk against them… So they might have only met them once and not have enough to go on… When they start to say, ‘Are these really good friends?’ or ‘I didn’t really like the way they treated you’ that, again, could sound lovely and supportive of you. But it also could be the beginning of starting to plant seeds, that really the best friend you’re going to have is this new person, and that you should be a bit suspicious of your other friends.

TARANG CHAWLA: We all experience periods of difficulty with friends and family; where relationships become strained and tensions are high. Elisabeth says that perpetrators take advantage of these moments. Fanning flames of doubt about your relationships with others, hoping to exacerbate the problem, not help you resolve it.

ELISABETH SHAW: If you were to take them to your family and you say, ‘Well, my sister and I have never really got on’, instead of actually working out how you could get on, if they came away saying, ‘Well, no wonder. I saw your sister have all sorts of digs at you that you didn’t even seem to notice. I think it’s worse than you thought.’ That sort of thing sounds loyal, sounds like it’s in your interest, but actually is going to cause more trouble in the family.

It’s painted as something that ‘I’m only here for you, I’m speaking in your interests’, but your interests are actually to get on with the people in your life. And an emotionally mature person would come into your life trying to help you with your goals. So that if you do have trouble with your family, you’d want a partner to be sympathetic and supportive. You know, that’s sad for you, how would you like me to manage that? What can I do? How can I help? It isn’t well let me validate the trouble and embellish it.

 TARANG CHAWLA: Aish moved to Australia for love a number of years ago. Aish and the man who would go on to abuse her, Manu, went to neighbouring schools overseas. Her marriage was arranged by her family and she moved to Australia after the wedding to live with her husband.

This left her far away from the people who cared about her most, and her husband stopped her from forming new friendships.

AISH: I knew no one here. I barely left the house. I had no purpose. My thoughts would wander off to how incredible it would have been if I was home. If I was with my parents, with my dogs, with my neighbours with all the fun and the food, and the people and the community.

TARANG CHAWLA: Manu systematically cut Aish off from her country, family and culture. He limited her contact with people in Australia by telling her how dangerous the country was, warning her not to leave the house. She was told it was too unsafe to even go for a run.

 MICHAL MORRIS: If you’re a migrant or refugee woman, you’re relying on your partner to explain our culture, to explain the systems and processes of how we do things and why we do things. And that gives a perpetrator – someone who abuses your trust – an opportunity to be manipulative and to demonstrate family violence by withholding critical information by not allowing you to have the truth to make decisions and empower yourself in your life.

TARANG CHAWLA: That was Michal Morris, CEO of InTouch, a domestic and family violence service that works with migrant and refugee communities.  She says a person’s visa status can be weaponised against them. 

MICHAL MORRIS: We can’t pick and choose when we fall in love. And then when we give that power of where we live and how we live to somebody else, that can be abused, and be a form of coercive control. Someone can sponsor you one day. And if you don’t do what they say they can take away that sponsorship, and then you are left here illegally.

TARANG CHAWLA: When she first arrived in Australia, Aish was unable to work because of visa restrictions. But when her spousal visa was processed, she told her husband that she wanted to find a job. Manu disagreed. 

AISH: ‘But love, why do you need the money? We’re living in this pretty incredible house. I’m driving you around in this luxury car, you have everything you need. Why do you need to work?’ There was always these conversations about gratefulness. Like why am I not being grateful about everything that I have, and why do I keep pushing for work or volunteering? 

TARANG CHAWLA: Isolation occurs under a pretext of kindness with pseudo-caring comments like ‘you don’t need to work, I’ll take care of you’. But unemployment creates a financial power imbalance between a victim and their partner, as well as a barrier to leaving.

AISH: After a year I started realising, ‘Oh my gosh, I have all of these brilliant ideas and an education to back me up. It’s going to waste.’ So I wanted to volunteer and that’s when things started getting really bad for me.

 TARANG CHAWLA: Economic isolation tactics can present themselves in different ways. Without access to money, a victim has limited autonomy and independence. Even if they are working, they might have their salary paid into an account they don’t control.

Perpetrators can also use violence or undermining behaviours to stop their partner from going to work, such as causing bruises that can’t be hidden, or hiding car keys or uniforms. Aish says that looking back, she suspects her perpetrator was drugging her. 

AISH: Every time I had an interview or a volunteering opportunity I would miss it. Because I would sleep all the way to two o’clock or three o’clock in the afternoon, and wake up feeling completely groggy.

He would have woken me up the previous night, very sweetly, put the pillow behind my back, sat me up in the middle of the night while I was asleep. And then he tells me, ‘Ah, love, here you go, here’s your chai latte. I heard your stomach growl while you were sleeping, and I didn’t want you to continue sleeping while you were hungry. It took about five years to work that out.

TARANG CHAWLA: Aish says that often she’d sleep all day. And she’d struggle to get basic things like cooking or cleaning done, and she didn’t know why. 

AISH: He’d be so lovely on the phone, and he’ll tell me, sweetheart, that’s totally okay. But I didn’t know until the relationship ended, that he was actually assassinating my character to everyone back home and my family member here saying, ‘She barely cooks. She sleeps all day. She doesn’t do anything about finding work or looking for opportunities.’ 

TARANG CHAWLA: By this point Aish’s partner had also become physically abusive, and her family didn’t know. People from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds are generally less likely than members of other groups to have access to appropriate support. Language, social, cultural and religious differences create additional barriers – barriers that mainstream family violence services often don’t accommodate. 

MICHAL MORRIS: Shame and stigma is such a powerful form of control… Community is important to us all. And to lose community through shame or stigma of acknowledging what’s going on cripples too many people particularly when your behaviours are going to impact your family back home.

One of the really debilitating things that can happen is that you are ashamed and embarrassed of what your life is. It’s nothing like you expected. And you think about a lot of migrant refugee women who have come here for the relationship, because they believe this is where their future is. 

TARANG CHAWLA: Alex Bunton had a successful career and public profile when she was in a violent relationship. She says the success from her basketball career only compounded her shame.

 ALEX BUNTON: I just wanted everything to be okay. I was in the public eye so I didn’t want people to see me in this failed relationship or a DV relationship. And at that time, I wasn’t even thinking that it was a DV relationship. But that continued on for almost a year.

TARANG CHAWLA: Alex’s partner broke down her sense of self, isolated her from her support network and encouraged her to retire.

When Alex was pregnant, the abuse became physical, which is sadly, not unusual. Research shows that pregnant people are at greater risk of domestic and family violence. Alex said that it took her several attempts to leave.

ALEX BUNTON: I remember one time wanting to leave. And I started walking away. And I thought, as I was walking, I have nowhere to go. Who am I going to go to? Like get in my car and drive three hours? But I knew that I couldn’t do that. I didn’t have my keys. And I was thinking, ‘Where do I go? What do I do? ‘And he came after me and pulled me by my hair. And he said the same words that were running through my head. He’s like, ‘where are you gonna go?’

TARANG CHAWLA: Bianca ended up having children with Simon. During this time, she was constantly monitored, surveilled, gaslit and physically and emotionally abused.

Her workplace was her only lifeline. When people weren’t allowed to visit her at home, and her phone was monitored, it also became a rare safe space for people to reach out to her.

One day, Bianca’s close friend showed up at her work. She had noticed that things weren’t quite right and gave Bianca $1000 in cash – telling Bianca to leave it in her filing cabinet at work, just in case.

BIANCA: Little actions like that one, that just indicate the severity of the situation that you’re in, or just give you that image of ‘I’m taking this very seriously, I care about you, you’re important enough for me to put myself out to say and do this thing.’ Those are very powerful messages to hear even when you’re not quite ready to hear it.

I never used the money. I never actually used any money from her at all. But I knew that she was there because of this action that she had taken, which was her way of letting me know that she cared.

TARANG CHAWLA: Aish, on the other hand, didn’t have a workplace or a local support network to lean on.

After her husband left, he cut off access to power and water, signed the lease into her name without telling her, and revoked her spousal visa. She was devastated and desolate. She also felt a sense of shame in letting her family down. It wasn’t until she connected with two women he had previously dated and married that her outlook changed.

AISH: When I heard these two women talk about those things that had happened, it was so horrific to realise that it’s exactly the same things… And that’s when I realised, This isn’t okay. And talking to those two people is what helped a lot. When I kept blaming myself, when I heard them blaming themselves was when I could see, oh, my gosh, why are they blaming themselves about it?

TARANG CHAWLA: It was when Alex Bunton’s partner drained their bank account on her birthday, that she left for good. When Opal Mae was born, she reconnected with her parents who helped Alex raise her daughter.

 Alex was advised to lie low, stay off social media and avoid the public spotlight after leaving. But in her case, this only exacerbated her shame. Telling her story was a way to get her power back. Now, Alex has found her voice, she’s returned to basketball and initiated a domestic and family violence awareness round for her team, the UC Capitals.

ALEX BUNTON: I have my daughter, and I want to be a good example for her. I was like, ‘There’s no way I can’t say something. There’s no way I can’t use my basketball platform.’ I was like, this is not just about me anymore. So my confidence in my ability to talk about what I went through came from other people.

TARANG CHAWLA: The antidote to isolation is community and connections. It was relationships outside the emotional and physical violence in their homes that helped the people you’ve met in this episode, escape and heal.

Moo Baulch says some of the crucial work frontline services do for victim-survivors after they are out of the initial crisis phase is to encourage that person to reconnect with old loved ones. 

MOO BAULCH: Who were those people in your life, before all of this happened? Who were your two or three key people that you went to? You know, they loved you, and they laughed with you, and they cried with you. No matter what was going on, they didn’t judge you.

TARANG CHAWLA: These relationships don’t just help people to heal, but also make it more difficult for a perpetrator to isolate them in the first place. 

MICHAL MORRIS: Where we go to seek help is through our friends and our family, where we learn that you can get help for family violence is our friends and our family.

TARANG CHAWLA: When you’re in the early stages of dating, Elisabeth Shaw encourages you to consciously maintain those relationships. She also suggests creating internal signposts to measure how your new relationship is really going.

ELISABETH SHAW: Okay, well, we’ve now been dating for three months. Am I actually feeling better about my life and better about the relationships that I have? Or worse? The things that I worried about three months ago? Are they improving or not? Not just in relation to your partner, but your life generally?

TARANG CHAWLA: Whether that is at the one, two or three month mark, when you reach that signpost ask yourself those important evaluative comments. 

ELISABETH SHAW: And if you say, ‘Well, actually, now I think about it, for three months I haven’t seen my friends and I’ve seen my family less often. And they’re starting to complain, they haven’t seen me lately.’ You could ask yourself, ‘Have I thrown myself into the relationship too much? But is there anything that’s happening in that relationship that’s actually making it less likely that I’ll see the people that are important to me?’

TARANG CHAWLA: And if you’re noticing someone in your life is being isolated in their relationship, Elisabeth says you can raise it, but raise it gently – and declare your intentions are to support them no matter what.

ELISABETH SHAW: I think it’s important to put that in there. ‘Look, as a friend, my relationship with you is really important. And I back you, whoever you’re with, I’m here for you. I just want to raise something that could be difficult, but it’s because I want the best for you.’ I think if you declare good intentions, it helps.

Just to be aware, whatever you raise might trigger embarrassment, or shame. So I think first of all, just say, ‘Look, I’ve just noticed a few times this or that happened. Did you notice that?’ Even just to say, ‘Did you notice that?’

TARANG CHAWLA: Elisabeth says to end the conversation with another declaration of support for your friend – and to remain patient afterwards.

ELISABETH SHAW: If you’ve had enough relationships, you know that when you’re attached to someone, and they’re letting you down, you tend to focus on the positive. And so you’ll hear something like, ‘Oh, well, he’s lovely most of the time’ or ‘he treats me so beautifully.’ And I think you’ve got to expect that that’s the reason why it can be hard to speak up is because we’re always doing this sort of gymnastics… How many good things are there to outweigh that? And it’s a hard road to make a decision that something’s unacceptable.

 TARANG CHAWLA: One of the safest things you can do is be a gentle support, so that you can be this person’s mirror when they are ready and when they need it.

BIANCA: You don’t know who’s going through abuse, but if you make it a policy of being supportive and reflecting the good things about each other, you can’t go wrong.

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

JUSTINE REID: The defining factor of gaslighting is that it’s an intentional behaviour. It’s a manipulation of your emotions. And in doing so, they invalidate your memories, your lived experiences, and you start to question your whole perception of reality.

 TARANG: 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, Hannah Fahour and Tarang Chawla. Editing by Bad Producer Productions. Artwork by Patti Andrews.