A Domestic Violence Scandal
What follows is a factual account of an institutional failure to protect a victim of domestic violence in New South Wales. The events took place between 2023 and 2026. This is not historical. The gaps it exposes are current, urgent, and consequential.
Failures in this case cannot be excused by claims that “we didn’t know better at the time.” The knowledge existed. The procedures existed. What failed was execution – and accountability.
A Victim’s Fears
I will refer to the victim as Shirley to protect her identity.
In late 2024, Shirley fled her home after sustained domestic abuse. She went to police to report physical assaults, sexual assault involving a weapon, threats to kill, threats involving third parties, prolonged harassment, and an escalating pattern of coercive control.
She did what the system tells people to do. She fled her home for her own safety and reported to police.
Her statement was recorded on a body‑worn camera. Shirley described near‑daily physical assaults; threats to kill her, threats to make false allegations if she tried to leave; a sexual assault involving a kitchen knife; constant tracking and monitoring; and 530 harassing phone calls and emails over a three‑day period after she fled.
No written statement was taken. She was not allowed to formalise her report. She was not offered the support of a specialist domestic‑violence officer. No probing questions were asked to draw out the full picture.
Shirley described the evidence she held – threatening text messages, recorded calls, and witnesses who could corroborate her account. Police listened – but did not collect any of it. No witnesses were contacted. None of the relevant evidence she identified was obtained.
Police took notes and did one thing in response – they arrested and questioned her abuser.
Even that description is generous. In practice, it wasn’t so much questioning her abuser as facilitating the abuser making counter‑allegations – the very outcome Shirley had warned them about. While under questioning, he did exactly what he had threatened to do – accuse her instead.
Police accepted those claims without scrutiny.
On the basis of the counter‑allegations alone, police closed the investigation into Shirley’s reports of domestic and sexual violence and redirected their full attention to investigating her.
Overnight, Shirley went from victim to alleged perpetrator.
There had been no investigation of her allegations at all – no evidence gathered, no witnesses interviewed, no testing of her account. Police had not even done the minimum work required to properly challenge her abuser.
An officer later summarised their position to Shirley bluntly: “We put your allegations to him and he denied it. What else can we do?”
Within 24 hours of interviewing her abuser, police imposed cross‑restraining orders. The AVO protecting Shirley stated that the investigation into her allegations had been closed due to ‘lack of evidence’.
Shirley’s reaction was immediate and bewildered: What do you mean, lack of evidence? You never looked at the evidence!
She spent days trying to reverse the decision. She attended the police station with a thumb drive containing the 530 harassing communications sent in the days after she fled. She identified an assault that occurred under a CCTV camera and asked police to urgently retrieve the footage.
Police said angrily “Are we going to have you coming in every day? … We’re now investigating you as the subject of our investigation. … We don’t want to see any more allegations from you.”
Police did not attempt to collect the CCTV footage for four months. By the time they attended, it had been overwritten. Shirley was later told the inter‑station request had “accidentally not been sent.”
By then, it was clear police had decided whom they were investigating – and whom they were protecting.
Assessing Risk – and Ignoring It
Police had access to a tool designed specifically to prevent catastrophic outcomes in domestic violence cases: the Domestic Violence Safety Assessment Tool (DVSAT).
The DVSAT consists of 25 mandatory questions. Each affirmative answer corresponds to known risk factors for serious injury or death. Scores above a defined threshold require mandatory escalation: specialist involvement, coordinated inter‑agency response, and protective action.
In Shirley’s case, the tool was administered – and then ignored. Twice.
She scored 19 out of 25, near the very top of the scale. Under police guidelines, that score indicates extreme risk. The prescribed response is not discretionary. It exists to remove individual judgment from precisely these situations.
None of it occurred.
No safety action meeting.
No domestic‑violence liaison officer.
No escalation to specialist units.
The protocol existed. The threshold was met. The mandatory police response was absent.
Even so, the DVSAT itself is incomplete. It focuses primarily on physical violence and has not kept pace with the recognition of coercive control as a criminal offence. A more complete tool would also ask questions such as:
- Have you been threatened with harm if you report abuse to police?
- Has anyone threatened to make false allegations against you?
- Have there been threats to damage your reputation or livelihood?
Had those questions been asked, Shirley’s risk profile would have been higher still.
The failure to treat the outcome of the DVSAT tool (incomplete as it may be) mattered – because everything that followed, flowed from it.
Evidence Lost, Protection Delayed
To defend herself against allegations that should never have been entertained, Shirley was forced to hire a lawyer.
Her first lawyer advised her not to speak to police at all – to wait until she was arrested. This kind of strategic silence may suit some defence strategies, but it also requires waiting to be imprisoned and denied bail before correcting lies.
Shirley dismissed that lawyer.
Her second lawyer helped her speak to investigators for the first time.
It took five months before police would even interview her. Their justification was that they needed to finish their investigation first so they would “know what questions to ask” – a standard conspicuously absent from the handling of her original complaint.
Shirley was interrogated for seven hours. Over the course of that interview, police shifted from presuming guilt to recognising what had happened – the counter‑allegations were not spontaneous. They were the culmination of a deliberate pattern of coercive control. The relationship itself had been a fraud, and the threat – “If you leave, I’ll have you arrested” – was the ultimate weapon, made all the more powerful by police willingness to ignore their own mandatory risk management procedures.
Shirley may have fled first, but her abuser had spent nearly a year laying the trap.
False evidence.
A fabricated narrative.
A trail of hollow “receipts” designed to mislead rather than withstand scrutiny.
But Shirley’s abuser had been sloppy.
Once police finally examined the material Shirley had identified from the beginning, the frame-up collapsed. Evidence directly contradicted the abuser’s claims and showed the allegations against Shirley to be part of the abuse itself.
Months later, police reviewed the evidence properly. Shirley’s ex‑partner was charged and convicted. The allegations against Shirley were declared unsubstantiated. The AVO against her was withdrawn and police ruled out any future charges.
The truth emerged – but far too late.
Oversight That Watched Without Acting
While trying to be heard by police, Shirley lodged detailed complaints with oversight bodies such as the Law Enforcement Conduct Commission (LECC). She set out the procedural breaches, the ignored risk assessments, the failure to collect evidence (or was it the willing destruction of evidence?), and the completely unequal treatment of the crossing allegations. All this was supported by documentation and timelines.
The response was circular.
LECC declined to investigate. The matter was referred back to police – the very organisation whose conduct was in question. LECC promised to “monitor” the situation but did nothing to maintain professional standards or mandatory protocols.
When Shirley provided fresh evidence, LECC’s decision was reaffirmed.
Responsibility was endlessly deferred. Institutions pointed sideways, never inward. Oversight became observation, followed by inaction.
The Human Cost
While institutions refused to provide the protection they exist to guarantee, Shirley’s health collapsed.
In the following months, she was hospitalised eight times. Prolonged stress led to severe cardiac complications, heart failure, and the implantation of a defibrillator to prevent sudden death.
It took six months before she could return to work – and then only part‑time. Her career stalled. Her finances deteriorated.
By the end of the ordeal, Shirley had incurred more than $35,000 in legal costs simply to survive the system meant to protect her, and suffered over $150,000 in lost income.
Shirley’s lawyer subpoenaed the original video tapes of her police interviews to prove that police had failed to follow their own mandatory risk mitigation protocols. The police failed to respond to the subpoena, and then indicated that the tapes no longer existed.
She sought a costs order against police, arguing that her legal expenses flowed directly from investigative failures that should never have occurred. The court refused. The costs remained hers.
There was no compensation.
No remediation.
No acknowledgement of institutional fault.
No acknowledgement that the police failure was an unacceptable failure.
This Was Not Inevitable
Nothing about this outcome was unavoidable.
The risk tool existed. Even flawed, it mandated action that was ignored. The procedures were clear. The thresholds were met.
What failed was not knowledge, but execution – and then accountability.
Each individual failure might be rationalised in isolation: a premature closure, a missed investigative step, a refusal to reopen, an oversight body declining to intervene, a court unwilling to revisit costs. Taken together, they reveal a system that compounds its own errors and insulates itself from correction. Police seem to have lost the video tapes that would prove their own failures.
This is not a story about a single bad decision. It is about how failure propagates when institutions are designed to avoid responsibility rather than recognise it and take corrective action.
Why This Matters Beyond One Case
Most cases like this never become public. They end in medical crises, financial ruin, silence – and sometimes suicide.
Few victims have the resources, stamina, or documentation to pursue every complaint, escalation channel, and review mechanism.
Shirley did. She cleared her name and avoided prosecution, but at the cost of permanent injury, unrecoverable debt, and compounded trauma inflicted not just by an abuser, but by institutional failure.
If a case involving extreme risk indicators, documented procedural breaches, eventual exoneration, and demonstrable harm can still leave someone ruined – then the problem is not a lack of rules or tools.
It is the absence of consequences.
A system that cannot correct itself does not fail once. It creates the conditions for the next failure – and the next – each time with a different person paying the price.
Shirley, you can’t be serious!
I said at the outset that I had changed Shirley’s name to protect her identity.
And perhaps you find this story incredible – how could this concatenation of errors really occur in a post #MeToo world?
The answer is simple.
I also changed the pronouns I used to refer to Shirley and her abuser.
In fact, Shirley was male, and her abuser – the one who laid the trap with false evidence and used the police as a weapon of abuse – was female.
Well, that explains it all then.
Doesn’t it?