Coercive control is more common than you think — and remote living raises the stakes

Trigger warning: information about family violence may cause distress

As investigative journalist Jess Hill explained in her award-winning book, See What You Made Me Do (Black Inc., 2019) and her podcast The Trap, coercive controllers don’t just abuse their partners to hurt, humiliate or punish them. They use particular and subtle techniques, such as surveillance, isolation from family and friends and gaslighting them so they stop trusting themselves, to strip the victim of their liberty and take away their self-identity. Victims live in a state of increasing terror; trying to please their partner but finding that the rules keep changing. Survivors describe constantly managing their partner, anticipating their moods, doing anything to not upset them, feeling terrorised. Walking on eggshells. 

According to the Australian Institute of Criminology, of the 1,023 Australian women who reported experiencing coercive control from a current or previous partner in 2021, 27 per cent lived in regional and remote Australia. In regional and rural areas, the stakes can be higher: by the time you realise what is happening, you might be geographically, socially and financially isolated. The rising cost of fuel and food, and the lack of available affordable rental properties in our regions also inhibit options. When internet coverage is sporadic and family is a long way away, or local and unhelpful, what do you do? It can be hard to prove you’re the victim to police when violence is weighed only in bruises and cuts. 

For Anna*, a Gippsland nurse, her relationship was all sparks and passionate declarations of love at the beginning. He showered her and her family with gifts and trips. He was passionate and expressive. They were destined to be together, he said. She was swept away by it all. They married within a year of meeting each other and had three children in quick succession. “I fell head over heels into his arms and then couldn’t get out,” she says. Anna’s world became very small, very quickly.

She stopped working soon after marriage so she could look after him and the children. Her husband moved them interstate, isolating her from her family and friends. The happy relationship soured. He started going through her phone, checking her messages, locking her and the children in the house while he was at work and only giving her small amounts of money for groceries. He would hide the car keys if she didn’t give him sex when he wanted it. Other times he raped her. The house was never clean enough, the food never good enough. She was never a perfect enough wife; he told her she was an embarrassment to him in the community. Anna’s confidence plummeted. She lived in fear of him; she began to believe all the things he said about her. One look from him would stop her in her tracks.

Other times, it is ‘love bombing’. Love bombing sets the groundwork for emotional manipulation and coercive control. After a few months, you’re hooked into the relationship, committed and emotionally invested. And then, slowly, the dynamic starts to change. It’s called love bombing because eventually, it can blow up your life. Love turns into control. “The key to understanding how love bombing differs from romantic courtship is to look at what happens next, after two people are officially a couple. If extravagant displays of affection continue indefinitely, if actions match words and there is no devaluation phase, then it’s probably not love bombing. That much attention might get annoying after a while, but it’s not unhealthy in and of itself. On the other hand, if there’s an abrupt shift in the type of attention, from affectionate and loving to controlling and angry, with the pursuing partner making unreasonable demands, that’s a red flag,” explains US psychologist Dr Dale Archer, in a 2017 article in Psychology Today.

The main thing is, once they’ve got you, they reject you. But beware, because it happens so slowly and you’re invested, so you may miss the signals or decide to overlook them. There will be very few readers who have not heard Hannah Clarke’s story.  It brought the issue of coercive control to the front page of many newspapers in the country. The mother and her three children were murdered on their way to school by their husband and father, Rowan Baxter, on 19 February 2020 in Brisbane. The children — Aaliyah, Laianah and Trey, aged six, four and three years respectively — lived with Hannah at her parents’ home in Camp Hill, Brisbane, after she and Baxter had separated in early December 2019.

There was an intervention order against Baxter at the time and he was not allowed to see the children. That morning, Hannah was taking the children to school. Baxter approached the car and climbed into the passenger seat with a jerry can of fuel and a knife. Hannah drove the car onto a nearby driveway and stopped. Baxter had poured petrol over the car interior and held Hannah in a bear hug. She screamed to witnesses for help. Baxter set the car alight with all five of them inside it. Both adults were able to escape the car, but Hannah was ablaze from head to toe. Baxter guarded the car and stopped the frantic bystanders from putting out the fire before killing himself with his knife. Hannah didn’t know Baxter had died when she spoke to police. Somehow, despite horrific burns to 97 per cent of her body, Hannah was able to tell the police what happened. She didn’t survive the day, passing away that night in hospital. She was so badly burned only the soles of her feet were untouched. Hannah Clarke was 31 years old.

The incident surfaced again in the media in March 2022, following an inquest by the Queensland Coroner’s Court into the deaths. As part of the inquest, witness evidence was heard as to the family’s final moments. Michael Zemek was washing his car that morning outside his home and told the inquest (as reported by Ben Smee, The Guardian Australia, 21 March 2022) that Baxter’s demeanour was controlled. “He didn’t appear to be really crazy and aggressive and trying to do anything like punching or anything like that. It was just a constraining hold. My impression was he had more of a resigned look on his face.”

The look on Baxter’s face that Michael Zemek remembered illustrates it perfectly. Baxter knew exactly what he was doing. It wasn’t a loss of control; nothing ‘came over him’. All went to his plan. As was reported to the inquest, Baxter was seen on CCTV footage buying a jerry can, cleaning fluid and zip ties from a hardware store just days beforehand. He also bought three chocolate eggs with toys inside. After the murders, a note was found written by Baxter. It said, “I’m finishing your game. I don’t want to play anymore. I have told the kids that you loved them. They will miss you, I’m sure.”

A close friend of Hannah’s from the gym, Manja Whaley, who had children the same age and had worked in the domestic violence field for over 10 years, gave a telling interview to Channel Nine’s Today show just days after the murders. Whaley explained that Hannah hadn’t seen the relationship as one of domestic violence because Baxter didn’t hit her. Once Whaley started unpacking the sexual abuse, emotional abuse and financial control with Hannah, the patterns emerged. One red flag was Baxter’s expectation of daily sex and, if he didn’t get it, he would punish Hannah by not letting her go to the gym, which was her happy place and refuge. Or he wouldn’t let the kids go to the beach on Sunday, which was their favourite family activity, and that would be Hannah’s fault. 

Baxter checked Hannah’s social media profiles and would accuse her of cheating if she communicated with a male, Whaley says. He accused her of flirting with men at the gym and wouldn’t let her wear shorts, as that would be promiscuous. She had to wear tights. He commented on Hannah’s appearance and told her she was disgusting. He made threats to punish her or the children if she didn’t comply with his wishes. He strangled her. Whaley also describes comments Baxter had made to Hannah 10 years earlier about his previous partner, saying he had told his previous partner that if she left with his child then he would kill the child and kill himself. These threats were well known to Hannah. 

Perpetrators often present well — calm and in control — sliding under the radar of counsellors, psychologists, social workers, lawyers and the police. They deny, lie and manipulate, dispute facts and discredit their partner, usually telling people ‘she’s crazy’. By the time they’re finished telling the story, the perpetrator has painted themself as the victim. And they can be very convincing. The real victim survivors, by contrast, are discredited by their inability to say to police, “He hit me, here is the bruise.” In Hannah’s matter, the inquest was told that less than a month before the incident, a psychologist wrote a reference for Baxter saying, “I have no concerns about his mental health. Contact with his children would be ideal and after reviewing his parenting strategies all seems in order for him to regain contact.”

When asked what she wanted people to understand after Hannah’s death, Hannah’s friend Manja Whaley said she hoped that “people see that coercive control is real”. The terrible grief and sadness of such profound loss cuts to the heart of the cycle of family violence in our communities and asks of us the same question, over and over again: when is enough enough?