31 (2008) 65–72www.elsevier.com/locate/wsif

Women's Studies International Forum

“Why doesn't she just leave?”: Belonging, disruptionand domestic violence

Suellen Murray

Centre for Applied Social Research, School of Global Studies, Social Science & Planning, RMIT University,GPO Box 2476V, Melbourne VIC 3001, Australia

Available online 21 December 2007

Synopsis

From the 1970s, a feminist response to domestic violence in Australia was to assist women to leave their homes to escapedomestic violence. In doing so, women's (and their children's) lives and their belongingness to place and to family were disrupted.Indeed, discourses about domestic violence assumed that women's lives would be disrupted. More recently, in Australia, legal andother reforms have allowed for the greater possibility of a woman remaining safely in her own home (and her violent partner beingremoved) and retaining some sense, at least, of her belonging to place. However, further significant policy and attitudinal change isrequired. In this article, I explore the gap between the experiences of women and the policies and legislation that have been in placeto provide assistance and protection, and how this has changed over the past three decades. In particular, I examine what it means toleave home or to at stay home in relation to domestic violence and I consider what they mean in terms of belonging to family and toplace.© 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Introduction

In the 1970s, a feminist response to domestic violencein Australia was to assist women to leave their homes toescape domestic violence. In doing so, women's (andtheir children's) lives and their belongingness to place andfamily were disrupted. Indeed, discourses about domesticviolence, and the subsequent responses to it, assumed thatwomen's lives would be disrupted. These responses weredeveloped at a time when there was little support to keepwomen safe at home and, while leaving home and goingto a refuge was, for some, ‘a last resort’, for others, itbecame a place where a new sense of belonging wasinvoked. For other women, the sense of belonging,particularly to family and place, was a barrier that stoppedthem from ever leaving, despite the violence. Morerecently, legal and other reforms have attempted to allowfor the greater possibility of a woman remaining safely in

0277-5395/$ - see front matter © 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.doi:10.1016/j.wsif.2007.11.008

their own homes (and her violent partner being removed)and retaining some sense of belongingness. However, thediversity of women's interests is also acknowledged, thatis, for some women, leaving their home, despite thedisruption, is what they want (or need) to do.

In this article I explore these changes about leavinghome/staying home in relation to domestic violence overthe last three decades in Australia. I examine the gapbetween the experiences of women and the policies andlegislation that have been in place to provide assistanceand protection. While legislation has been in place forsome time to enable women to stay at home (and toremove violent men), until recently, much public policyhas been framed in terms of women leaving their home.In particular, I consider the disruption to belonging tofamily, community and place that leaving home entailsand the ways in which recent changes attempt to min-imise these disruptions.

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This research forms part of a larger AustralianResearch Council-funded study which explores thehistory of Australian domestic violence public policyand which draws upon document analysis as well as in-depth interviews.

The article will contribute to a growing literature onAustralian responses to domestic violence. While thereis a substantial literature on Australian public policyresponses to domestic violence including reviews andevaluations funded through the Australian Govern-ment's Partnerships Against Domestic Violence (e.g.,Bagshaw, Chung, Couch, Lilburn, & Wadham, 2000;Strategic Partners, 2003), analysis of contemporarydomestic violence policy (e.g., Chappell, 2001; FitzRoy,1999; Murray, 2005; Phillips, 2006) and there is somedocumentation of how domestic violence became apolicy issue (e.g., Murray, 2002; Weeks & Gilmore,1996), there has been considerably less concerning thedevelopment of domestic violence policy over time.Moreover, much of the published debate specificallyabout staying in the home in the Australian domesticviolence public policy context has occurred in govern-ment and other social policy reports. In particular, then,this article brings a historical perspective to under-standing leaving home/staying for women and childrenwho experience domestic violence.

‘Why doesn't she just leave?’

‘Why doesn't she just leave?’ is a question stillcommonly asked about women who are experiencingdomestic violence. The question minimises the reasonswhy women might find it difficult to leave their home,their partner and, sometimes, their family and commu-nity. However, recent research suggests that even thoughthere is improved confidence in police and court re-sponses and that more women are reporting domesticviolence (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2006), in thewider community, ‘understanding of barriers to actionremain poor’. In a community survey conducted by theVictorian Health Promotion Foundation, 81% of respon-dents agreed that ‘it's hard to understand why womenstay in violent relationships’ and 50% stated that ‘mostwomen could leave a violent relationship if they reallywanted to’ (Vichealth, 2006, pp. 63–64).

At the same time, and in a somewhat contradictorymanner, 91% of respondents agreed that the violentperson should be made to leave the family home(Vichealth, 2006, p. 63). This suggests that the question,‘why doesn't he leave?’ should be being asked instead, aquestion I will return to later in this article. First of all, Iwill briefly consider what it is when we talk about

domestic violence, or family violence, as it is also knownin Australia. I will then address the question, ‘why is itexpected that a woman would leave her home in the firstplace?’ before turning to ‘why doesn't she just leave?’

How domestic violence has been understood haschanged over the last three decades. The AustralianGovernment's Royal Commission on Human Relation-ships, researched during the mid 1970s, included anexamination of what was called ‘family violence’. TheCommission defined family violence as ‘acts of violenceby one spouse against the other spouse or against thechildren’ and was concerned primarily with physicalviolence including rape (Royal Commission on HumanRelationships, 1977, p. 133). More recently, definitionsof domestic violence (and family violence) place asmuch emphasis on other forms of violence includingthreats and intimidation, and emotional and financialabuse, because of the ways in which these behaviourscontrol and restrict victims' lives (e.g., Office ofWomen's Policy, 2002).

In Australia, family violence is now inclusive ofviolence perpetrated by a range of family or communitymembers, not just male partners, to capture, in particular,the experiences of Indigenous women and children(MacDonald, 1998). The term domestic violence con-tinues to be understood as violence between intimatepartners with both family and domestic violence rec-ognising the gendered nature of the violence. There isalso increasing concern about the impact of domestic andfamily violence on children and understandings aboutthe frequent co-existence of domestic violence and childabuse (Laing, 2000).

The expectation that a woman would leave her homewas based on firmly held beliefs about men's entitle-ment to their home and that ‘a man's home is his castle’.There is a long history of a man's rights over his wife interms of ownership of property, income and children(McFerran, 2003, pp. 39–40). These views, that womenwere less entitled to the family home, were also at leastpartly based in women's experiences of typicallycontributing less financially, regardless of their othercontributions made to the household. Furthermore, theneed to prioritise safety meant that, because men weredeemed to be entitled to remain in the family home,women and children had to leave to be safe. As socialwork academics Chung, Kennedy, O'Brien and Wendt(2000, p. 2) have noted, women have been constructedas ‘victims who need protection and seclusion ratherthan as citizens with rights which can and should beasserted and enforced.’ Instead of domestic violencebeing treated as a serious crime, women were left unsafein their homes, or they left.

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The response of police to domestic violence is a key tounderstanding why women left home. While the policeplay a significant role in domestic violence, historically,there has been reluctance by many officers to criminalisemen's assaults on their wives (Alexander, 2002;Victorian Law Reform Commission, 2005). The lackof importance attributed to domestic violence was evi-dent in the ways that some police officers failed tosupport those who were the victims of what, in any othercircumstances, would have been considered seriouscrimes. The response of the refuge movement to this lackof action by police was to provide safe, supportedaccommodation in women's refuges. Refuge workerGlenda Blake recounted the injustices she witnessedduring the 1980s:

going with the police to women's houses and havingthe police just stand back and offer no assistance atall. In fact, sometimes [the police would] take theperpetrator aside and have a chat to him as though hewas one of their best mates.

And during this display of Australian mateship, therefuge worker would be assisting the woman to movesome basic items out of the house — in effect, ‘movingtheir whole lives' into ‘sub-standard, cold and isolated’housing (Murray, 2002, p. 119).

So why, then, did women not ‘just leave’? The quoteabove provides some clues, that women were moving to‘sub-standard, cold and isolated housing’, leavingbehind, for some, at least, the relative comforts oftheir own home. But the physical circumstances ofwomen's lives after leaving is only one aspect of whyleaving could be difficult and one that I shall discussfurther in the next section of this article. Other reasonswhy women might find it difficult to leave include theirfinancial dependence on their partner, their lack ofknowledge of or access to appropriate support servicesto assist them or their fear of what their partner may doto them if they did leave (Alexander, 2002; Keys Young,1998; Patton, 2003). I will not discuss these reasons herebut, instead, turn to the disruptions to belonging thatwomen encountered.

During the mid to late decades of the twentiethcentury, Australian social policy and wider communityattitudes framed domestic violence as ‘marital conflict’with the aim of restoring family harmony. According togendered norms, women, rather than men, wereresponsible for the maintenance of family harmony andmarital conflict (or domestic violence) was an indicationof their failure to perform their expected roles as wives.Women continue to experience social pressure to ‘makethe marriage work’ and to remain in their relationship,

despite the violence, as revealed in several recent studies.While some women interviewed in a 2003 Tasmanianstudy received supportive responses when they discloseddomestic violence to friends and families, others weretold ‘You have made your bed, now lie in it’ (Patton,2003, p. 84). A 2004 Victorian study revealed women'sexperiences of being told to ‘keep the family together atall costs’ (Chisholm Institute andWomen's Health in theSouth East, 2004, p. 20).

For those who do ‘just leave’, leaving symbolises thefailure of their relationship, even when this was not whatthey wanted. Some women just want the violence to stopand not the relationship to end (Patton, 2003). Despite theviolence, some women care about their partner andcherish the lives that they have shared together. Notsurprisingly, then, for some women, leaving is not a finalact but, due to the difficulties that leaving entails, involvesreturning and leaving on a number of occasions. Approx-imately 30% of women return home after accessingdomestic violence crisis accommodation services; almost60% in remote areas (Chung et al., 2000, p. 32).

Domestic violence also disrupts relationships towider family and community, felt by all women tosome extent, and most particularly by Indigenouswomen and women from culturally diverse communitiesfor whom leaving their partner may mean leaving theircommunity, and possible ostracism or alienation fromothers in that community (Lay, 2006). An Aboriginalwoman leaving her home and community may feel likeshe ‘is not only losing her family, but she is walkingaway from her whole culture’ (Keys Young, 1998, p. 73).There may also be pressure to ‘put up with’ the violenceso as not to shame the family or the community. Thus,according to criminologist Harry Blagg (2000, p. 9),‘Aboriginal women are caught between a range ofpressures to remain silent on family violence issues in theinterests of community and family.’

In contrast to feminist models which have tended toemphasise women ‘breaking free,’ Indigenous responsesto family violence have focused much more on ‘healingapproaches’ with the aim to preserve families (StrategicPartners, 2003, p. 45). In consultations undertaken withIndigenous women and family violence organisations inWestern Australia, Blagg (2000, p. 24) found thatwomen wanted refuges or safe houses that they couldgo to for respite from the violence, without pressure onthem to leave the relationship.

For some women, leaving was not an option, ‘for thesake of the children’, believing that the sense ofbelonging for the children, and their children's relation-ship with their father, were more important than theviolence in the home (Keys Young, 1998; Patton, 2003).

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However, as suggested previously, children too experi-ence violence in these homes. The point at which womentook action, often involving leaving their partner, waswhen they ‘held grave fears for their physical safety orthat of their children, or where they began to havesignificant concerns about the impact of the abuse upontheir children or other family members’ (Keys Young,1998, p. xi). But there have always been risks for somewomen in taking action: women are expected to protecttheir children from violence, including from her violentpartner. However, women express concerns aboutreporting domestic violence because of the risk that shemay be identified as a ‘bad’mother unable to care for herchildren and have them taken away. Her partner escapesattention as the source of the violence and the otherperson who has responsibility for the care and safety ofthe children (Davies & Krane, 2006; Health OutcomesInternational, 2004).

Domestic violence does not only disrupt intimate andother family relationships. Pets may have a largesignificance in women and children's lives, includingas important sources of emotional support. Domesticviolence can be perpetrated through the abuse of pets, asrevealed by Heather Osland, an Australian woman whowas convicted of the murder of her husband after manyyears of his extreme violence towards her and herchildren (Osland, 2003). In one United States study of apopulation of women who had pets and had soughtassistance at a refuge, threats to harm or actual harm hadoccurred against half of these pets by violent partners(Flynn, 2000; see also Becker & French, 2004). Womenmay not want to leave home as they cannot take theirpets with them and they fear for their safety otherwise(Victorian Law Reform Commission, 2006).

In addition to leaving personal relationships, womenmay struggle to leave the place that is their home. Thefamily home is not just a place of physical shelter, but itis also supposed to provide emotional security; it hassymbolic importance for the relationship and the familylife that a woman and her children have lived. Domesticviolence disrupts this belongingness to place by alteringunderstandings of the space that is home, as JenniSouthwell (2002, p. 4) has noted:

family violence disrupts and violates the sense of safetyand belonging that are culturally associated with thehome and to this extent robs its victim of such a space.

This sense of loss is invoked by Anna Spencer as sherecalls her feelings when she first came to a refuge:

I had this image of me walking up the path to themain door. I had a two-year old on one side and an

overbrimming suitcase on the other. I remembertripping over and my knee bleeding and having anawful sense of desolation (Murray, 2002, p. 51).

However, some women who remain at home mayfeel no sense of belonging there. As Carolyn Johnson(2005) has noted, the most dangerous time for a womanis when she is about to or after she leaves a violentrelationship. The fear of these dangers may mean thatshe never leaves home but has no sense of belongingthere (Patton, 2003). Moreover, for those women whoserelationships involve high levels of control of theircontact with family and friends and other socialnetworks, over time, they may also lose a sense ofconnectedness to their wider community.

Having discussed ‘just leaving’, I will turn, in thisnext section, to a consideration of what happened forwomen and children when they did leave home. Forsome, the disruption lead to ongoing disadvantage; forothers, leaving was empowering and they tell stories ofthe better lives that resulted for them and their children.

Leaving home, leaving violence

While most women who experience domestic viol-ence do not seek assistance from official sources(Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2006), some leavehome to go to a refuge. Others stay with friends, familymembers or have their own resources to supportthemselves. Many of these women become ‘homeless’,at least in the short-term, even though they have a homewhich they have had to leave. According to theAustralian Institute of Health and Welfare (2005, p. 1),homelessness is understood as a lack of ‘safe, secure andadequate housing’ rather than the more commonperception of ‘living rough’. As social worker RobynGregory (2001, p. 13) has noted:

Women, often with children, were/are far morelikely to be living in intolerable domestic situations,dependent on a partner for shelter, than directlysubjected to the “dangers” of the streets. However,for women who do leave, the uncertain future ofpoverty, inadequate housing and social isolation isnot much more inviting.

The Supported Accommodation Assistance Program(SAAP) is the major government response to home-lessness in Australia and, in 2003–2004, a third of clientsaccessing these services were women escaping domesticviolence. Across Australia, this means that around33,000 women and 35,000 accompanying childrenseek assistance from refuges and outreach services

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annually (Australian Institute of Health and Welfare,2005, p. 1). When refuges are full, women and childrenstay in motel units, paid for by SAAP, but typically withlimited support. Almost a quarter of these womenescaping domestic violence in 2003–2004 were Indi-genous Australians and 15% were born in countries thatwere predominantly non-English speaking (AustralianInstitute of Health and Welfare, 2005, p. 2).

Leaving home usually entails significant disadvan-tage, including the loss of belongingness to place,partner and family described previously. Leaving homecan also lead to unstable housing and homelessness, therisk of poverty and displacement from social networks.Whenwomen and children leave home they leave behindconnections to local communities and local friends.

Despite the disadvantages typically inherent inleaving home, for some women, leaving home andgoing to a refuge invoked a new belonging. Whilerefuges were intended to be homely — even though notall women find them so— the shared experiences of thecommunal refuge model aim to promote self-help andempowerment. As noted by Veronica Wensing (2001,p. 17), ‘the sharing of experiences was, and still is, animportant aspect of the environment in the refugesupportive of empowerment’. Living in the shared spaceof the refuge provided opportunities for women torealise that their experiences were not unique and forsome this was empowering, as Maggie Lawson, aresident at a women's refuge in the 1970s, explained:

For me personally, it meant that I wasn't the onlyone in the situation, that there were other peoplecoming from a range of other backgrounds that werecoming from the same situation; that there werethings that I could do about it, that I could make alife for myself… Yes, there was a life after domesticviolence (Murray, 2002, p. 50).

Maggie Lawson left the refuge for a flat where herneighbours included other single mothers. She recalledthat this group of women ‘all looked after each other’ andhave remained friends ever since (Murray, 2002, p. 60).Some women, like Maggie, joined the women's move-ment and embraced feminism. For Maggie, a new senseof belonging developed.

In the next section I will turn to the possibility ofwomen and children remaining safely at home.

Staying home, leaving violence

As a long time Australian activist and domesticviolence service worker, Ludo McFerran (2002a)reminds us, refuges ‘were never perceived as an end in

themselves, only a means’. Is it possible, then, to have inplace a service system that supports women and childrento stay safely in their own homes rather than allowingthe man to remain? Should we be asking instead ‘whydoesn't he leave?’ and having in place the environmentthat enables this to occur and, in doing so, minimises theeffects of and prevents domestic violence? By askingthese questions I am not suggesting that the violentpartner will necessarily be cognisant of their conductand its impact on his partner and other family members.Nor do I assume that he agrees with the woman'saccount of his behaviour as unacceptable. Rather, legalreforms and policy changes should allow for the pos-sibility that this could occur and he be made to leave tofind accommodation elsewhere. As noted earlier in thisarticle, there is wide community agreement that withinrelationships where domestic violence is occurring, theviolent partner should be made to leave the familyhome.

The possibility of ‘staying home, leaving violence’has existed in at least some states of Australia for sometime. However, even though the ability to remove violentmen from their homes has been in place since theintroduction of domestic violence intervention orders inthe 1980s (at least in some states of Australia includingNew South Wales and Victoria), police and courts, ac-cording to McFerran (2002b), have ‘shown deep reluc-tance over the years to remove a man from his home’.Furthermore, according to Southwell (2002, p. 26),‘when faced with a contest between the citizenship rightsof men and those of women, the Court is inclined toprivilege those of men, despite the construction oflegislation to enable the contrary.’ Clearly, then, in thisinstance, legislation is important but, as Carol Smart(1989) has reminded us, how the law is used is notnecessarily in women's interests and more than legisla-tion is needed.

Domestic violence intervention orders, violencerestraining orders or apprehended violence orders, asthey are known variously across Australia, are used as acivil law means of managing violence and the threat ofviolence, in addition to the less well-used criminal lawprocesses of arrest and prosecution (Alexander, 2002;Victorian Law Reform Commission, 2005). Interventionorders restrict defendants' activities, such as by limitingtheir access to certain places and people and, in doing so,increasing women's safety. A defendant, for example,may not be allowed to go within a certain distance of theworkplace or residence of an ‘aggrieved family member’(as they are called in Victoria). A breach of an inter-vention order is a criminal offence, but police have beennotoriously reluctant to act on breaches, putting women

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and children who are supposed to be protected by them,at great risk (Victorian Law Reform Commission, 2006).

Intervention orders can include a condition thatexcludes defendants from the family home, even whenthey own or partly own the home. These orders arevariously known as exclusion orders, ouster orders andsole occupancy orders. Exclusion orders do not affectwho owns or has equity in the property and are supposedto be unrelated to the deliberations of the Family Courtregarding property settlements. They are intended to beprimarily concerned with the safety of women andchildren, not property matters, although researchsuggests otherwise, discussed further below.

In recent times police have gained further powers toassist in the possibility of women remaining in theirhomes. Holding powers, for example, have the capacityto assist women to remain in their own home while theprocess of applying for an intervention order is under-taken rather than leaving home to do so. From 2006, inVictoria ‘holding powers’ enable police to detain aperson suspected of domestic violence for up to 6 hoursduring which time an intervention order with anexclusion condition could be put in place. The introduc-tion of the Victoria Police Code of Practice in 2004, withits main aims of safety and support for victims, earlyintervention and investigation and prosecution ofcriminal offences, has also been an important step inclarifying the police's role in responding to domesticviolence (Victoria Police, 2004). There has been, then,change in some states of Australia, at least, that attemptsto allow for the greater possibility of women and childrenremaining in their home.

However, while women may then apply to excludetheir violent partner from their home, as Robyn Edwardshas noted, ‘the court's response to requests for exclusionorders often focuses on the property rights andaccommodation needs of defendants’ (Edwards, 2003,p. 2). In other words, the belongings and belongingnessof alleged violent partners are more important than thesafety and accommodation of women and children, andthis view has been retained over time.

In Victoria, research undertaken in the 1990s bysociologist, Rosemary Wearing (1992 cited in South-well, 2002), revealed the extreme reluctance thatmagistrates expressed about making exclusion orders.Over half of the forty magistrates that she interviewedclaimed that they ‘would never’ exclude the perpetratorfrom the home as they believed it was a denial of hisproperty rights. Furthermore,

“several Magistrates remarked that they felt therewas a problem with evicting the male offender as he

would not know how to manage or survive withouthis family's (usually meaning wife's) nurturance[sic] and support activities” (Wearing, 1992 cited inSouthwell, 2002, p. 24).

Edwards' analysis of transcripts from South EastSydney courts a decade after Wearing's study is alsotelling. Her study revealed that magistrates paidparticular attention to the accommodation needs of themale defendant: if the magistrate was not satisfied thathe had somewhere to live, they were reluctant to grantan exclusion order. None of the transcripts revealed anyinterest by magistrates in the female partner's housing(nor that of their children). No prosecutor argued that thewoman had no other housing options than the familyhome (Edwards, 2003). In other words, it was assumedthat they would leave if suitable arrangements were notmade for the violent male partner. Similar outcomeshave been found in other research (e.g., Nunn, 2001; seealso McFerran, 2003).

During 2001, a Victorian domestic violence specia-list outreach service supported 30 women who hadexclusion orders in place to remain in their own homes.These women reported that ‘this option has enabledthem to remain close to their support networks andreduced the disruption to their lives caused by domesticviolence’ (Eastern Domestic Violence Outreach Service,2004 cited in Weeks & Oberin, 2004, p. 52). By 2003the number of women supported had doubled andservice workers were optimistic about the prospects forthe use of exclusion orders. They argued that their useinvolves police, courts, domestic violence workers,solicitors and the general community giving ‘a unifiedmessage that tells [women] of their entitlement to thehome’. However, they acknowledged that womencontinued to receive conflicting messages. For example,a solicitor advised that the abuse women have suffered isnot significant enough for a magistrate to make an ordereven when they have ‘suffered violent assault leading tovisible injuries’ (Eastern Domestic Violence OutreachService, 2004).

Furthermore, as Chung (2002, p. 11) has noted, forwomen to stay in the home safely, ‘a massive shift inpublic commitment [is required] which can enablepolice, courts and other agencies to act on such anoption where it is the woman's choice’. It may be thiscommitment across agencies, rather than legal responsesalone, that will provide the circumstances in whichchange can occur. But as argued by McFerran (2003,2007), the wider policy framework is only justdeveloping and its development will require dealingwith this resistance to enabling women and children to

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remain safe in their own home. In Victoria, for example,the groundwork for this policy framework is beingestablished through reforms to the family violenceservice system, underpinned by an integrated model andwhich, in part, have a focus on supporting women toremain in their own home (Department for VictorianCommunities, 2005; Office of Women's Policy, 2002).Tasmania and the Australian Capital Territory are otherAustralian jurisdictions that have put in place policyframeworks intended to facilitate women and childrenremaining in their own home (McFerran, 2007).

Part of this policy framework is providing support towomen who remain at home and ensuring their safety.The provision of outreach services, conduct of safetyaudits and risk assessments, installation of securitydevices and rapid response alarm systems are all mech-anisms that can support women and children stayingsafely at home (Health Outcomes International, 2004;McFerran, 2007). Some argue, however, that thesemeasures will never ensure the safety of all women andchildren and that there will continue to be the need forrefuges to provide protection to those who are most atrisk of violence.

Another part of the policy framework is dealing withthe accommodation needs of men who have beenexcluded from their homes. Many in the domesticviolence field have argued that women and children'ssafety must be the priority, rather than the accommoda-tion needs of the defendant. Edwards confirms that therehas been exasperation among some workers in thedomestic violence sector that too much concern isexpressed about where men will live. But there are alsoshifts in thinking about this. Edwards, for example,argues that the housing of violent men may be one of thebest strategies to ensure that women remain in the home(Edwards, 2004). Like women who leave home becauseof violence, men also stay with other family membersand friends or use their own financial resources to fundalternative accommodation. Government-funded initia-tives include providing men with financial assistance tosupport them to leave and paying for men's motelaccommodation. In addition, the Supported Accommo-dation Assistance Program provides accommodation tohomeless men. Men who have been excluded from theirhome can also access these services but it is unclear theextent to which they are being used in this way.

Conclusion

Despite thirty years of action around domesticviolence in Australia the question, “why doesn't shejust leave?” is still asked. This question is based in an

assumption that women and children are less entitledthan their violent partner and father to stay in their ownhome and minimises the disruption and disadvantagethat leaving entails. It also assumes that this is the onlychoice that women have, that is, to escape violence, theymust leave their own home. While acknowledging thatsome women do not want to remain in their home andfor others it may never be safe to stay, for others again,staying home can be a way of leaving the violence.

Increasingly, the question “why doesn't he leave?” isbeing asked. Indeed, as noted, in a recent Australiancommunity survey over 90% of respondents agreed thatthe violent partner should be made to leave the familyhome. However, even though legislation has been inplace for some time to allow its possibility, the researchdiscussed here suggests that there has been reluctance toexclude a man from his home, reflecting deeply heldviews concerning men's entitlement to their home.

There is some evidence to suggest that changes arehappening but further significant policy and attitudinalchange is required to reduce the gap between women'sexperiences and the provision of support and protection.Ultimately, these changes involve recognition of womenand children's entitlement to the space that is theirhome, and that this is a safe place. In doing so, womenand children may then retain a greater sense of be-longing despite the other disruptions that domesticviolence brings to their lives.

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Suellen Murray PhD is a Senior Research Fellow at RMITUniversity in Melbourne, Australia, and has particular researchinterests around social policy concerned with domestic violence. Shehas worked in this area in and with government and with non-government domestic violence services. She is currently working onan Australian Research Council-funded project examining the lasttwenty years of Australian domestic violence public policy.