Inside a buckling system people are breaking
FDSV Commissioner Micaela Cronin said we need to change the language we use to talk about domestic and sexual violence. We can start by not talking about “the system” and talk instead about people.
On Friday FDSV Commissioner Micaela Cronin said “the system” that is supposed to serve people who have been raped, abused, humiliated, assaulted, and controlled by violent (mostly) men is “buckling”. She’s right of course, and she’s spent enough time with the people who do frontline work to know how true this is for the people inside “the system”. Broken. Stretched. Failed. Pleading for help. “The system” has been buckling for years.
What does that look like from the inside?
It looks like structural underfunding that says women and children’s lives are not important, not urgent, not a priority. Not right now. So, there is never enough money and never enough people and always too many women and children suffering, pleading for help, and far too many times they’re told there is no help available.
It looks like exhausted people supervised by managers forced to be hypervigilant about every minute wasted and begrudge every dollar spent.
I once watched a senior manager in a rape crisis service glare at a woman answering calls as she took her second toilet break in an hour. Sleepless nights medicated with too much coffee will do that to you, but the calls were piling up, too many people were out on sick leave, and someone must answer to Department heads about hold times and abandoned call rates.
Chronically underfunded organisations that can’t present adequate performance metrics risk losing their funding because, where public outrage peaks, government departments need to issue press releases about how much things have improved. All the people who do crisis work know this hopeless impasse, but knowledge doesn’t help when you’re being paid barely above minimum wage to listen to terrified women you can’t help while a manager paid twice your salary in much more secure job give you shit for taking a piss.
It looks like the DV crisis service manager who doesn’t think her job is at all secure because too many people who work for her call in sick and the ones who do show up don’t have enough training and are too tired to remember everything, so they keep asking her the same questions over and over again. Or they’re too scared to ask her, for the third time that week, where to find emergency accommodation for a woman with multiple disabilities, so they just tell a woman who thinks she might die that week that there are no accessible beds, which is probably true, but they don’t know for sure. The manager knows this is happening, but she doesn’t have time to get everyone trained on the complex needs of women with disabilities, and even if she did, she knows most of those people won’t be working for her in a year, so it feels like a waste of time and budget. Then a journalist writes a story about how horrifying this is and the manager or the worker (or both) get sacked and the CEO issues a statement saying they take all victim survivors very seriously and hires a consultant to write a new policy on responding to complex needs. Problem unsolved.
It looks like the woman working in child protection who cannot face another visit to a child she knows is being harmed and offer nothing, do nothing because there is nothing she can offer or do, and then the child is killed and she feels responsible because she is responsible, except that of course she isn’t.
It looks like the 24 year old junior constable on his fifth DV call for the night and he can’t take it anymore, so he sighs and roll his eyes at the terrified woman who called him for help. She might never call for help again.
Senior managers in “the system” are usually people who either worked their way up or, more recently (since organisations started paying management better) came in sideways from the corporate sector. Which means often have only one of two necessary skillsets. The ones who started at the bottom understand violence. They’ve spent years working with angry men and agonised women and children. They know how violence works, what it sounds like, how it smells. They’re there for the mission. It’s a vocation that goes down to their bones. The manager who comes in with MBAs and private sector experience know how to administer budgets, produce reports, manage upwards, and reduce expenses but they think the vocation is idealistic, impractical, and unnecessarily political. I’ve only seen a very few people who have both skill sets, although in one particularly horrifying case, a board chose someone with no capacity to understand the vocation and no management ability to lead a structurally underfunded frontline organisation. The clusterfuck that followed ruined lives beyond repair.
A few months back I found a woman sitting in the street crying. The kind of bone breaking crying I’ve only ever seen before when someone’s child died. I thought that’s what had happened to her. But no, she worked at a domestic violence service. She wasn’t there shattering to pieces in the street because of any dramatic moment. “Nothing happened,” she told me. She had just been too long with the colleagues she couldn’t help and the abused women she couldn’t help and the managers telling her that after her twenty years doing this work, “maybe you’re just not cut out for this, crisis work is not for everyone, you know”.
I’ve watched this happen in refuges and courtrooms and police stations and hospitals and classrooms. And it’s getting worse.
I’ve watched bright passionate hardworking people stride into new jobs, shining with conviction that they can change the world. Sometimes they only last a few months. Some of them stay for years. Too many of them stumble out broken and irreparably damaged.
This is what Miceala Cronin means when she says the system is buckling. She means people. She’s talking about the Aboriginal woman who stopped calling police when her life was in danger because the best response was dehumanizing contempt and the worst was that she was imprisoned and her children were legally stolen. She means the 22 year old woman with a determined chin and a cowlick who told me she had a vocation and left to be a dental nurse three months later. The woman in her fifties who couldn’t afford to retire and told me she had given her life to a role she thought would save lives, but it didn’t. The CEO who told me, “Everyone who works in this sector is just fucking nuts”. The woman who rang a DV service because she knew if she stayed with her husband he would kill her one day and waited on hold for 45 minutes for someone to tell her there’s nowhere for her to go. The nonbinary person who was fired for falling asleep at their desk after weeks of nightmares about mutilated children. The nurse who had a barely acknowledged memory of being raped by a “friend” in her teens and, after treating treated too many rape victims, ended up in hospital with depression that almost killed her.
Admin and payroll and policy people who sit next to the people who do frontline work told me vicarious trauma is not happening to them, so they have no right to complain about the moral injuries that cripple them. Nurses and counsellors and constables told me the violence is not happening to them, so they have no right to be traumatized by the trauma they feel every day. Women who’ve been raped told me they didn’t fight hard enough so they have no right to be broken. Children who grew up with violent fathers told me they didn’t do enough to defend their mothers or their siblings so they have no right to their nightmare. These are the people who are the broken system.
Even if the government put the necessary billions into the people who do this work, which it won’t, it will take years for everyone to recover. And the people we call “frontline workers” or “the system” so we don’t have to call them people will stay barely a step ahead of the trauma they’re so desperate to alleviate in all the people abused, humiliated and raped by violent men.
The system is broken because systemic contempt broke the people who are trying to provide systemic support that doesn’t exist.