Nowhere to run

People living in remote Australia are 24 times more likely to be hospitalised as a result of family and domestic abuse

- SAMANTHA TRENOWETH

Karen Brock was sitting on the bedroom floor, her back pressed hard against the door; her feet bracing against a chest of drawers opposite. “And my husband was pushing on the other side,” she tells The Weekly. “I could hear the door cracking around me, and I was trying to work out how I was going to break the window to get out of the room. I knew the net curtain would stop whatever I threw at it and I didn’t have anything in the room to throw anyway. There was no phone to call for help. He’d already broken that. And if he got through that door, with the adrenaline rush he’d get, I wouldn’t have survived.”

Karen, her husband and their two little ones (her son was five years old and her daughter three) lived on a wild and windswept property in Tasmania. There was nowhere to run and no one would hear her scream.

Karen had weathered brutal treatment in the past. She had been beaten and raped throughout her five-year marriage. “And there was a mental war going on that, at first, I didn’t realise was happening,” she says. “That person wanted to control you. Slowly, like an acid erosion, you lose your self-esteem, you lose your self-worth, you lose sight of any hope. You get yourself down to where you just exist.”

This attack, however, was particularly vicious. “It was the war of the worlds,” Karen adds, because days earlier she had summoned the strength to tell her husband that he had to leave.