Memoirs of Domestic Violence Victims

By Lachelle Wood

11 min read

Why does it matter? Because a profit-driven industry is already operating inside domestic violence shelters — and almost no one is watching.

Nobody invited them in. No policy paper authorized the arrangement, no government tender opened the market. Private security, historically built to guard corporate lobbies, industrial sites, and the gated perimeters of the affluent, simply noticed where the funding had started flowing and showed up at the doors of domestic violence survivors with duress alarms, CCTV cameras, and risk assessment forms. Some of what followed was quietly remarkable. Some of it was scandalous. Most of it went unmonitored by anyone. The debate still consuming policymakers — whether private security belongs in this space at all — turns out to be the wrong argument. They're already there, already operating inside the private homes of women who had survived the violence itself but hadn't yet found their way out. Nobody designed a system for this. It simply materialized.

The System Supposed to Protect Domestic Violence Victims Is Quietly Failing Them

Australia's response to domestic violence is a budget decision made visible: intimate partners kill more than twice as many Australian women each year as have died in all terrorist incidents since 2001, yet federal allocations sent tens of billions to counterterrorism while domestic violence received a $100 million pledge. The gap tracks political priority, not actual harm. One threat is a national emergency; the other is a social welfare concern.

That calculation plays out at street level. Victoria police answer a domestic violence call every two minutes (68,134 incidents in 2014 alone). Officers stretched that thin don't have much left to give. Seventy percent of survivors found their police responses unsatisfying, describing officers who treated their reports as trivial and made clear that showing up was an inconvenience. Many stopped calling at all.

Courts compound the problem. The legal process layers its own harm onto what victims have already experienced, a pattern researchers call "secondary victimization." Survivors face aggressive cross-examination designed to undermine credibility. Judges minimize violence in custody hearings. Abusers exploit family court procedures to pursue relentless litigation, not to win arguments but to drain partners of money, time, and psychological reserves — the practice lawyers and advocates call "paper abuse," using the courts as a new instrument of control.

Thirty years of homicide data in Australia, the UK, and Canada show domestic violence death rates holding flat despite mandatory arrest policies, specialist courts, awareness campaigns, and new laws criminalizing coercive control — the pattern of domination that precedes physical violence. The institutional effort is real. The outcomes haven't moved.

A pattern this consistent doesn't leave a gap; it creates one. In Australia, beginning around 2014, that gap filled with private security. Workers arrived at survivors' homes with clipboards and cameras, offering protection the state wouldn't provide, answerable to no one.

A Boy's Murder in 2014 Sent $2.4 Billion Into the Domestic Violence Sector — and Security Companies Followed the Money

In February 2014, Greg Anderson beat his eleven-year-old son Luke to death during cricket practice at a suburban Melbourne oval, then died before police arrived. Luke's mother, Rosie Batty, walked into that scene. Within days she was speaking to journalists: not to grieve privately, but to name what had happened as a systemic failure. Her former partner had been reported to police and other agencies repeatedly. None of it had stopped him.

Australia watched. Within a year, Batty had addressed the Victorian Parliament to a standing ovation, been named Australian of the Year, and launched a foundation in her son's name. Her argument was specific: not that one violent man had slipped through, but that every institution responsible for protecting women and children had been structurally arranged to fail them. The argument landed. Victoria established a Royal Commission into Family Violence in 2015. After a year of hearings and more than a thousand written submissions, it produced 227 recommendations. The Andrews Labor government pledged to implement every one, committing $2.4 billion and describing domestic violence as "Australia's number one law and order issue." Nothing close to that sum had ever been directed at the problem before.

That money needed somewhere to go, and it went fast. Victoria created Flexible Support Packages that gave frontline caseworkers discretionary budgets of up to $10,000 per client for immediate safety needs. Across 15 agencies, roughly two-thirds of that money flowed toward safety and security, about $13.2 million annually in Victoria alone. Services that had spent years fighting for basic resources suddenly had real purchasing power.

Security companies noticed immediately. A representative from one national peak body described the atmosphere after the Royal Commission funding announcements: firms began cold-calling and pitching, she said, with "quite a lot of kind of dollar signs in people's eyes." This wasn't gradual market development. It was a sprint — companies that normally guarded corporate campuses and shopping centers identifying a new contract stream and moving to capture it.

The discomfort with that picture sits just under the surface. The same sector built around enforcing exclusion in commercial spaces and protecting executives in transit was now entering the homes of women who had already been failed by every institution they'd trusted. Security workers, mostly male, often visited clients without a caseworker present. They checked phones for stalkerware, assessed exit routes, advised on social media settings, recommended where to mount cameras. No supervisor stood in the room. No caseworker took notes. The visit was just the security worker and the woman, in her kitchen or living room, going through the vulnerabilities in her life. The money behind them was legitimate. The gap they were filling was real. But the system they were operating in hadn't been designed — it had just arrived.

The Company That Charged Extra to Release the Assault Footage

After a woman in Australia was assaulted by her partner in her own home, she did something reasonable: she went to retrieve the evidence. A domestic violence service had arranged for a security company to install a camera at her property. The footage, streaming to the company's servers, had captured her partner arriving before the attack. She needed it for the police. The company told her it would cost more money.

The camera had been installed for her protection. What nobody had negotiated (the domestic violence service later admitted they hadn't known to) was who owned the footage it produced. The company held it as an asset. Her caseworker called and argued. The service refused to pay, rightly pointing out that no contract obligated the client to buy back recordings made in her own home. The company stayed rude and immovable. The client, already traumatized from the assault, eventually stopped fighting for it. The prosecution stalled. Without the footage, the case collapsed. Her assailant went uncharged, the record stayed clean, and she had nowhere left to turn. The company faced no consequences and remained eligible to bid on the next contract.

The assumption that a flawed security presence beats no security presence holds only when the failure mode is incompetence: cameras that don't capture a clear image, workers who run late. It breaks down when the company recognizes the leverage it holds over someone too exhausted and frightened to sue.

The research found a second failure mode, harder to fix than bad contracts. An app developer sold a GPS and audio emergency-alert application to a domestic violence service, which deployed it to a significant number of clients. After the rollout, his ex-partner filed rape and domestic violence allegations and disclosed that the developer had been storing client names and personal details — victim data — on a home computer. An intervention order was eventually issued. The service shut down the app. But for the entire deployment window, an alleged perpetrator had held a detailed list of local victims and their whereabouts. Every woman who'd been issued that app, catalogued on a private hard drive.

The security industry draws from a workforce that's predominantly male in a country where the overwhelming majority of domestic violence perpetrators are men. Successful prosecutions are rare; most abusers live without formal records. Any program routing security workers through the private homes of domestic violence survivors carries a near-certainty that some of those workers are abusers. Background checks catch criminal histories. Most abusers don't have them.

When a company extorted assault footage, or when an alleged perpetrator held victim data, the domestic violence service's main recourse was to quietly stop using that company. Nothing prevented it from approaching the next service with a tender. The researcher who interviewed more than 90 stakeholders found no mechanism to stop this: no central registry, no mandatory reporting, no license that could be revoked. One security worker described competitors at a government briefing focused entirely on how large the revenue opportunity was. A domestic violence service representative had a different word for it: a "cowboy industry."

One Button Press Ended a Hostage Situation — and an 11-Year-Old Stopped Sleeping With a Knife

A woman received a personal duress device on a Thursday. By Sunday, her partner — wired on methamphetamine — had her and her two infant children trapped inside their home. He smashed her phone. He said he was going to kill her. Somewhere in that window, she found the button and pressed it.

Police arrived in time. The device's live audio feed had captured everything, and the recording became evidence. Her partner went to jail.

The device had been in her possession for three days.

This is the version of commercial security involvement in domestic violence response that tends not to circulate — not because it's anomalous, but because it's harder to build a policy critique around. The previous sections described devices that didn't charge, companies that blamed victims for product failures, an app developer whose personal data practices turned out to be his ex-partner's safety risk. All documented. But the same industry, the same category of device, also produced a scene at traffic lights where a woman pressed her button, police arrived before her partner finished smashing her car windows with a tyre lever, and the babies in the backseat were fine.

Over four or five years of deployment, one service worker estimated, actual emergency activations numbered fewer than a dozen. Clients still described the cameras as things they loved and wouldn't live without.

Through the Salvation Army's Safer in the Home program, a security company visited one woman's property and made physical upgrades — better locks, sensor lighting, adjustments to the yard. Her eleven-year-old daughter, who had been so frightened she'd been sleeping with a knife in her drawer, started sleeping through the night. The mother had been checking that drawer for months.

That outcome doesn't appear in crime statistics. No breach was deterred, no perpetrator convicted. What happened is that a child's nervous system settled enough for her to sleep.

Indigenous women who face community reprisals if they report to authorities, undocumented workers who've concluded that enduring the violence is the cost of staying in the country — these populations don't access state response networks at all. Security companies, carrying no prosecutorial function and no mandatory reporting obligation, enter as something genuinely different. One Indigenous security worker travelled to a small community for a single assessment and ended up conducting three, pulled in through word of mouth during the visit. Three women in that community got a safety assessment that day. None of them would have accepted it from anyone with a badge.

What the research kept finding — across the devices, the audits, the assessments in small towns — is that the value was psychological rather than operational. Not the activation: the anchor. Evidence, often for the first time, that someone had treated this particular woman's safety as worth investing in. These companies can produce outcomes the formal system cannot reach, in populations the formal system cannot reach. The question isn't whether they belong. It's who's watching them once they're there.

Banning the Industry Is Fantasy — and Waiting for Government to Act Is Leaving Victims Unprotected Right Now

What's the obvious policy fix when a commercially-motivated, largely unaccountable industry gains privileged access to domestic violence survivors?

Most people land on two answers: ban it, or regulate it harder. Both fail in practice.

A total prohibition has surface appeal — until you account for what gets lost. This book has documented what disappears if security companies exit the space: the child who stopped sleeping with a knife in her drawer after a security company upgraded her mother's home, the women in small Indigenous communities who wouldn't accept help from any agency with a police relationship. Prohibition eliminates those outcomes too. It's not a serious option.

Which leaves stronger state regulation. Victoria tried this. What happened is worth sitting with.

In April 2017, the Victorian government announced the Personal Safety Initiative — a statewide program that would vet an approved panel of security companies and deploy them to domestic violence clients across the state. It made sense on paper: instead of every service guessing independently, the government would evaluate centrally and share the results. By June 2018, companies were being interviewed for panel placement. By late 2018, the design had been scrapped and replaced with a looser model. By early 2019, two years after the announcement, the Personal Safety Initiative had delivered zero services to zero victims.

The paralysis wasn't corruption. It was the weight of getting it right. When a government formally approves a security company, it assumes accountability for what that company then does to clients. Every incident becomes a political liability. Every standard creates litigation risk if imperfectly applied. The same caution that makes state regulation appealing in principle ground Victoria's program to a halt. Victims waited through those two years regardless.

The workable path is less clean, but it already exists. Security companies cannot reach domestic violence clients directly — they need a DV organisation to refer them in. That structural fact hands those organisations a power they rarely use collectively: the ability to blacklist. A company that charges extra for assault footage, or whose worker makes unsolicited contact with a client, depends entirely on DV services for access to this market. One organisation quietly dropping a provider changes nothing. A sector that shares information — maintains a live record of which companies have behaved badly, circulates assessments of which devices actually work, demands data deletion clauses before signing anything — changes market incentives without waiting for legislation. A company that demands extra payment before releasing assault footage appears on that record; the next service considering them sees it before signing.

This is unglamorous. It requires services, already stretched thin, to build accountability infrastructure. It requires overcoming the impulse to stay quiet after a bad experience; services have historically gone silent to avoid the embarrassment of admitting they exposed clients to a problematic company. But the alternative is a state program that takes two years to deliver nothing. The leverage already exists. The question is whether anyone uses it.

The Industry Is Already Inside — The Only Variable Left Is Whether Anyone Is Paying Attention

The companies are inside. That's where to begin, not end. They arrived before anyone designed a framework for them, and they'll be there long after the next government initiative stalls in committee. The women whose experiences opened this research didn't have the luxury of waiting for a cleaner answer. Some of them sleep better because of it. Some of them nearly handed their location data to an abuser. Both things are true about the same industry. What sits between those two outcomes isn't legislation. It's the judgment of the caseworker who decides which company gets the referral, and whether her sector has built any collective memory about which ones to trust — a gatekeeping role nobody trained for, and right now, the only lever that moves.