I work in gender-based violence prevention. Every day I’m across harrowing incidents. My job is to hold them with care, look for patterns, and figure out what needs to change in workplaces.
I try hard to keep professional distance from these stories. The Sam Wood allegations closed it. I felt physically sick reading the allegations this week, and it’s taken me the week to understand why.
I didn’t watch The Bachelor in 2015, or any season to be precise. No shade, I’m partial to mind-numbing reality tv, just not this show. I became a single mum in 2016, and by 2018 I was dating. Before I asked myself whether I liked someone, I asked whether I’d trust him around my son. That was the year Sam and Snezana married, and the coverage was everywhere. My girlfriends kept sending me the articles. Look at them, they’d write. Look at how he is with her daughter. It was their gentle way of telling me to keep going, that it could work out for my son and me. And, indeed, the story brought a smile to my face.
Professionally, I knew a loving public image tells you little about what happens behind a closed door. But I wasn’t reading those articles as a lawyer. I was a single mum who’d started dating, and it was nice to see a man so openly embrace a child who wasn’t biologically his. I didn’t think about it more deeply than that.
Sam Wood has been charged with assault and strangulation in a domestic setting. He denies the allegations and will defend them, and a court will decide what happened. Strangulation is not a minor detail in that charge. Research shows a woman strangled by a partner is around seven times more likely to later be killed by them. It is one of the clearest warning signs of lethal violence we have. I’ve long believed strangulation belongs alongside attempted murder in how our law treats it. That’s a debate for another piece, but it’s one we need to have.
But a different detail from the bail hearing shook me.
The court heard that when Snezana’s daughter told him to stop yelling, he allegedly approached her aggressively, and her mother stepped into his path and told him to leave her daughter alone. It was her daughter who called triple zero.
I put my phone down and looked over at my son playing cricket in the backyard.
I have imagined that moment. Not those people, but that moment. It is the fear underneath every careful decision I made about who got to meet my son. Reading it as an allegation against the man whose marriage my friends sent me as proof of hope, the professional distance I rely on in these cases was gone.
In 2022, research by Anne Summers found single mothers are more than three times as likely as other women to have experienced violence from a previous partner: 60 per cent, compared with 17 per cent.
Behind that number are women I know and love. For many of them, dating again meant carrying the memory of what a previous partner did, alongside the same careful calculations about their children that I was making.
More than 50 Australian women have been killed by violence this year, most by men they knew, and most don’t get national attention. The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare reported that in 2024-25 one woman was killed every 11 days by an intimate partner.
Last month, NSW Deputy Police Commissioner Peter McKenna said police are called to a domestic violence incident every three minutes. That figure shocked people. But what hit me is how many incidents experienced by women never reach police at all. McKenna has also said the average victim-survivor experiences around 26 incidents before she feels able to come forward.
Two years ago, the Prime Minister declared domestic violence a national crisis. Yet federal spending on domestic violence is still a tiny fraction of our economy, and most of it goes to responding after the harm is done, not preventing it. In Queensland, the government cut domestic and family violence prevention funding by $38.5 million in the 2026/27 state budget. Our leaders keep telling us they’re horrified. Then they hand down budgets that say otherwise.