For years now, Australia has judged its progress on domestic and family violence by one question: did she leave?
We count crisis beds, police call-outs, protection orders. Lately we count paid domestic violence leave entitlements too, and rightly so, those things matter. But they all measure the same single moment – the point at which a woman gets to physical safety. What none of them measure is what happens to her in the years after that.
I’ve lived through this myself. I know what it is to walk away from abuse and then realise that leaving was never the finish line everyone assumes it to be. It’s the start of something much longer and much harder, and Australia hasn’t laid down the road for that journey yet, let alone built the vehicles that will carry victim-survivors.
The numbers back this up
Around 275,000 Australian women experience physical or sexual violence from a current partner each year. Roughly 90,000 of them want to leave but feel they can’t, and among that group, a quarter say the reason comes down to something as blunt as money. No savings, no income of her own, nowhere to go. It’s one of the core reasons women end up back in abusive homes.
I’d push back hard on anyone who chalks that up to “willpower.” That framing is not just wrong, it’s insulting to what these women are actually dealing with. What’s missing isn’t resolve. What’s missing is the financial infrastructure that would allow her to stay away.
And even for the women who do get out, the economic fallout is brutal. Mothers who’ve experienced partner violence see their household income drop by 34% on average, from around $54,648 down to $35,921. About 60% of women who leave violent relationships are working, but their pay so often isn’t enough to hold a household together that roughly half end up relying on government payments just to get by.
And for many women, leaving doesn’t even end the financial abuse, it just changes its shape. The child support system and the family law process become the next battleground, and often the most exhausting one. Withheld or inconsistent child support payments, drawn-out custody disputes, and legal fees that run into the tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of dollars all become new ways to keep control over a woman long after she’s left the house.
Employment shouldn’t be the reward for recovery
I see this play out constantly in the women I work with. Capable, qualified and driven women who show up having been out of the workforce for a year or longer. Their confidence gutted and their resume full of gaps they can’t explain without explaining everything else. That’s not an accident. It’s exactly what coercive control and financial abuse is built to do: leave a woman who can’t afford to walk away, and if she manages to anyway, can’t easily prove to an employer that she’s still employable. And she certainly does not feel employable.
What I keep seeing, over and over, is that when women are given real support back into work, not a job ad forwarded to them but an actual trauma-informed path back in, the change in them is lasting and it’s obvious.
So when I say employment isn’t the reward for recovery, I mean it literally, it’s the engine that drives recovery in the first place. A pay cheque is independence, and it’s proof, to a woman who’s spent years being told she’s worthless, that she isn’t.
Kindness keeps the door open
None of this works, though, unless employment comes with some understanding of what recovery actually looks like. Trauma doesn’t run on a tidy schedule. It doesn’t switch off the day she signs a lease or gets a restraining order granted. Often the health impacts show up years later, long after everyone around her has decided the crisis is over. And a workplace that doesn’t get that will do what most workplaces do without even realising it: ease her back out the door, then read her exit as proof she wasn’t ready, when really it was the workplace that wasn’t ready for her.
This, to me, is Australia’s real blind spot. We’ve built an entire policy response around leaving, and almost nothing for the years afterwards, when she’s actually trying to rebuild a career, an income, a sense of who she is. Small businesses employ four in ten working Australians, and they’re often the ones dealing with this on the ground, with none of the structure or support to do it well.
Paid domestic violence leave is a genuine step forward, I don’t want to undersell it. But it’s also an entitlement sitting on its own with nothing built around it. Big business and government employers have a huge role to play, as large workplaces can, and should, absorb some of the cost of enabling economic inclusion for victim-survivors as the burden on small business can often be too much.
A system that’s meant to protect her, and often doesn’t
We also need to be honest about the fact that some of the very systems built to help women in this situation end up prolonging the harm.
The family law system is meant to be a neutral space for resolving disputes, but for a lot of women it becomes another arena for the same control they were trying to escape.
Legal costs alone can force a woman back to the negotiating table on worse terms than she deserves, simply because she’s run out of money to keep fighting. Child support arrangements, when they’re not properly enforced, become just another lever a former partner can pull. None of this shows up in the statistics we usually reach for, but it’s every bit as much a part of the economic story of domestic violence as the wage gap or the government payments.
If we’re serious about her rebuild, we can’t keep treating the family law and child support systems as separate from the conversation about financial abuse. They’re not separate. For a lot of women, they’re where it continues.
The missing piece
If we’re serious about cutting the long-term cost of domestic and family violence in this country, government and employers need to start building what comes after the exit: workplaces that understand that trauma has no timeline, hiring practices that don’t punish a resume for its gaps, a family law system that doesn’t let cost and delay become tools of control, and a real acknowledgment that steady, well-supported work isn’t a nice-to-have alongside recovery. It is the recovery.
I didn’t rebuild my life the day I left. Ten years on I am still rebuilding it every day. But what I did have all along, unlike so many other women, was an income that was mine, and the knowing I could stand on my own two feet.
That’s what recovery looks like in practice, and it’s the part our systems still won’t fund. If we want to stop domestic violence from shaping a woman’s next twenty years, we need to stop treating her exit as the finish line and start treating her employment as the first step. Until we measure recovery by whether she can support herself, not just by whether she got away, we’ll keep mistaking the beginning of her story for its end.