5: Hungry and Holy
Illustration by Madison Griffiths
Content warning: This show looks at domestic abuse head on. This particular episode zooms in on what men weaponize against their partners in abusive relationships: be it their faith, their community, or anything else that holds significance in their partners’ lives. It also documents Roia’s abuse explicitly, and from there, zooms out to reveal snippets of the stories of other women, some who were tragically murdered. Because of this, it is quite heavy at times. So, be gentle with yourself, listen with care, and know that support is readily available for any unpleasant feelings that might pop up. Check out our website for a list of people you can speak to if the going gets tough. If you or someone you know needs assistance, please contact: Lifeline (13 11 14), 1800 RESPECT (1800 737 732) or any of these support services. Listen with care.
“Abuse grows where love once could have. Interpersonal violence is a double-edged sword. And this, this tense and dangerous phenomenon, makes any sort of court proceeding incredibly hard. A webbed thing. The end, or so it seems, of a terrible, loveless promise.”
In episode 5 Hungry and Holy, Roia tackles the criminal justice system head on as she faces her abuser in the courtroom. In a bid to protect himself, he uses his faith to distract and delay court proceedings. Roia considers how religious institutions of all kinds can be weaponised by men when it comes to the way they exercise violence.
Further information
‘I don’t want to do this’: Forced into marriage, Ruqia Haidari was dead two months later, WA Today
SA not ready for a woman president - Xhosa King Zwelonke Sigcau, SABC News
Sarah Hanson-Young calls out David Leyonhjelm for 'offensive and sexist slur', Guardian News
Priests to Pope: Stop the Sexism, the Real News Network
Credits
Co-producers: Madison Griffiths and Beth Atkinson-Quinton
Lead Storyteller: Roia Atmar
Sensitivity Editor: Shakira Hussein
Assistant Producer: Danae Gibson
Sound Designer and Engineer: Jon Tjhia
Guests in this episode: Hala Abdelnour
Founder of the Institute of non-violence, Hala Abdelnour is a highly qualified and experienced consultant and professional trainer, with specialist skills in family violence, intersectionality, and diversity and inclusion.
Tender season two is Broadwave podcast supported by the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria, and proudly sponsored by the Victorian Women’s Trust.
Get in touch
We love hearing from our listeners. Stay in touch across Twitter, Instagram and Facebook at @broadwavepods, and @tenderpodcast on Twitter.
Tender S2, Episode #5: Hungry and Holy
[Music: ambient, expansive and sharp.]
Madison Griffiths (content warning): Hey, Madison here. Just before you start: this show looks at domestic abuse head on. This particular episode zooms in on what men weaponize against their partners in abusive relationships: be it their faith, their community, or anything else that holds significance in their partners’ lives. It also documents Roia’s abuse explicitly, and from there, zooms out to reveal snippets of the stories of other women, some who were tragically murdered. Because of this, it is quite heavy at times. So, be gentle with yourself, listen with care, and know that support is readily available for any unpleasant feelings that might pop up. Check out our website for a list of people you can speak to if the going gets tough.
[Music: strings sound, piano joins. Ambient, eerie and tense.]
Roia Atmar: There’s a tired fact that lives in all abusive relationships, and it’s one that hurts to think about.
Domestic abuse differs from other forms of violence, and this has nothing to do with the echo of an insult or the hot sting of a slap. Domestic abuse can often flourish without any physical violence. In fact, It lives in the soft threats, the feeling of being controlled and monitored, the way your agency falls and leaks out with every curse, with every sideward glance. What sets domestic abuse apart from other forms of violence is the interpersonal dimension of it; the fact that it admits that what was once postured as commitment, has evolved into something monstrous. Something ugly. Something of an antithesis of what it promised.
The origin story of many abusive relationships is as unique as any love story. Sometimes, abuse grows in the cavities of an intense love-affair between two teenagers as they fumble around nervously in quiet locker-rooms, [sound effects: teenagers laugh] or in the backs of cars. Sometimes, abuse grows in more orchestrated and deliberate interactions: an arranged marriage, the looming tension between a mother and her son or a daughter and her father as they occupy the same wearied space. Sometimes, abuse snakes its way through to the heart of any matter by way of emojis, of cute texts, of matching with a handsome person on a dating app only to have agitation grow and swell where it promised it wouldn’t, for flirtatious banter to turn into foreboding threats.
[Music: fades out to silence. Scene ends. New music starts: foreboding, serious, like someone in pain]
Abuse grows where love once could have. Interpersonal violence is a double-edged sword. And this, this tense and dangerous phenomenon, makes any sort of court proceeding incredibly hard. A webbed thing. The end, or so it seems, of a terrible, loveless promise. Not only did something die here, something died where it was meant to thrive. And here, in this courtroom—a space littered with the echo of dry legalities, of shoes marching on tiles to rooms where tears are dabbed and forgotten, of the apprehended sentencing and the silence that follows—is where it is laid to rest.
You’re listening to Tender, a Broadwave podcast that asks the question: what happens when a woman leaves? In this season, and last, we offer an insight into the intricacies of the survivor’s after, a deeply personal exploration. But for some of us, that journey finds itself embedded into the public psyche, into the rights and reputation of a state apparently designed to seek justice: to punish, to teach, to evolve accordingly. When my abuser decided to set me alight, he lit the fuse of his own ‘after’ at the same time. He invited the outside world into a domestic horror that he had let run riot.
And he was charged for it.
[Music: shifts. Plods along, eerie, creepy]
When you separate yourself from the grips of abuse, you are forced to see your abuser in a stark and unforgiving light. You are forced to see his violence, divorced from each and every tired ‘excuse’ he could muster. The domestic script is turned on its head when it is seen, poked and looked at through a bureaucratic system. But this wasn’t always the case, and very often still isn’t in a distorted system pasted together to achieve ‘justice’. Once upon a time, in the recent future even, as recently as 2012, the abuser’s tired remarks surrounding why he did what he did, were taken seriously… in the court of law.
When Chamanjot Singh was sentenced in the New South Wales Supreme Court to six years jail after murdering his wife, his sentence was manslaughter by provocation, not murder. Despite slitting his wife’s throat in cold blood, his argument was this: he was under the impression that his wife had been unfaithful and was intending to leave the marriage. In many ways, the law—when it tries to understand the perpetrator, to tap into his mindset at the time of the crime—legitimises lethal domestic violence. The empathy it often reserves for those who assert control and dominance, so much so that a life was lost, only works to reaffirm the infrastructure of abuse in the first place: namely, that she was his. And he had to do whatever he could to keep it that way. But she wasn’t. She never was.
When my abuser watched the flames curl and swallow me, as I held our child—my child—I would have no court of law argue that it was something induced, something provoked. The smoke was there, right from the beginning.
[Sound effects: A sound like the clicking of the tongue signifying the end of the scene. Reverberates.]
[Music: reflective, shifting towards rage]
It was January 1999 when the trial went ahead, and the heat was stifling. There were cameras, movement, a kind of buzz in the air that I couldn’t quite understand. And then, there was him: something more than a man, now… but the sweaty and awful image of my undoing. There’s something perverse about having the person who tried to kill you, as you wear the wounds that demonstrate his attempts, argue innocence… and be afforded that right. But what made the court proceedings even more convoluted had little to do with the actions themselves, but with how my abuser used his faith—my faith—to confuse, derail and undermine my pursuit of justice. And how, in a court of law largely unfamiliar with multicultural Australia, he was believed.
He tried to stand before me, before the court system of Australia, as an image of Muslim ‘goodness’: surrounded by his family, the pillars of his faith.
An abuser often assumes a role larger, and more precarious, than an actual… person. Extensions of their abuse can be found in the lateral violence that comes from their network, their position in the world, their capacity to isolate you from others.
[Layered audio-scape with Trump and other men in power’s voice]
Donald Trump (Donald Trump’s Sexism Through the Decades, NowThis News): You know, I don’t want to sound too much like a chauvinist, but when I come home and dinner’s not ready, I go through the roof, okay.
Newsreader (SA not ready for a woman president - Xhosa King Zwelonke Sigcau, SABC News):Now, Xhosa King Zwelonke Sigcau says he doesn’t believe South Africa is ready for a woman president…(fades out)
Sarah Hanson-Young (Sarah Hanson-Young calls out David Leyonhjelm for 'offensive and sexist slur', Guardian News): Earlier today, during the motion relating to violence against women, Senator Leyonhjelm yelled an offensive and sexist slur at me across the chamber.
Miriam Duignan, Wijngaards Institute for Catholic Research (Priests to Pope: Stop the Sexism, The Real News Network): When you have the leader of the largest faith group in the world, with 1.2 billion catholics, who has referred to women as ribs, not once, but twice. Then you really have a problem.
Hala Abdelnour: Part of the reason I keep coming back to the system we’re in is… the man will always be able to weaponize his culture and faith against his partner in a system that allows him to.
Roia Atmar: You just heard from Hala Abdelnour,a family violence practitioner who specialises in her work with male perpetrators and culturally diverse communities.
Hala Abdelnour: In his own community, which is isolated but also has not addressed gender-equality, let’s say, that conversation is different in different spaces, but in the broader context of being in Australia.... Men can weaponise anything against women. Because, I mean, our own politicians are doing it.
Roia Atmar: It wasn’t just him I was dealing with, anymore; it was the image of respectability and religion he had formulated in an attempt to distract and seduce the court. It was his family… the columns of his ‘after’, bolstering him up. His relatives.
Hala Abdelnour: Look whether it’s justice, whether it’s a police response, the minute somebody is from overseas, different faith background, different skin colour, we start attaching everything going on in their lives… to that! I will be in a conversation with someone who is far more of an expert than I am on gendered issues and understanding gender dynamics, power and control, coercive control, and we can go in so deep into those things and I’m so blown away by their level of knowledge, but the minute we talk about someone from overseas, they say: that’s their culture, that’s their faith. It’s everyone’s culture and faith! Why did you just throw all of your knowledge out the window because somebody is of a different background and skin-colour?
Roia Atmar: In an attempt to divert the court away from the issue at hand, he even tried to argue that the trial couldn’t possibly go ahead due to it being held in the month of Ramadan, the holiest month of the Muslim calendar, where adults fast from dawn to dusk for approximately thirty days. Hala Abdelnour: That for me is inherent racism, it just is... I’m going to name it. It’s so inherent to all of us. We have to work really hard to unpack that. So, that’s going to follow you into a courtroom. And there might be one worker in that courtroom that gets it, that’s done some work to decolonise their brain, to de-racialise their thoughts - doesn’t matter! Because the whole system hasn’t done that.
Roia Atmar: He was hungry… hungry and holy and unable to stand trial.
But I too had been hungry for a long time; hungry for a judicial proceeding that would see him disappear from my life, that would see my children be able to flourish without fear, to live my life honestly and safely as a Muslim woman in this country.
[Sound effects: court proceedings, room chatter. Judge taps gavel.]
Roia Atmar: Twelve years. That’s what they explained to me that he got… twelve years. Twelve years, as in nearly double the length it takes for each and every cell in the body to regenerate. Twelve years, as in a small lifetime, as in how long it takes for a baby to become a child, for a child to become a teenager.
For life and growth to ensue.
Twelve years, he got.
[Music: spacious, eerie]
Roia Atmar: But I had been sentenced long before him, sentenced from the first moment he locked eyes with me, his fourteen-year-old bride, as he threw my doll I had packed in my suitcase from Afghanistan to Pakistan to Australia into a metal bin, my toy, a symbol of comfort and safety.
In much the same way, I too got twelve years: twelve years to tend to my children, to occupy crowded pubs and sweaty dance floors alongside eager patrons, to breathe, to rest, to fast if I so wish. A small and petrifying marriage summarised into one dismal court charge that confirmed, without question, that this man wanted to hurt me. Twelve years… or so I thought.
[Music: tension grows, dark]
Roia Atmar: What does it mean to ‘earn’ your way out of the harm you’ve carried out? To stir awake in a cell for the last time, having ‘gained’ the option to leave, to reintegrate oneself into the world again? As my abuser counted down the days until he was able to step foot into the Perth he once knew, I was kept in the dark, forever detained by a sentence with no expiration date, anxiously anticipating his release.
[Sound effects: Roia enters her home, puts keys down, her children are making noise, homely ambience, she opens a letter.]
Roia Atmar: It was a Friday, and he was being released. It was a Friday, and I looked fretfully toward my children as I processed the letter, a foldable courtesy in a tired envelope notifying me that the man who tried to kill me once, the man who may again, was being released. In a panic, I rang the corrections body and pleaded with them: first, that they were making a mistake, and second, that if they weren’t… where was he working? Staying? Occupying? I need to know, I uttered, desperate.
Roia Atmar with the echo of a corrections officer (voiced by Jon Tjhia): That’s an invasion of his privacy, Roia. I can’t tell you that.
Roia Atmar: When survivors are met with a system that assumes, or at least attempts to ensure some kind of balance between perpetrator and victim, a few concrete facets of the identities of survivors are taken for granted. An invasion of his privacy, sure. I can understand that… on paper. But I can’t seem to understand my own invasionsin such simplistic terms. What about the sort of terror that was able to envelop me when it occured in his privacy? When his privacy was made sacred? Protected? His privacy… as in the thing now being preserved as I beg for the right to run, to avoid, to tip-toe around a living, breathing threat of a man.
[Sound effects: Children playing at home]
Roia Atmar: But it wasn’t just me, now. It wasn’t ever.
As social worker Dr. Fiona Buchanan writes, “far too often, women are perceived as passive victims of domestic abuse, who while enduring unconscionable abuse, are unable to protect their own children.”
I had been sheltering my children from the horrors that developed in the home we shared with my ex-husband. It was hard-wired into me, now: conflict was avoided at all costs, abuse was preempted, aggression was subdued with timely dinners and modest conversations, about the weather, his work, my clothing, the way the kids played. My children’s wellbeing was safeguarded. I was a mother, after all. It was my job.
Hala Abdelnour: One of the greatest privileges I’ve had is to sit through hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours of men’s behaviour change groups. When you meet that many men that use different forms of violence toward their partners and children and sometimes other people - from every kind of background - and you hear them say the exact same thing, there is no doubt in my mind that gender has a massive role in this and that the way men are raised and socialized and indoctrinated about their sense of entitlement, privilege, their role in society. Regardless of the religion, the faith, the ethnicity, or cultural background, violence towards women is prevalent across all communities. And, we live in a world where we normalise violence. Where we accept it. If it’s being perpetrated toward the people we think it’s okay to perpetrate against: Indigenous people, women, children, people with disability, LGBTQI+, particularly trans. There’s certain cohorts where we say: that’s what happens, they always have [experienced violence.]
[Music: fades out. A moment of silence. A woman's voice starts singing acapella. It’s imbued with sadness and grief. Piano starts]
Roia Atmar: I’d like to take you back for a moment to a December six years prior, a balmy Perth afternoon.
I’d like to take you back to the moment everything changed, the moment my ‘after’ began. I’d like to remind you of the time an orange blaze curled its seething flames around my body, the way I watched from someplace else, somehow, as I stood before the man who promised to love me... as he set me alight.
I want to take you back, because it wasn’t just us, and perhaps it never was. As I found myself swaddled by the fire that would eventually ignite his sentence, our separation, the prospect of a difficult but necessary future away from him, I looked down to find my daughter in my arms. Right then and there. My sweet, tenuous child, being held by her mother as she found herself enveloped in flames, completely ablaze, but determined to protect her.
They were always there, my children. And I was too. And as they evolved and changed, figuring out their own extraordinary ‘afters’, I wasn’t going to let anyone step in their way. Especially not the system designed to protect them. I would stop at nothing. I was my own fiery inferno. My own blaze. I was their mother.
[Silence]
[Music: serious, pitter patter]
Roia Atmar: I want to thank Hala Abdelnour for her generous contributions to this episode, and for the work she does in advocating for an Australia free from violence.
This season is supported by the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria and UNESCO Melbourne City of Literature, and is kindly sponsored by the Victorian Women’s Trust, an advocate for violence prevention, fair wages for equal work, and the equal representation of women, men and gender diverse people in the decision making processes that shape our lives.
You are listening to Tender, a Broadwave production about what happens once women leave abusive relationships. This season is created by Madison Griffiths, Beth Atkinson-Quinton and me, Roia Atmar. Until next time.
Multiple Voices: Broadwave, Broadwave, Broadwave, Broadwave, Broadwave.