6: My Name is Roia Atmar
Content warning: This show looks at domestic abuse head on. This particular episode uncovers Roia’s experience of going through the family law system. But, it also document’s her slow release from the grips of his abuse, as she stands boldly as a survivor. 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.
“My name is Roia Atmar, and—in my after—I made it a mission that other women find proof of their own. Proof that there is no uncomplicated route, that fear and shame lives in the most dubious of places, even still. That abuse does not end with the last lighting of a match, with the last foul insult, with the last bellow of a man—or ten—as they stand on the dusty steps of a court, the same court where women wanting nothing more than justice stand, holding space for any semblance of pride they can muster. Women that fight for their very own afters.”
In the sixth and final episode, My Name is Roia Atmar, she battles through the family court system as she is confronted not only by her abuser, but by the loud and obnoxious presence of “Men's Rights Activists”. As she fights to keep herself and her children safe, Roia reflects on the ongoing nature of healing, survival and hope.
Further information
The Mother Wound, Amani Haydar
Because I Love Him: One woman's journey from wounds to wisdom, Ashlee Donohue
Shattered lives by Malcolm Brown, The Sydney Morning Herald
Murders of Jack and Jennifer Edwards by estranged father ‘were preventable’, NSW coroner rules by Michael McGowan, The Guardian
Welcome to the Men’s Rights Activists Seething Divorced Resentful Fathers Support Group, The Guardian
‘Women are routinely discredited’: How courts fail mothers and children who have survived abuse, The Guardian
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: Samantha Jeffries, Amani Haydar and Ashlee Donohue
Samantha Jeffries is a criminologist, academic and advocate for anti-violence. Jeffries is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Griffith University. She has been working for twenty years in the area of gender, victimisation, criminalisation and justice. She has done a lot of work in the domestic violence space and also does work with incarcerated women in different parts of the world and their experiences of violence.
Amani Haydar is an award-winning artist, lawyer, mum and advocate for women’s health and safety based in Western Sydney. In 2018 Amani’s self-portrait titled Insert Headline Here was a finalist in the Archibald Prize. Since then, her writing and illustrations have been published in Arab, Australian, Other, Sweatshop Women Volume Two, SBS Voices and ABC News Online. In 2020 Amani was a Finalist for the NSW Premier’s Woman of the Year Award and was named Local Woman of the Year for Bankstown in recognition of her advocacy against domestic violence. Amani serves on the board of the Bankstown Women’s Health Centre and uses visual art and writing to explore the personal and political dimensions of abuse, loss, identity and resilience.
Ashlee Donohue is a proud Dunghutti woman born and raised in Kempsey, NSW. Ashlee is an author, educator, advocate and speaker for the anti-violence message. With a Master's degree in Education, she was awarded with the UTS Human Rights Reconciliation Award. Ashlee has presented at the United Nations Status of Women Forums in New York City, and been the lead writer and co-creator for numerous anti-violence campaigns. She is also a published author with her memoir titled ‘Because I love him’ a personal account of love, motherhood, domestic violence and survival. Ashlee is currently the CEO of Mudgin-Gal Aboriginal Corporation and sits on the ‘Our Watch’ Aboriginal Women’s Advisory Board, City of Sydney’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Advisory panel and is Chairperson of Wirringa Baiya Aboriginal Women’s Legal Centre.
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
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Episode Six: My Name is Roia Atmar
[Music: ambient, expansive and sharp.]
Beth Atkinson-Quinton: Hey, Beth here. Just before you start: this show looks at domestic abuse head on. This particular episode uncovers Roia’s experience of going through the family law system. But, it also document’s her slow release from the grips of his abuse, as she stands boldly as a survivor. It can be 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.
[Sound effects: the dull echo of an angry group of men jeering.]
Roia Atmar: In Australia, there is a small but distinguishably loud group of people, who claim to be doing one thing: “levelling the playing field” when it comes to how we make sense of gender equality. They meet innocuously, often in dowdy city pubs across Melbourne and Sydney, passionately sinking lager and intent on liberating men from the so-called shackles that oppress them in the Family Court system.
Roia Atmar: With each heated sigh and angry comment, with each court case, they feed into a long contested myth that fathers are hard done-by when made to ‘verse’ mothers in the Family Court. That men are deprived of their children, of their livelihood, and are instead pronounced unfit due to their arch nemesis’s—often a wife, a girlfriend, a female family member’s—warped account of their behaviour.
Roia Atmar: They are referred to as ‘Australia’s Men’s Rights Association’, and they are made up of myriad individuals, each with their own sordid reasons to pit men against women. Their bulletin boards consist of chilling hyperbole, with links to unfounded and poorly articulated articles about how women kill, maim, hurt those they love.
Roia Atmar: They stand before panic-stricken mothers in sterile waiting rooms, booming angrily. Strangers with spit angrily lodged in the corners of their mouths. They claim that women make up scandalous tales, accusations of violence and terror. That they equip their impressionable children with the weapons designed to destroy the reputations of their hard-done by fathers. Before me, they stood, at the Family Court hearing I had attended in an attempt to protect my children.
[Sound effects: the dull echo of an angry group of men jeering gets louder, more ominous.]
Roia Atmar: They stood before me, with him, heedless to my wounds. My misgivings.
[Emphatic pause.]
Roia Atmar: They were so loud.
[Music: ambient, eerie and and evocative, a deep horn sounds.]
Samantha Jeffries: In the family court system is extremely re-traumatising for women who are victims of domestic violence.
Roia Atmar: That is Samantha Jeffries, an academic at Griffith University whose work centres around how the court systems in Australia often re-traumatise survivors seeking justice.
Samantha Jeffries: And I think it's particularly so because I think a lot of women who have been victims of domestic violence, believe - I think naively - when they go into that system, that that system is about protecting them and protecting their children in particular. And it's not set up that way. The family court system is a patriarchal system that was created for men by men. So it cannot respond appropriately to the experiences of women who have been victims of gender based violence, it's just not set up that way. They’re not getting justice.
Roia Atmar: “How do you feel about them being there, Roia?”, my lawyer asked, kindly.
Roia Atmar: What I felt was anger. First, an anger laced with confusion, with defeat. Coupled with their blind insistence when it came to supporting a man they didn’t know, they forgot about one essential aspect to the story, to my story: the truth. They had formulated their own story, had created a narrative where my abuser was preyed on in the Family Court system in virtue of his manhood, was made absent in the life of his children, and had come to even fear this—the same children he exposed to brutality, to violence.
Roia Atmar: He was the victim. He was the survivor. In their eyes, he was a man who had every right to fear his rights being taken. And I? I was the feared subject. The catalyst. His undoing. As far as I could see, the men’s rights movement were a group of alienated fathers with a clear—albeit confused—vengeance.
[Music: ambient, eerie and and evocative, getting louder and more expansive.]
Roia Atmar: They convinced men that they had something to fear, reason to panic for a future that undermined their capacity to control us.
Samantha Jeffries: Men’s Rights Activists, if you actually go on their websites, and have a look, the rhetoric or the narratives that come out [of] their mouth, reads like perpetrators of domestic violence, it's the same sort of narratives.Roia Atmar: They had blood on their hands, seen especially in the 1999 trial and sentencing of Robert Clive Parsons, who murdered his ex-partner Angela outside the Dandenong Family Court, yelling “it’s over, bitch. It’s over.” He had been seduced by the men’s rights group Parents Without Rights, and his fear of his own undoing resulted in hers.
Samantha Jeffries: Men will use the system to continue to abuse her. When a woman walks into a family court, she is considered to be dishonest, as vindictive and as trying to fracture the father child relationship. And for women in that, it’s gaslighting, systemic gaslighting of victims of domestic violence.
Samantha Jeffries: There’s absolutely no evidence anywhere - including the US, UK, here - to suggest that the family court system is biased against men. It never has been. What the evidence shows is that it's biased against women. It's the complete opposite.
Roia Atmar: Still, the people who carry my blood, my name, my drive to live would not have their truth taken from them. What was far louder, and continues to be, than the bellowing hatred spurred on by Men’s Rights Activists, is the truth. Is my truth. A shared truth. And the fear I knew was one unimaginably different to his.
[Music: ambient, expansive and minimalist.]
Roia Atmar: In 2016, Olga Edwards, a passionate yogi and kind-hearted mother, began Family Court proceedings against her ex-husband, John: a man who posed a clear and undoubtable risk to his family. The court was notified about his regular assaults, about how he kept a machete under his bed, the vigilance he practiced in instilling fear into the space he occupied with his partner and children. Olga feared that she’d arrive home one day to find her teenagers killed, and on July 5 2018, exactly that had happened.
Roia Atmar [after an emphatic pause]: John had obeyed the trajectory he had drawn out for himself, and had made a mockery of the men claiming it a kind of red herring.
Roia Atmar: I want to ask them: the Men’s Rights Activists. I want to ask them: what are you scared of? In what ways does fear occupy your mind? What colour is it? Where does it live in your body? Help me understand the way it wraps itself around you in the dead of night. Help me understand the way you sleep, if so terrified of the grave injustices you apparently lay witness to. I want to scream: Help me understand you.
[Roia’s plea resounds like an echo.]
Roia Atmar: In describing the moment Olga realised her children had been taken from her, State coroner Teresa O’Sullivan stated in an interview with Guardian Australia, that “this moment”—that being Olga returning from work—“was the crystallisation of the fear she had harboured as a victim of domestic violence.”
Amani Haydar: What if this violence is inescapable? What if it is just, you know, taken for granted that women from my particular part of the world, from my cultural heritage, or who look like me, will live through multiple violent experiences that are beyond our control? And that’s a really unsafe way to feel, and that’s a very difficult and complex form of trauma to begin to deal with.
Roia Atmar: You just heard from artist, writer and women’s health and safety advocate, Amani Haydar as she reflects on what it meant to lose her own mother at the hands of her father.
Amani Haydar: This is not an inevitable thing. This is a social issue. It’s a political issue, and these are deliberate forms of violence. It’s not a mystery how they take place, we don’t have to take it for granted, and there is work we can do continuously, not just me as an individual, but as a community, as a society, that can challenge the different forms of violence that we witness all the time, and patriarchal violence and colonial violence occur on the same continuum, and if we’re going to challenge it locally we need to challenge it globally as well.
[Music shifts slightly: a haunting, ambient melody resounds.]
Roia Atmar: In every house I’ve ever stayed in, in every home I’ve ever shared with my children, I have charted my whereabouts: mapping exactly how it is someone could, if they so wish, enter. Could come in, and destroy everything I love. I would posture my small body toward the nearest door, so that if—God forbid—someone did enter, he did enter, it would be my body on the line first.
Roia Atmar: In the time that it took for him to punish me, for his anger to find itself nestled in my limbs once more, my body—they’d be able to run far, be able to jump and hide and save themselves. That… is fear. I want to ask these men if they’ve ever imagined themselves slain, if they’ve ever made sense of themselves as something fragile and fleeting. I am a combination of over-the-shoulder checks. Unconventional sleeping patterns. The shuffling of keys between clammy fingers. I am all of this, and still… a survivor.
Roia Atmar: I want to ask them, too: have you ever had the opportunity to, amongst a world of terror, imagine your ‘after’? Have you ever been able to let your finger graze over the scars you carry, the same scars that emerged from a blanket of flames, the smell and heat since forgotten? Have you ever done this, and instead of feeling dread and fright, you feel something akin to pride. Pride with every slight elevation of skin, every slight swelling.
Roia Atmar: Pride, as in: a feeling that captures something both gentle and strong, a little like yourself. Have you ever watched your children grow into kind, loving adults, to emerge from a complex shared history, knowing well that—despite it all—you protected them tirelessly, and continue to do so, exactly the way you did the moment everything changed. That is, and always was, your proudest achievement, after all. Have you ever danced freely on a colourful dance-floor, surrounded by an eclectic group of doting friends, high on survival and survival alone?
[Music: the key changes slightly, affecting sounds.]
Roia Atmar: Have you ever awoken some mornings, and over tea and toast, forgotten for a moment of the afflictions you’ve faced because pain—something slow, and unrushed—fades, as it ought to. Pain changes. Have you ever seen yourself in the jaded eyes of a desperate woman, clutching a hold of her sweaty hands as she looks down the barrel of an unknown future, cornered and anguished? Have you ever seen that future and warmly invited them to take the first step?
Roia Atmar: That future, as in… that ‘after’, and ushered them softly in that direction: knowing well that, one day, they—like you—will find hopes where there once wasn’t any, will find love where they were once deprived, will find desire where desire wasn’t permitted.
Ashlee Donohue: I don’t do anything now for the woman that you see before you. I base my experience and my education on the woman that was running from this man for, you know, 15 years. Like, on this merry-go round. The basis of what I do is to let women know that there’s help out there, that they’re not alone, that it happens, that domestic violence doesn’t discriminate, doesn't matter if you’re Black, white or brindle, doesn’t matter how rich or poor you are, it happens in every town, city, state, country in this world. And the violence they may be going through is not their fault.
Amani Haydar: I think there’s some appeal to the idea that we can grow from and recover from trauma in a way that honours the lives of the people that we’ve lost, honours the things we’ve inherited, and sort of celebrates them rather than shunning them. So, I really worked hard to reconnect with the parts of my heritage and my childhood that were wonderful and that I valued and that deserved to be carried on to the next generation.
Amani Haydar: And some of that, you know, some of those things seem kind of trivial… I talk about, you know, crafting and making things and looking after plants and doing care work and being outspoken about social justice issues… those things were really huge parts of my grandmother’s character and my mum’s character, and I think they’re really amazing and important tools of resilience that I’ve been able to integrate into my work, into my creative practice, and into my writing, and I think they really drive a lot of what I do and give me the energy to keep doing it.
Ashlee Donohue: I’m forever grateful that I’m here, like I’m alive, and I’m well. And my thing is: I have five grandchildren. And I don’t ever want them to think that they can’t be and do whatever they want, and nor do I ever want them to think or have the belief system that if something happens to them, nobody will help, and nobody will believe them. So that really is the basis of why I do what I do: so that people know that I’m here, that I will believe them, that I see them, that I hear them, and that I know what that feels like.
Amani Haydar: I think they’re all parts of my… parts of my understanding of how we can, um, inherit resilience and inherit joy and inherit our coping mechanisms and apply them to make a better world for our kids and you know, pass them on.
[Music: atmospheric, soft and reflective.]
Roia Atmar: My name is Roia Atmar, and—in my after—I made it a mission that other women find proof of their own. Proof that there is no uncomplicated route, that fear and shame lives in the most dubious of places, even still. That abuse does not end with the last lighting of a match, with the last foul insult, with the last bellow of a man—or ten—as they stand on the dusty steps of a court, the same court where women wanting nothing more than justice stand, holding space for any semblance of pride they can muster. Women that fight for their very own afters.
Roia Atmar: My name is Roia After, and I want to leave you with this: that survival doesn’t end either. Hope is just as strong, just as mighty, just as powerful as fear. So, when I ask them: what are you scared of? I know the answer. They’re scared of me. They’re scared of survivors.
[Emphatic moment of pause, accompanied with a soft and hopeful soundscape.]
Roia Atmar: They fear us, our strength, our insistence, our willingness to wear our story with pride. And, to be honest, if I were them… I’d be scared, too.
Roia Atmar: My name is Roia Atmar, and this is my after.
[Music: A hopeful, soft ambient resounding carries on.]
Roia Atmar: I want to thank Samantha Jeffries and Amani Haydar for their contributions to this episode.
Roia Atmar: Season two of Tender 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.
Roia Atmar: A heartfelt thank-you to our production team who brought my story to life, Shakira Hussein for her careful sensitivity editing, Danae Gibson for her gentle support in recording, and Jon Tjhia (pr: Chee-ah) for his masterful ear as our sound engineer.
Roia Atmar: 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. Thank you for listening to my after.
[Music: Trails off softly.]