Screaming in Silence

By Genevieve Elliott

Screaming In Silence is the true story of a woman who, through the strength of her children, found a way to break the cycle of domestic violence and child abuse. It is a story of hope, sending a message out to others around the world who have dealt with or are dealing with abuse - you are not alone, you can be heard and helped. This book clearly outlines how people can become trapped within the cycle of abuse, often without even knowing or acknowledging it at the time. In a society where more and more stories of abuse emerge each day, it is an important read for those working in the welfare sector and also for those who have ever dealt with abuse directly or indirectly. The author has gone from being silenced to raising her voice in a message of peace, empowerment and hope.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tellwell Talent
• Release date: Nov 30, 2016
• ISBN: 9781925529975

Genevieve Elliott

Genevieve Elliott is a 48 year old mother of three brave and resilient children. Together, they have endured the horrors of abuse and the roller coaster of the legal system. Genevieve and her children now live in rural NSW where Genevieve now hopes to remain and to build a life of self sufficiency, close to nature and the healing powers that can bring. She works voluntarily for Fighters Against Child Abuse Australia and does some public speaking also.

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

Familiar yet almost unseen shapes flashed by my car in the darkness as I drove desperately for home. Words chased each other through my mind, becoming somehow more sinister and yet more meaningless as they tumbled and wrapped around each other. The police officer’s voice you need to come home, search warrant, AVO, your daughter, we will call a DOCs officer, give you five minutes.

What on earth was happening? Just minutes earlier I had been delivering pizzas, now I was racing for home, unsure of the situation I would find there. As I rounded the last bend before our house, flashing lights lit up the normally quiet little cul-de-sac, marked and unmarked police vehicles were strewn across both sides of the road. It was September 10, 2011, the night I thought was pretty much the end of my life, my world, but actually turned out to be the beginning of a long, agonising, difficult but ultimately empowering journey.

It wasn’t until almost a year later that I realised just how my entire life had led up to that one terrifying, horrific night………

I was born in Blacktown NSW in 1968, the second of three daughters to an average working class couple. Dad was a hard worker, raised by his mother along with his two sisters and brother in the western suburbs of Sydney. He worked while he studied in order to get ahead and eventually was an industrial chemist for the Illawarra Steelworks plant at Port Kembla. Mum had been raised on farms, the daughter of hard working, animal loving parents. Her mother was a small yet strong woman, active in local politics and community issues. My birth was not met with the usual joy though, as both of my legs, particularly the left, were badly deformed and twisted. It took almost 5 years of gruelling physiotherapy and multiple surgeries to enable me to take my first unaided steps. The left leg however, would remain withered and weak for the rest of my life. My early memories are few and fragmented, I do remember happy times playing with my sisters and cousins, rambling through the bushland of the Blue Mountains, playing hide and seek in the thick mist that would wrap itself around the peaks even on the hottest of days. I also recall many happy times on my maternal grandparents’ farm and animals, always animals have figured largely in my life. We would lean into the cattle in the milking sheds, soaking up their clean grassy smell and their warmth on cold wintry mornings, or rest our arms on old wooden railings, stroking the velvet noses of prick eared horses, whispering all our dreams and hopes into those furry depths.

Overlaying all of these memories though is fear, a terrible gut wrenching, unspeakable fear. Unspeakable because it was always drilled into us in so many ways that what happened within our family was nobody else’s business. I came to feel then that this must be somehow my fault, I must deserve to be punished so relentlessly, I carried that shame and that belief for over 40 years. There are few childhood photographs of me, just the odd couple where I appear because I was with someone else, a cousin, a sister. Once I asked my mother why this was and she simply said, Who would want pictures of that? Another time she told me that it was selfish of me to ask, as they had had to spend all of their money on treating my legs, and so could not afford photographs.

My father would often tell me that he wished I had never been born, in fact he even told me when I was only about 5 years old that I was a murderer because I had had a twin brother who had been still born while I had lived. After that I felt that I had to somehow make it up to Dad, I tried so hard to be a son for him, accompanying him to football matches and rising at dawn to go fishing with him and his friends from work. Although I was desperately afraid of him, I always felt that he only hated me because I was bad and unworthy of his love, so I worked at making myself better so that I could be loved.

I never saw my father hit my sisters, although he was always abrupt with them and would frequently put them down verbally. My mother was often bashed quite badly by him, especially on weekends when he would grow more violent with every drop of beer he swallowed. My physical injuries were many - I was the favourite target for his anger and aggression. I actually reached the point though where I would rather that he hit me than constantly pick at me verbally, somehow his words and obvious disgust with me hurt far more.

Throughout my life, I was never told that I was loved by my parents, at least not that I can recall and was never able to even feel that I was loved. My mother would push me away if I tried to seek comfort on her lap, even as a very young child.

When I was around 4 years old, my family moved to Dapto on the NSW South Coast for my father to take up work at the Steelworks in Port Kembla. We lived in an old rented house for a short period of time while the new house was being built in Kanahooka. Nothing really changed with the move though and as I came to understand the days of the week more clearly, I began to dread Friday afternoons when Dad would arrive home from work with a case of beer and the fighting would begin in earnest.

One evening as we all sat down to dinner Dad suddenly lifted his plate off the table and held it out towards Mum yelling, What’s this shit? Before Mum could reply, he hurled the plate at the wall behind me where it shattered with a loud crash, leaving food running down the wall and across my back. My sisters and I sat frozen, staring at the plates before us, unable to eat yet terrified of what would happen if we tried to move away. Dad looked at us and jumped up yelling Come on kids, if we’re going to be fed like bloody pigs, we may as well act like pigs! He was trying to make us throw our food as he had done but there was no way we could have. The dinner table at our place had always been a place where we had to sit quietly until everyone had finished the meal, using our manners meticulously and certainly there was never any swearing at the table. Somehow this incident seemed to me to mark a terrible final breakdown in our family, as though nothing would ever be predictable again.

When I finally started school I was overjoyed to have a place where no one was ever punished unfairly and where, to my complete shock, people actually praised me and said that I was intelligent. I threw myself into my school work, soaking up knowledge and trying to always win the praise of the teachers, their kind words were like a soothing balm to my emotional wounds and I would cling to them like a security blanket during the long terrifying nights at home. Despite this praise however, even when I made friends at school and saw their families smiling and laughing together, holding hands and cuddling quite unselfconsciously, I still didn’t think that there could be anything wrong with my family, the fault must all be mine. I was a burden on my family and worse, a murderer of my own brother, so I deserved to be punished. When Dad was violent and abusive towards my mother, I thought that he was probably somehow angry at her for giving birth to me, so again, it was all my fault. I became nervous and clumsy at home, mucking up the simplest of tasks simply by trying too hard to do them well and so my teachers’ praise was turned against me with taunts such as Well if you’re so smart, why can’t you pour a glass of juice without spilling it? I ended up feeling very confused about who and what I was. During my years at Hayes Park Public School in Dapto though, I made a very special friend. Tammy was small and quiet yet also tough and self- reliant. We seemed to recognise shared pain without ever really having to discuss it too much. Tammy offered something I had never had before, understanding and acceptance. We were around 10 years old when we each cut our hands during the lunch break at school and pressed them together, declaring ourselves blood sisters. We used to dream of being able to fly, to simply soar above all of the world and its troubles and find a place where we could be happy. Tammy and I had many fun times together, getting into trouble in choir for making up rude alternatives to song lyrics, falling for the same boy as each other, singing and dancing to all of the songs from the movie Grease, which we were both obsessed with. One day however, Tammy was gone, having suddenly changed schools. I asked my mother about where Tammy had gone to, hoping to still keep in touch with her, but Mum was dismissive of my distress, saying that Tammy was a wild girl who had been a bad influence on me anyway. So life went on just the same, but without my friend beside me to support me.

It was probably around this time too that my mother took my sisters and I away to a women’s refuge after Dad’s violence became too much for her. Many times before and after this, we were taken to my grandparents’ farm and to my Uncle’s house, but this was the first and only time we were taken to a refuge. I loved it there, it was near a beach and we would play all day with the other children. I even heard Mum talking to Dad on the telephone and saying Genny’s actually smiling here. At night though, we could hear the murmured conversations and stifled tears of the women who were staying in this safe house, living in limbo, uncertain of their futures and unable to make any real plans. I guess they thought that all of the children were asleep when they sat down for these furtive talks but I would lay awake, straining to hear what they were saying in case it could shed some light on what was to become of us. Eventually though, I heard Mum saying, I have to go back for the kids’ sake, he’s their father and he says he will change. I remember feeling hurt and confused by these words, then feeling overwhelming anger at my mother. The anger frightened me because it seemed to prove that I was bad, what good child could feel such anger at their own mother? All the same, I felt like screaming out at her, for the kids’ sake? For crying out loud, we were terrified of him, away from him at least we could relax and have fun, how could she possibly have seen that and still thought that we would be better off with Dad? But my feelings went unspoken and unnoticed, they wouldn’t have made any difference anyway and soon we were back in our home with the drunken violence simply picking up from where it left off.

I remember one night when the violence was particularly bad and my sisters, Anne and Jane and myself had huddled up together in one of our bedrooms. We sat together, whimpering with fear occasionally from the noises we could hear coming from the lounge room and kitchen, afraid to make too much noise lest the rage be unleashed on us. Anne must have been just as afraid as us younger two, but I remember her stroking our hair, now and then murmuring reassuring words. Even when silence eventually fell, we were afraid to leave that room so when Jane whispered in distress that she needed to go to the toilet, Anne bravely crept out and carried a bucket back to the bedroom. I was so in awe of my big sister that night and her courage was something I would often think back to as time went on, drawing strength from it again and again. All through that long night, we sat in near silence, whispering the changing time to each other as we stared at the little digital clock glowing in the darkness. We were too afraid to fall asleep. In that one incident, my big sister showed me more love and protection than my mother did in my lifetime.

There was another night too, when Anne tried her best to protect us. Our father was drunk again, smashing glass across the lounge room, screaming that we were all bitches and he was going to kill us all and striking out at mum and myself at every opportunity. Mum swung a full beer bottle, smashing it across Dad’s head and sending him crashing to the floor. Anne ran to the telephone in the hallway and rang the police as Dad slowly sat up and began his drunken tirade anew. When the two local police officers arrived, however, they seemed to ignore the bruises, blood, spilt beer and shattered household items. They spoke to Dad in a mates fashion, telling him to go to bed and sleep it off. Even as they started to descend the front steps and Dad yelled Who the hell rang the bloody cops?, my sisters and I watched with sinking hearts as the officers paused, glanced at each other, then simply shrugged and continued back to their car. I knew then that we were truly on our own. In those days, there were not the Domestic Violence laws of today, a man’s wife and children were almost seen as his property, unless he did something really bad that could not be ignored. Although the neighbours must surely have heard the screaming and the beatings and the breakage of items in our house, no one ever came to our aid, called the police or community services, or even gave any indication to us that they knew what was happening. It just wasn’t done to get involved in someone else’s family business in any way, and for our part, it was something which we must never talk about. This attitude in society as a whole only added to my feelings that this must be something I should be deeply ashamed of, if something so terrible must be kept a secret at all costs, then I must have brought it upon myself.

Sometimes the abuse was much quieter, though no less frightening. Often, late at night, I would hear Dad sitting in the lounge room in darkness and muttering to himself. Not all of his words were ever clear, but amongst them I could hear phrases like all just a pack of bitches, sluts – the lot of them and "I’ll