It took a long time for Christina* to realise she was in an abusive relationship, because her ex-husband was not physically violent until the very end of their 13 years together.
“I wasn’t getting hit, I didn’t have bruises or injuries. My perpetrator’s way of getting control was by taking over my mind and my thinking,” she said.
Christina was in her mid-30s when she married the man who would become her tormentor.
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She had two children from her first marriage and the couple then had two more together.
The mother-of-four said it was not long after the birth of their first child that her ex-husband, sensing her vulnerability, began to implement insidious patterns of abuse.
A key way Christina’s ex-husband sought control over her was by depriving her of sleep and sapping her physical and mental energy.
Her ex-husband would often wait until late at night, when the children were all in bed and she was about to fall asleep to pick arguments with her, Christina said.
The arguments were usually about parenting. Her ex-husband had become overprotective of their children, and was scapegoating her older kids.
“I would go to bed, and he would just start. He wouldn’t be screaming or anything, but he would just go over and over and over with his opinion, about why I was incorrect and he was correct.
The circular arguments often lasted for hours, Christina said.
“Sometimes I’d fall sleep, and then I’d wake up and he would be at the edge of the bed, shaking the mattress and looking at me saying, ‘If I can’t sleep, you can’t sleep either,'” she said.
Her ex-husband would start up the arguments three or four times a night.
Christina sometimes woke up with the sensation that her ex-husband had just kicked her.
“It wasn’t a really hard kick, just enough to shock me and wake me up,” she said.
“I would ask, ‘Did you just kick me? And he would say, ‘No’ – there was a real gaslighting element to it.”
Her ex-husband rose early every morning. He would force her to get up too, Christina said.
“He’d get up at 5.30am, put all the lights on, and say, ‘Up you get’, no matter how many times I had been up with the baby at night,” she said.
Thoroughly exhausted, Christina said she soon found herself bending to his will.
“I got the picture that if I wanted to sleep I just had to agree with him. It was just out of survival mode, to placate him because I was so tired.”
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If Christina did dare to disagree with her ex-husband he would call her “crazy” and threaten to have her committed, making her extremely fearful that he would take her children away from her.
The psychological abuse was so constant that Christina said she began to question her own reality, but she still didn’t necessarily recognise it as abuse.
Many years into the relationship, Christina was diagnosed with depression and went to see a counsellor.
“That counsellor said, ‘This sounds like domestic violence’ and I didn’t really even register what that was,” she said.
Christina was then referred on to see a specialist domestic violence counsellor.
“That counsellor told me I was in an abusive relationship as well. It took me a long time to really get my head around that.”
Christina finally managed to get out of the relationship, which escalated towards physical violence at the end, eight years ago.
She has now been working as a DV case worker, helping survivors of family violence for several years.
Christina said she now realised that sleep abuse was a fairly common tactic used by domestic violence perpetrators to gain control, but it was also one that had so far gotten very little attention.
“It doesn’t come up often for some reason. I think maybe people don’t think it’s that serious, because it’s not physical violence,” she said.
Women’s Community Shelters CEO Annabelle Daniel said while she had worked with domestic violence survivors for 25 years, she only recently began to understand how prevalent sleep abuse was after working with a group of lived expertise advocates.
“This form of coercive control, which disrupts or controls a victim’s sleep patterns, is alarmingly prevalent but rarely acknowledged,” Daniel said.
“No-one is talking about it (but) it’s such a big part of coercive control and domestic violence and people don’t even realise.”
The effects of sleep abuse were often physically and mentally devastating, Daniel said.
“If you don’t get a good night’s sleep, your brain doesn’t repair itself, your memory can get foggy.”
“You might just give in to what people want because you’re too tired to argue, and so inducing that state of being feeling debilitated or exhausted is actually a technique that abusers can use to get their own way more often.”
Daniel said it was important for the general public, victims and law enforcement agencies to have a complete picture of what coercive control looked like, which included sleep abuse.
In July, new laws came into effect in New South Wales making coercive control a criminal offence.
Coercive control, where a perpetrator uses repeated patterns of physical or non-physical abuse used to hurt, scare, intimidate, threaten or control someone, is present in almost all cases of domestic violence which then turn deadly.
Coercive control was found to be taking place in 97 percent of intimate partner domestic violence homicides cases between 2019 and 2021, a NSW Domestic Violence Death Review Team found.
This year, Queensland has also passed laws criminalising coercive control, which are expected to come into force in 2025. In South Australia, legislation has introduced to parliament.
Statistics from the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics show that in July, the first month the new laws were in operation, there were 23 reports of coercive control made to police.
Daniel said evidence of sleep abuse could form part of a victim’s case against their perpetrator.
“These patterns of behaviour, if you can identify them and note them and see a pattern, can actually contribute to the prosecution of a criminal offence, they form evidence,” Daniel said.
* Name has been changed to protect privacy and for legal reasons.
Victims of domestic and family violence can seek advice and services by contacting 1800RESPECT (1800 737 732) or visiting: https://www.1800respect.org.au.
Reports of domestic and family-related crime or abuse can be made by contacting or attending your local police station. In an emergency or life-threatening situation, contact Triple Zero (000).
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