It’s coming from inside the house: Why Micaela Cronin needs to look first at government

Micaela Cronin is the newly appointed Domestic Violence Commissioner in Australia. Cronin comes from a background of leading not-for-profits and social work and many people are excited about the possibilities of change under her leadership.

She’s certainly a step up from the Coalition offering - a former banking executive. Yet I find myself concerned at the knee jerk excitement I’ve seen today online about her professional roots.

Some of the work Cronin has done in the past is indeed impressively rights-based. She worked as a crisis worker with survivors of torture, among other things, and recently for Child Fund. It isn’t with Cronin per se, that I have the issue. It’s with the rather oblivious excitement over a social worker being in this position.

People have some pretty rosy views of social workers that are, to be blunt, not always warranted.

My experience of social workers is that it really depends who they work for, what they’re doing, and how much exposure they’ve had to lived experience advocacy and training by people from the most vulnerable communities they are supposed to serve. Some of them are deeply principled, committed and kind - there to work hard at lifting others and open to being surprised by people.

Others are arms of the state, and thus, are terrifying if you are a mother with complex disabilities. You can usually tell which one you’re dealing with quite quickly. The ones that regard you with an unprovoked tickle of suspicion around their eyes, and who you can see observing you from your periphery as you move around your house - those ones are the kind to be feared. And plenty of them exist.

Some systems tend to be dominated by them more than others. Something I’ve noticed is that the closer the working relationship between the social worker and police, the more dim the view of mothers with psychosocial disabilities will be. It’s interesting. Social workers that you find in Neighbourhood centres, or in Health, tend to have a more positive bias. I wonder at times if this is to do with the severity of cases they deal with, and vicarious trauma - combined with a criminalisation mindset. In general, Neighbourhood centre workers are there to build capacity, not remove and convict.

I think the excitement about Cronin’s roots is not unwarranted, per se; but it does show that we still have some quite heavy bias towards seeing social workers as Mary Poppins multiplied, rather than people with incredible authority over our lives and often, not enough training and education to hold that in a just way. Almost all of them are, eventually, answerable to a system of safety and risk assessment which is burdened with errors, and makes many mistakes.

Which brings me to my key point here: Cronin’s mandate is to oversee the end to violence against women and children in one generation, via the joint National Plan to End Violence against Women and Children just released. As a disabled woman who has been caught in the tangled web of violence perpetuated by government and justified by their current policies and practices, I am dubious.

Disability advocate and Editor in Chief of Missing Perspectives, Hannah Diviney, pointed out that Disability was mentioned repeatedly in the document; which is a good sign. It seems we may be walking towards acknowledging what advocates on the issue of violence against women and children already know. A great number - in fact possibly the majority - of victim survivors are Disabled.

We experience the most violence. We stay in it the longest.

I have recently adopted the term hyper marginalisation to describe the experiences of mothers with psychosocial Disabilities, because…it describes well what is happening. Often cut off from formal supports such as the NDIS due to their inaccessibility (why does everyone require phone calls to get things done?? Email was invented in the 1970s for goodness sake) or not qualifying for them in the first place, and frequently locked out of informal supports due to bias and stigma, many of us remain long term in abuse so we can retain shelter and the ability to feed ourselves. Those of us that leave, often experience stunning poverty, and our children along with us.

Our experiences of violence are often at the hands of government - monitoring, scrutiny, removal of our children, abuse in institutions, psych wards and group homes - or aided and abetted by them.

Our legal system remains horrifically misogynist, ableist and classist, and Disabled women are statistically poor. We can’t afford to defend ourselves adequately or at all; the fact of our Disabilities, and the ways we present, lead to our credibility being routinely questioned by police, judges, social workers, doctors, teachers. To be believed, it is best to not look or sound Disabled in any way. More often than not, our abusers are believed over us, and we are sent back to remain dependent on them.

If Cronin wants to answer the call she has been given, she would do well to begin with the government systems that Disabled women are most profiled and harmed by - child protection and the justice system, the health system, the NDIS and the education system.

What our governments need first, if they are serious about ending violence against women and children, is a mirror.