Dangerous intentions: The abused woman's story

Anthony Roydon Ratahi was killed by police during a hostage scene. Photo / Supplied

No name, no age, no suburb, no details which might identify, no face-to-face meeting.

Just an anonymous telephone conversation with a woman whose life has been made hell by a man she met years ago, a man she quickly knew she didn't want to stay involved with.

Yet she couldn't become uninvolved from him. He wouldn't let her.

The woman feels a little nervous even talking like this. We let her vet the interview, to remove anything that could lead him to think this is about him. She couldn't bear to set him off again, on his path of obsessive behaviour.

There are thousands of women living like this, agencies say.

Domestic violence, from psychological abuse to beatings, is our biggest problem, they say.

The man the woman fears could be any one of thousands; a professional, upstanding man, or a man in a trade; a man who lives in a Housing New Zealand home or a man who lives in a mansion.

The plight of women such as the one we spoke to was brought to stark notice last weekend when Antony Ratahi abducted Marcelle Beer from the Opunake hotel where she worked and held her hostage for hours before finally releasing her, though the siege was over only when he was shot and killed by the police.

Marcelle Beer had a protection order against the man who had come out of prison just nine days earlier, released early from a three-month sentence for violence against her.

Police enquiries are ongoing and they are not talking about any aspect of the siege, or why the protection and trespass orders didn't keep her safe.

It seems that while protection and other orders can be a successful deterrent in many cases, with a determined offender such as Ratahi there is no guarantee of safety.

A former high-ranking police officer, who didn't want to be named, told us that faced with such an offender, a protection order is only as good as the paper it's written on.

Police try to act promptly when notified of a breach but because of limited resources this can only be reactive: "Police officers aren't sitting on their doorsteps."

The woman's story

The woman we spoke to did not have a protection order but gained police protection when the man she had met after her marriage break-up tried to break into her house.

She had realised early on he was not someone she wanted to be with and repeatedly tried to back out, but the man ignored her.

She would tell him not to come to her home but he would arrive anyway.

He would text at all hours and insist on seeing her and when he was with her was sexually aggressive.

He would get rough, pull her hair, push her around, slap her, and he repeatedly forced himself on her.

"It happened on and off for about three years and I'd even get rid of him for six months and then, you know, he'd say he wanted to see me... he was just really hard to shake off."

The situation became very scary. She would hide inside the house as he knocked on the doors, or she would flee the house if she had a chance to do so.

One time when she was going through a major unrelated personal trauma, he came round and raped her as she cried.

This time she went to the police, feeling ashamed and embarrassed that an intelligent woman like herself had found herself in such a situation.

She didn't press charges, though, but when the man turned up again uninvited and knocked on her door and tapped on her windows for an hour and a half, then tried to break in, she called the police.

This time supports kicked in.

The police arrested him and he was bailed to keep away from her, and she found help from Shine, an anti-domestic violence agency.

Shine placed her at high-risk of harm and put her in their Safe At Home programme, organising for her house to be protected, installing sensors, reinforcing windows and giving her a security alarm she could carry with her which, when pressed, alerted the police.

The police also sent her a letter telling her they would be keeping an eye on her property and doing drive-bys - and they did.

"When I received the letter I actually cried, because I thought people [were] taking what happened seriously and that people in the community care."

The man still tries to contact her but she is able to sleep more easily.

Life has irreparably changed, though.

She is suspicious of men and says she can never take it for granted that this one will leave her alone, but at least she has the security of knowing the police are behind her.

Is it really so bad out there?

Jane Drumm says it is, absolutely. Drumm, a former probation officer, is the executive director of Shine, the organisation which helps women regain some sense of safety.

The charity goes to extraordinary lengths to keep women safe in their homes, even calling in the fire brigade to teach women and children how to escape if the house is set on fire and providing mothers with alarms they can hide in their bras and trigger if an offender suddenly appears inside or outside the house.

Offenders come in many categories, Drumm says, but most fit the "obsessed" category, and some fit the hyper-violent category.

Men like Ratahi probably fit both categories.

These offenders are like bulldogs, she says.

"They've got them clenched in their teeth and that's it, they will pursue them forever."

It's a horrible way to live and is a very real and huge problem in New Zealand.

Drumm cites a World Health Organisation study which found one in three New Zealand women are physically or sexually abused by a partner and points out that around half of all homicides are domestic-related.

Shine spends about $4000 of scarce resources to protect just one home - yet Treasury a few years ago estimated the cost of a homicide was $3.9 million.

That does not include the costs incurred by the living - the women with broken teeth and bones, soft-tissue damage, visits to mental health services.

If the severity of the country's domestic abuse problem still seems hard to believe, Drumm says take a look at police statistics.

Police say they only see 20 per cent of all domestic violence and last year attended about 80,000 incidents. Of those, about 10,000 would be households in high-risk, high terror environments, she says, and below them is a whole other group in borderline danger.

Drumm's colleague Liz McAneny, another former probation officer, co-ordinates the Safe At Home programme. She sees women every day with fractured arms and skulls, bite marks, bruises around the neck from attempted strangulation, and those living with sexual and psychological abuse - women who are stalked wherever they go, who have completely lost their freedom.

"When you're actually sitting with a woman and she's got her arm in a sling and a bruised face and a big bite mark on her chin - I mean, that young woman is a particularly beautiful young woman and has this big bite mark and you just think 'how can somebody be such an animal?'

"Quite a bit of that biting and attempted choking stuff goes on."

People still want to block domestic violence out and pretend it's not happening, that our society is not as bad as that.

But it is, she says.

So how do we protect them?

Protection orders are one of the main mechanisms women can use to help protect themselves and their children from a violent partner.

But police and agencies seem to agree that when up against a determined offender, nothing is foolproof.

Greg O'Connor from the Police Association says with a small minority of offenders who are hell-bent on targeting a woman, nothing but being behind bars will stop them.

"But that is where protection and trespass orders are useful - I'd hate for people to think [they] were useless. They're not, they are a good tool and give us real leverage without the complainant having to give evidence."

Breaching a protection order can result in the person being jailed, he says, whereas without one there is often nothing the police can make an arrest for when called to an incident.

Heather Henare from Women's Refuge defends protection orders, too, as long as systems swing into action - that when breached the offender is arrested and charged.

But more care has to be taken with how the orders are written up in the first place, because they can be challenged.

If an order says an offender is not allowed contact with a woman, this needs to define contact such as telephone calls or texting.

And other systems must go along with protection orders, like risk assessments, notification of family members and anticipation of areas of weakness as to where he might access her.

She, too, says it is hard to prevent an offender who is hell-bent on harming or killing a woman, but while much work is done focusing on keeping the woman safe - such as taking her out of her own life and putting her in a safe house or moving towns, more could be focused on keeping the offender away from her.

In cases like Ratahi's she thinks questions have to be asked around the justice system: why he was released from prison early and why he got such a light sentence in the first place, given his earlier serious assault of Marcelle Beer.

The judiciary sometimes still don't take domestic violence cases seriously enough, she thinks.

Matamata woman Helen Meads was shot in the head by horse-trainer husband Greg Meads, yet he received a minimum non-parole period of only 11 years.

And in the case of men like Ratahi, were he still alive he should be considered a serious risk to Beer's life indefinitely.

"You do get cases like that which are really about managing the risk to the person involved and trying to put systems around her and the only way you can do that I think effectively in these sorts of scenarios is... you need to have him locked up for long enough periods so we can do the work that needs to be done with her and get her out of it."

The woman we spoke to says there needs to be changes in attitudes in society and that the process to get protection orders has to be made easier - in her situation once the police and courts were involved a protection order should have been automatic, she thinks.

But she still doesn't have one because of the cost involved.

Protection orders are difficult to apply for without a lawyer and for women like her who do not qualify for legal aid, the ballpark figure is around $2000.

The Shine agency says women sometimes spend thousands of dollars more than this trying to obtain protection orders because some obsessive offenders are good at using the legal system to fight the orders and continue the psychological abuse.

The woman we spoke to also believes women must be much more educated in how persistent, manipulative and subtle some of the behaviours of offenders can be.

Watch out for any manipulation right at the start, she says, before emotion or sex is a factor.

She worries for young girls who have role models such as pop-star Rihanna to look up to.

"It seems bizarre to prosecute Chris Brown for slapping her in the car and then write the song S&M. That song is insensitive to the women who are suffering domestic violence.

"Our environment is utterly glamorising that kind of thing."

Girls must also realise having an obsessive stalker is not a sign they are into you. Instead, they are into power and control.

There is no flattery in a stalker, she says.

Where to get help

* Women's Refuge crisis line: 0800 REFUGE or 0800 733 843, open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, website:
www.womensrefuge.org.nz

* Auckland-based Shine's confidential domestic abuse helpline: 0508 744 633 and website:
2222shine.org.nz

- additional reporting by Phil Taylor