104. If their name was Brian: family violence in lesbian relationships

There is a phrase I have heard, in various forms, from many of my clients over the years:

"If her name was Brian instead of Barb, the recognition and response would have been completely different."

That phrase is the whole problem, distilled into one sentence.

This solo episode is for two audiences at once.

The first is every woman who has experienced family violence or post-separation abuse perpetrated by a female partner - and who has watched as professionals, police, and even community bystanders failed to recognise what was being done to her.  If that is you, I want you to know I see what happened. The pattern is real. The response was inadequate. And it was not because your experience didn't matter - it was because the system we have built to recognise family violence is built on a gendered template, and when neither party fits that template, the template fails.

The second is the post-separation professionals - lawyers, mediators, family report writers, Independent Children's Lawyers, police - who handle these cases without realising how much they are missing. The bias is correctable and this episode is a direct invitation to do better.

In this episode I unpack what the research actually shows about intimate partner violence in lesbian relationships, why minimisation happens so consistently across professional and community contexts, the specific dynamics of stalking and coercive control when both parties are women, and what naming abuse honestly does - and does not - mean for the broader LGBTQIA+ community.

Content note: This episode discusses family violence, post-separation abuse, coercive control, and stalking, including the specific ways these are minimised in lesbian relationships. 

If you need support: 1800RESPECT 1800 737 732 (24/7 family violence and sexual assault support, available across Australia) | QLife 1800 184 527 (LGBTQI+ peer support).

Explore the supports offered by Danielle Black Coaching

The Post-Separation Parenting Blueprint™
👉 https://www.danielleblackcoaching.com.au/the-post-separation-parenting-blueprint-1

AI Danielle - Your 24/7 Digital Coach
👉 https://www.danielleblackcoaching.com.au/meet-ai-danielle

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The music you hear in this outro is 'Calm is Credible' - an original track created exclusively for the Post-Separation Abuse Podcast and Danielle Black Coaching.  You can listen to this song, or download free, by visiting danielleblackcoaching.com.au

About Danielle Black Coaching:

Danielle Black is a respected authority in child-focused post-separation parenting in Australia. With over twenty years’ experience across education, counselling and coaching - alongside her own lived experience navigating a complex separation and family court journey - she supports parents to think strategically, build capacity, and protect their children’s safety and wellbeing within complex legal and relational systems.

Through Danielle Black Coaching, she leads a growing team of specialist coaches and a structured support ecosystem designed to provide professionally held, evidence-informed guidance for parents navigating high-conflict separation and family court processes.

Learn more at danielleblackcoaching.com.au

This podcast is for educational purposes only and not legal advice. Please seek independent legal, medical, financial, or mental health advice for your situation.

Transcript

Content Warning And Core Problem

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Before I get into today's episode, I want to give you a brief heads up. We're talking today about family violence and post-separation abuse, including coercive control, stalking and the specific ways that abuse in lesbian relationships is minimized, missed, and mishandled. If that's something that you need to take slowly, please do. You can pause, come back, take breaks. This content matters but you matter more. Let me tell you about a phrase that I keep coming back to. One that I've heard in various forms from multiple clients over the years that I've been working in this space. I'm paraphrasing to protect privacy, but the essence is always the same. If their name was Brian instead of Barb, the recognition and response would have been completely different. That's it. That's the problem distilled into one sentence. A woman being followed through a shopping centre by her former partner asking her to stop, asking bystanders for help. Nobody reacting. Not because they were afraid to get involved, not because they didn't hear, but because genuinely, they didn't actually see anything wrong. Two women, one following the other, no alarm bells fired, no pattern recognition was activated, no intervention. Change the gender of the person doing the following. And I have no doubt the scene reads completely differently to bystanders, police, the courts, family law professionals, and to the community as a whole. That gap between what is happening and what actually gets seen is what this episode is about. Welcome to the Post Separation Abuse Podcast. I'm your host, Danielle Black. I'm primarily a post separation parenting coach, working with clients navigating some of the most complex and painful territory that family breakdowns can produce. Today, we're talking about family violence and post separation abuse in lesbian relationships, what it looks like, why it's so consistently missed, and what needs to change. This episode is for women who have lived this, who have tried to name it and been met with confusion or disbelief, or that particular brand of well meaning minimization that can feel almost worse than outright dismissal. I want those women to feel sane and accurately seen. But it's also for professionals that tune in. The lawyers, the mediators, the report writers, the ICLs, the police, the counsellors, the support workers, the doctors who work with this cohort and may not yet have the framework to fully understand what they're looking at. This episode is also a professional development opportunity, and I say that directly and without apology. Our entire cultural and institutional understanding of family violence was built on a particular model male perpetrator, female victim visible family violence as the primary evidence of abuse. That model has done important work the recognition of family violence as a serious crime, the development of specialist court and legal frameworks, the training of police and support services, all of that emerged from a feminist movement that fought hard to make the reality of violence against women visible and taken seriously. And not just violence against women, but violence perpetrated by men. That matters, that history is real and important. But we also need to acknowledge that that particular model has limits, and one of its most significant limits is that when neither party in the relationship fits the template, when there's no man in the picture, the framework can fail completely. The pattern recognition doesn't fire, the alarm bells don't go off. The practitioner, the police officer, the bystander can look at the situation and they can't locate it in the story they've been given about what abuse looks like. The Australian Institute of Family Studies has documented this clearly. Research identifies what it calls an invisibility of LGBTQIA plus relationships in policy and practice responses, a structural absence of acknowledgement that intimate partner violence exists in these communities at all. The Australian Human Rights Commission has noted it. Rainbow Health Australia has noted it. This is not a fringe observation. It's a documented, researched, replicated finding, and it has real consequences for the women that I work with. When the framework doesn't see you, the system built on the framework doesn't protect you. Police who aren't sure how to respond, magistrates who aren't sure how to categorize what they're hearing, mediators who proceed as though the power is equal because they can't identify the dynamic they're actually in the room with. Family report writers who have been trained in a model that assumes a male perpetrator and a female victim and who are trying to apply that model to a situation it was never designed to assess. The woman on the receiving end of all of this is not experiencing a gap in academic literature. She's experiencing a gap in protection. And that gap can be dangerous. The numbers do matter here, not because data is more important than lived experience, but because one of the ways that abuse in lesbian relationships gets minimized is through the assumption that it's rare, that it's an anomaly, that it's not the norm. But the truth is that it's not rare. Research consistently finds that LGBTQIA plus people experience intimate partner violence at rates comparable to and in some studies even higher than those in heterosexual relationships. The Private Lives 3 survey, a large national survey of LGBTQIA plus people in Australia, found that over sixty percent of respondents reported experiencing intimate partner violence. Over sixty percent. That number should stop us in our tracks. And yet, reporting rates tell a very different story. The same body of research consistently finds that victim survivors are significantly less likely to report their experiences to police or to seek formal support. The gap between prevalence and reporting isn't small, it's a chasm. And it's produced in large part by the very failures that I'm describing in this episode, the expectation of not being believed, not being understood, not being protected. When someone has learned through experience or through the experience of others in their community that reporting is likely to result in confusion, minimization or retraumatization, they don't report. That's a rational response to a broken system. It's not evidence that the abuse isn't happening. It's also important to talk about the Australian context here. We're not talking about a problem that only exists in countries with less developed family violence frameworks. Australia has actually invested significantly in family violence reform compared to many countries. We have specialist family violence courts, the Family Violence Protection Act in Victoria, nationally recognised risk assessment frameworks, and a growing body of training for frontline workers. And still the research finds that LGBTQIA plus experiences of family violence are underrepresented in all of those systems and still the gap persists. That tells us something important about where the gap lives. It's not primarily in legislation, it's in the assumptions and frameworks that practitioners carry into the room with them, often without even knowing it. Talking about coercive control specifically is also important here because it's the form of abuse that's most consistently missed in lesbian relationships, and it's the form of abuse that can cause some of the most profound and lasting harm. Coercive control is not a single incident, it's a pattern, it's a sustained use of behaviors, both physical and non physical designed to monitor, restrict, isolate and dominate a partner. It's the erosion of autonomy over time. It's what creates the condition that researchers describe as entrapment. The experience of being controlled not through a single act of violence, but through the cumulative effect of a thousand small and large acts of domination that can make independent thought and action feel impossible. In heterosexual relationships, this is increasingly recognised. The law in several Australian states and territories has moved to explicitly criminalise coercive control. The community conversation is shifting. People are beginning to understand that you do not need to have been hit to have been abused. In lesbian relationships that shift is slower, and there are specific reasons for it. The first is the myth of equivalence. When two women are in a relationship, there's a cultural tendency to assume equivalence, to assume that the power is balanced, that the dynamic is mutual and that any conflict is simply conflict rather than control. This assumption is both incorrect and dangerous. Power imbalances can exist in all relationships, they're not produced by gender alone. They are produced by financial control, social capital, emotional dominance, isolation tactics, and a hundred other mechanisms that operate just as effectively in relationships between women as in any other. The second is the specific identity-based tactics that are available to a perpetrator in a same-sex relationship and that have no equivalent in heterosexual abuse dynamics. ANROS and ACON research has documented these clearly. They include threatening to out a partner, to their family, their employer, their community as a mechanism of control. For a woman who is not yet fully out as lesbian, or who is out in some contexts but not in others, this threat can carry enormous power. It's a lever that does not exist in heterosexual relationships, and it's entirely unique to the experience of LGBTQIA plus victim survivors. There can be a weaponizing of internalized homophobia. Telling a partner that she's unstable, that her responses to abuse are evidence of psychological problems, that no one will believe her because of who she is or what their relationship is. To use the stigma and shame that some LGBTQIA plus people have often absorbed from a lifetime in a heteronormative world as a tool of control. There can be an exploiting of the overlap of community networks. Lesbian communities, particularly in regional and suburban areas, can often be small and tightly interconnected. The perpetrator and victim survivor might share friendship groups, social spaces, workplaces, support networks, even therapists. This is not incidental. It's a condition that a coercive and controlling person can exploit systematically, controlling the narrative, positioning the victim survivor as the problem, ensuring that community spaces where a person would normally seek support become unsafe or inaccessible. The woman being followed through a shopping centre that I described at the opening of this episode, that's not an isolated event in many cases. It's one visible moment in a pattern of surveillance and presence that is designed to communicate I am always here, you cannot escape me. Your community is mine too. And bystanders didn't see it, because the script they've been given for what danger looked like just simply doesn't include this. It's important to also name the specific institutional failures here because I think the vagueness is part of the problem. When we talk about quote systemic gaps without naming where those gaps live, nothing changes. So let's be specific. With police, the research on LGBTQIA plus people's experiences of reporting family violence to police in Australia is not encouraging. Barriers documented in the research include police officers who are uncertain how to apply legal frameworks to a same-sex relationship, officers who default to a mutual dispute framing when both parties are of the same gender, and in some cases overt or subtle homophobia that silences the victim survivor. The woman who calls police on a female partner is already working against the grain of the script. She might be met with confusion. She may be met with the question implicit or explicit of whether it really counts. She may be told that it doesn't really sound like domestic violence. She might find that the officer in front of her simply does not have the training to understand what coercive control looks like when it's not being perpetrated by a man. That is a failure of training and institutional culture. It's not the failure of the woman making the report. We need to talk about the family law system, the mediators, the family report writers, the ICLs, the judges, who operate on frameworks that have been developed primarily with heterosexual family structures in mind. The risk assessment tools that practitioners use, the questions they ask, the patterns they're trained to identify, these were built on a particular model of family violence. That model is not wrong for the context it was designed for, but it's a bit incomplete. A family report writer who's been trained to look for a male perpetrator and a female victim who walks into an assessment involving two women is operating without a full map. They may not identify coercive control dynamics that would be immediately legible to them in a heterosexual context. They may read the presenting behaviour of the perpetrator, the composure, the reasonableness in the room, the cooperative performance, as the evidence of safety. They may read the presenting behaviour of the victim survivor, the anxiety, the heightened state, the difficulty presenting calmly when in the same space as the person controlling them, as evidence of instability. This is not hypothetical, this is what many of my clients have described, and it's what the research on coercive control in same-sex relationships is beginning to document. As I've said in a previous episode, the family dispute resolution process can be gamed. A coercive and controlling person can perform cooperation in the room while maintaining a pattern of control outside it. That applies in heterosexual relationships and it also applies here, perhaps with an added layer of opaqueness. Proceeding with mediation in the presence of a coercive control dynamic is not a neutral act, it's potentially dangerous. It places the victim survivor in a process that requires them to negotiate with the person who has been controlling them in a room where the power imbalance is structurally invisible with a practitioner who may lack the framework to see it. FDR practitioners have screening obligations under Australian law. The Family Law Act requires practitioners to screen for family violence before proceeding. The question is whether those screening tools and processes are capable of identifying coercive control in same-sex relationships, and in many cases the answer is not yet. I want to name a specific failure in family law assessments that I think is under discussed and that affects lesbian families in a way that is consistent and consequential. When a heterosexual couple separates and parenting arrangements are in dispute, practitioners can ask as a matter of standard practice, who was the primary caregiver? They don't assume equal involvement. They examine the evidence. Who attended the medical appointments? Who managed the communication with the school? Who was the child's primary attachment figure? Who held the emotional and practical infrastructure of this child's daily life? The question is asked because the framework assumes it needs to be asked, because the framework knows from decades of research and practice that parenting roles in heterosexual relationships are often not equal, and that the history of actual care matters enormously in determining what will serve the child's best interest going forward. When two women separate, I have observed and my clients have experienced that this question is far less likely to be asked with the same rigour. The default assumption, applied often without conscious examination, is something close to both parents are women, women are caregivers, therefore both were equally involved. Significant time with both parents is then recommended, an equal or near equal arrangement is framed as the progressive child focused outcome, and the actual history of care, who did what, who knew what, who built what is either not examined at depth or not weighted appropriately when it is. If the non primary caregiver were male, if it were Brian and not Barb, his involvement would likely be far more scrutinized. He would be expected to demonstrate his engagement with the child's education, health, emotional life, relationships, friendships, developmental needs. The absence of that engagement if it existed, would be relevant and would be weighed. Because Barb is a woman and women are assumed to be involved, that scrutiny often doesn't land in the same way. The assumption does the work that the evidence should be doing. This matters in at least two specific ways that I want to name directly. The first is the birth mother status. In many lesbian families, one partner carried the pregnancy. She may have been the primary attachment figure from birth, through the biological experience of pregnancy, birth and often breastfeeding, and through the patterns of caregiving that were established in those early weeks, months and years. In heterosexual family law proceedings, biological connection is routinely treated as a relevant factor. For birth mothers in lesbian partnerships, that connection and the primary care history that often accompanies it can be flattened, it can be subsumed into quote two mums, in a way that loses the specificity of who this child was primarily attached to and who built the architecture of their daily life. The second is the invisible architecture problem, which I spoke about at length in our International Women's Day episode. The primary caregiver in any family, regardless of the structure of that family, is often performing work that is invisible precisely because it functions. Connections with daycare, school, other caregivers, the medical knowledge, the emotional attunement, the daily management of a child's needs. When practitioners fail to look actively for and assess that invisible labour in a same sex female couple, they're not conducting a neutral assessment, they're conducting an incomplete one. And an incomplete assessment in family law contexts has real consequences for children. I want to be clear about what I am and am not saying. I'm not saying that non birth mothers are less capable parents, or that they can't be the primary caregiver, or that equal involvement never exists in lesbian families. There are absolutely families where both parents were genuinely and significantly embedded in the child's life, and where the child spending significant time with both parents can be the right outcome. But that should be the conclusion of a rigorous assessment, not the starting point. And the starting assumption of equal involvement in same-sex female couples is, in my professional view, alive and operating in ways that are not in the best interests of children or of the primary caregivers who have cared for them. It's important that we say something about the community as a whole, because the shopping centre scenario that I opened with is not just about bystanders who didn't act, it's about a broader community pattern. Lesbian communities are often spaces of profound support and solidarity. They can also, when a relationship breaks down in the context of abuse, become sites of additional harm. When the perpetrator and victim survivor share a community, Community, the perpetrator often moves faster to control the narrative. They present first, they frame the story, they position the victim survivor as the unstable one, the unreasonable one, the one who's making things difficult. And community members who are not equipped to identify coercive control any more than the average person often accept that framing, not out of malice, but out of the same absence of a framework that I've been describing throughout this episode. They just don't know what they're looking at, and in the absence of a clear framework, the person who presents more calmly can often be perceived as being more credible. This is how victim survivors end up losing their community at exactly the moment they need it most. If you have been in an intimate relationship with a woman who hurt you, who controlled you, who monitored you, who isolated you from friends and family, who threatened you, who used your identity against you, who followed you, who turned your community against you, and you found yourself struggling to name it or struggling to be believed when you did name it? I want to let you know that what happened to you was abuse. The gender of the person who perpetrated it does not change that. The fact that you loved her does not change that. The fact that your community may not have seen it does not change that. The fact that the police may not have been sure how to respond does not change that. Abuse is about power and control, it's not about gender, and the experience of having your autonomy systematically dismantled, of being monitored and threatened and isolated and undermined is the same experience regardless of who is doing it to you. One of the additional layers that women in your situation often carry is this the fear that naming it will somehow reflect badly on the community you love, that saying quote, a woman abused me will feed a narrative that is already used against LGBTQIA plus people, that your relationships are somehow dysfunctional, that you're not fit to parent, that same sex families are inherently less stable. I understand that fear. It's real and it's not paranoid because that narrative does exist in the community. But I want to offer you a different way of framing things. Naming abuse in your relationship is not a statement about lesbian relationships in general. It's a statement about one person's behavior towards you. Abusive people exist in all communities, all relationship structures, all genders. Naming abuse does not betray your community. Staying silent to protect a narrative does. And your safety and the safety of your children if children are involved is more important than any narrative. If you are still in the relationship, please know that support exists. Rainbow Health Australia, Q Life and Specialist Family Violence Services are increasingly developing the capacity to see and respond to your experience. You may have to advocate for yourself within those services. That's not fair, but please don't let the imperfection of the system convince you that you don't deserve help. If you are post separation and navigating the legal system, please document. Document the pattern not just the incidents. Dates, specifics, the context around the events, how you responded and how your former partner responded. Coercive control is a pattern-based form of abuse, and the documentation of those patterns is part of your evidence. If you lack a deep understanding of coercive control and what you've experienced, you may like to consider accessing the post separation parenting blueprint. You can do that via our website, Daniel Blackcoaching.com.au. The blueprint features an entire module focused on coercive control. And please if you can, find a professional who understands this space and what you're navigating. Not every lawyer, not every coach, not every therapist has a framework to work with you effectively, and you deserve someone who does. Now I want to speak to the professionals who are tuning in. The professionals that I work with in the post separation space are by and large people who have come into this work because they wanted to help people. The failures that I've been describing today are not primarily failures of character, they're failures of framework and training. And the good thing is that that means that they're fixable, but they have to be named before they can be fixed. So let's name them directly. If you're a family violence practitioner, a police officer, a mediator, a report writer, a lawyer, an ICL, ask yourself whether your training has given you a framework for identifying coercive control in same-sex relationships, not just family violence in general, but coercive control specifically between two women. If the honest answer is no or not adequately, then this is information that you need to act on. Ask yourself whether your risk assessment tools were designed with an LGBTQIA plus relationships in mind. Ask yourself whether your screening processes for family violence are capable of surfacing identity-based abuse tactics, the outing threats, the weaponized homophobia, the exploitation of overlapping community networks. If they were not designed with those tactics in mind, then they won't reliably bring them to the surface. Ask yourself how you respond when a woman presents claiming abuse by a female former partner. What's your first internal response? Is it to take the claim at face value in the same way that you would if the alleged perpetrator were male? Or is there a moment of hesitation, a need to recalibrate, a question about whether this really fits the category? If there is, that moment of hesitation is worth examining. The research on this is very clear. Gender stereotypes about who can be a perpetrator and who can be a victim affect perception, not just in the bystanders on the street, but also in trained professionals. Studies have specifically examined how practitioners and even law enforcement assess the same violence scenario differently depending on the gender of the parties involved. When both parties are women, the assessment of danger is consistently lower. Consistently. That's a bias. It can be corrected, but only if it's acknowledged. The practical implications of this for post separation practice are significant. In a mediation context, if you're proceeding with a family dispute resolution involving a same sex couple, and one party is presenting with the indicators of someone under sustained pressure, hypervigilance, difficulty speaking freely, deferring repeatedly, apparent fear, please don't interpret that through a lens of a difficult personality or high conflict. Consider whether what you're looking at is the nervous system response of a person in the room with someone who's been controlling them. In a family report context, the same dynamic that I've described in previous episodes on family reports applies here with an added layer. A coercive or controlling person who's also skilled at social performance is going to present well when meeting with you regardless of gender. The victim survivor will often not, and if your framework for interpreting that presentation difference was built primarily on heterosexual family violence research, you might be missing what's in front of you. I'm not asking anyone to assume abuse. I'm asking them to hold open the question, to be genuinely curious about the dynamics in front of them, instead of defaulting to a framework that doesn't fit. The parents that I work with deserve practitioners who can see them clearly. All of them, including the ones the framework was never designed to see. Let's wrap up by coming back to where we started. If their name was Brian instead of Barb, the recognition and response would have been completely different. That sentence holds a world of pain in it, the pain of having something real and serious happen to you, and of watching the world not recognise it, of trying to explain it and being met with blankness or confusion, or the particular cruelty of being told that what you experienced wasn't actually abuse. But it also holds up a clear diagnostic because it tells us where the failure lives. It's not in the law primarily, but it is in the gap between what the law says and what the practitioners are equipped to see. It's in the pattern recognition that fires for Brian but doesn't fire for Barb. It's in the same training that was never designed to include this. It's in the community that shares the same blind spots as the institutions. Those are all fixable things. They require intention and motivation, they require investment in training, and the intellectual honesty to acknowledge the gap rather than defend the existing framework. They are fixable. In the meantime, to the women who are navigating this, you are not invisible to everyone. There are practitioners who understand this space, there are services being built to serve you better. The research literature, albeit slowly, is catching up. And there are people in professional practice, in community, in spaces like this one, who are committed to naming what's happening clearly enough that it can't keep being missed. You deserve to be seen and heard accurately, completely, without the distortion of a framework that was never designed to include your experience. If this episode resonated with you, please share it. The more people who hear it, the more chance we have of closing the gap that I've been describing today. You'll find me and my team at Danielleblackcoaching.com.au. If you're ready to work with someone who understands this space, my team and I are here. Thank you so much for being here with me for this important conversation. I look forward to chatting with you again soon.