Picture this. If you can. An eight-month-old baby girl, pretty as a pixie, is taken to hospital with a fractured femur. Her mother tells the doctors it happened when she fell out of bed, less than 30 centimetres onto a pile of towels.
But a full skeletal X-ray survey has revealed other healing fractures: one to each humerus – the bones of her little upper arms – and a couple to her tiny ribs.
What it looks like, someone observes, is that for the past five or six months – most of her life – this baby has been going through hell.
So now a pair of ugly detectives have the mother, 17 and scared but sticking to her story, in a cramped interview room at Kingsville police station in Melbourne’s west, laying out her options before the official taped interview begins.
They good-cop/bad-cop her a little, one leaning in close and telling her she’s a liar and how if she doesn’t tell the truth she’s likely to lose the kid for good, the other taking her out into the courtyard for a cup of coffee, a smoke and a chat about both their beautiful babies.
And suddenly the tears and the true story fall out.
She didn’t mean it, she says, never wanted to hurt her. Just snatched her up too quick and too hard, maybe grabbed her a couple of times too roughly. Done in by the utter frustration of a baby she loves madly but who too often just won’t stop crying.
The policemen read her rights and roll the tape.
But now picture this. A couple of days later and one of the detectives is in the young mum’s kitchen, taking coffee and dropping off a couple of dummies and a list of places she can go for help. Saying yes, he’ll go to court with her when she tries to get her baby back. Even wishing he’d brought his tool box to fix that dribbling tap over the sink.
And to think she’d always reckoned all coppers were arseholes, she says. Says she’s going to get help to make sure it never happens again, that she’s going to work one day at a time at becoming a good mother.
In the car on the way back to the station, one detective tells the other that he doesn’t consider himself naive but he believes her. It’s true, says the other: now she’s got her awful secret off her chest and is getting the help she needs, she’s taken a giant step towards a better life. That’s one mum, they’d bet, who’s not going to damage her baby again.
But, of course, it’s not up to them any more. They’ve done their job.
When you work on Victoria’s Community Policing Squad, you come in every day thinking you’ve already seen the worst that can happen, and every day you’re wrong. There’s always something worse.
There are times when you’re dragged down among society’s bottom-feeders, that particular breed of monster that devours its own children. Down to a world of hurt, full of broken babies.
Down here a de facto bites a little boy all over his body because he won’t go to sleep, chomping down on his toes so hard they fuse together. One man rapes an eight-week-old baby and another a 97-year-old great-grandmother. Pensioners French-kiss paperboys in public bus shelters. A father and his daughter live as husband and wife and all the relatives come to the birthday party of their vegetal offspring.
Here there are pederasts and pedophiles, battering babysitters, fondling schoolteachers, and parents who chastise their naughty children with fists and boots, lit cigarettes and boiling water.
‘Sometimes you just have those days,’ says Sergeant Linda Bennett of the Newport Community Policing Squad. ‘Those days when you get the worst that people can throw at each other, all laid on your doorstep in the course of one shift.’
Sometimes in this line of work, she adds, there are no blacks and whites. Only shades of grey.
A too-young mother with no parenting skills, alone and at her wits’ end from depression, shakes her screaming baby too hard. Another, the subject of a protection order when she was a child, now lashes out at her own. A dad goes too far and takes a shoe to his boys.
Is this an abuser? Or someone crying for help?
So you care about victims before crooks, about giving people quality time and personal contact, you counsel victims and point offenders to the services that might help them break the cycle. And you ponder the awful dilemma of knowing when it’s time to take away a baby or put a parent behind bars.
Says David Walsh, a soft-spoken, considered senior constable at Newport CPS: ‘You have to look at the overall picture. You don’t want to break up a family. You put the main caregiver, the breadwinner, in jail and the repercussions and consequences can be ongoing and just blow that family right out of the water.’
Senior Constable Sharon McKinnon, 25, says she has been awed by the extent of abuse she’s seen in the six months she’s been posted at Newport. The mother of a small daughter and now four months pregnant, it has made her more protective: ‘But you’ve got to keep it in perspective. I think you’re more aware and more wary but, once you start losing faith in the human race, you might as well get out of it.’
It has to be hard. Thousands of Victoria’s children live in that world of hurt: abused physically, sexually, emotionally, even chemically, or neglected in all manner of ways. Since 1981, it has been the job of the 210-member Community Policing Squad to protect them and bring to book their tormentors.
And of the 27 community policing squads located across the state, Newport is the busiest. A humble, dirty-white, triple-fronted weatherboard place in North Road, just down from the overpass and the railway yards and well screened by a couple of scraggy gums and a paperbark, you’d be hard-pressed to recognise it as a police station. Its 18 members, and the two permanent CIB detectives attached through its sexual investigation unit, serve almost 400,000 people across Juliet district, stretching from the Maribyrnong through Footscray, Williamstown, Altona, Sunshine and Melton to the hinterland country communities of Little River, Bacchus Marsh and Toolern Vale.
They respond to calls of truancy, missing persons, neglect and abuse of the elderly but the staple fare is child abuse, domestic violence and – more than any other police district in Victoria – rape, incest, indecent assault and sexual penetration of minors.
Over the past three years, since the squad moved to Newport from the red brick police complex at Altona North, the number of complaints has slowly fallen. Nevertheless, in the past 12 months it has inquired into 1120 complaints, 819 of them involving children. It investigated 448 sex crimes and 319 assaults – more than 80 per cent of them involving victims under 16.
But the Community Policing Squad and the Department of Human Services, with whom the police work in partnership, may only be scratching the surface. Worldwide research suggests that only 10 per cent of sexual assault of children is reported.
In a single year the CPS will take statements from more than 1000 children regarding sexual abuse – which implies that there are actually 10,000 instances of child sexual abuse in Victoria every year. Likewise the rest of the country. In other words, 10 times as many of our children as we suspect – and few of us suspect even the extent of the official figures – might be having their innocence brutally stolen away.
The coppers at Newport know it. It’s just the tip of the iceberg, says Senior Detective Gary Carson. The bulk of horrible stuff floating beneath the surface just doesn’t get complained about. And it can make you jaundiced, turn you cynical. ‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘You tend to think everybody’s either A: a victim or B: a sex offender.’
‘It’s rife,’ adds Senior Detective Paul ‘Robbo’ Robson, on seven weeks’ secondment to Newport from Footscray CIB. ‘Not just the sexual abuse but the physical stuff. The sexual, you can’t say it’s out of hand but the files we’re getting of the historical stuff, incidents from 20 years ago, show we don’t know what’s going on today.
‘These people come to us. We’re not out there fishing for complaints, because why would you? Why would you fish for these sorts of complaints?’
Because, of course, they keep rolling in anyway.
Tuesday, 11.26 am
He’s a lined and leathery Italian in his late 60s wearing a blue pullover, cheap check shirt and old grey trousers, incongruous against his nice white Nike Air runners. A little bloke and getting littler as he fidgets and looks around the interview room at the triple-deck tape recorder, the fingerprint gear and the two shirt-sleeved detectives sitting opposite.
Robbo and Terry ‘Keg’ Keating joke a bit and bring him coffee while they wait for an interpreter. He tries to join in but it’s only the brave-face bonhomie you put on with coppers when you know you’ve done something wrong. And he admits it: smiles and says he’s shitting himself.
Last week, after a Department of Human Services notification, the police were called to his immaculate little house in Footscray. He’d found out his 15-year-old daughter had been wagging school to see some boy, so he beat her. ‘What else could I do?’ he’d told them.
Later that day, in a VATE (video and audio-taped evidence required for all sex or assault witnesses or victims aged under 17) interview, the girl said she was on her bed when her father came in, started kicking at her and hitting her with the buckle end of his belt, calling her whore, slut and prostitute in Italian, ‘Puttana!’, hitting her on the arm, thigh, leg, everywhere. Twice, she alleged, he left the room to calm down but returned and started in on her again.
The beating went on for an hour, she said, and left her covered in welts and bruises, one on her thigh black and swollen up like half a football. A doctor who examined her at the Royal Children’s Hospital’s Gatehouse Centre stated it was the worst assault on a child he had seen all year. The girl had been placed in emergency accommodation and now she wanted her father punished.
Senior Detective Keating flicks on the recorder and the old man begins talking. He admits hitting the girl: ‘I was unhappy; I lost control and what happened, happened.’
He was worried she would get out on the street with the boys, maybe the drugs, he says through the interpreter. He wanted her to have an education and a future. He begins to weep. ‘I love my children very much and I want her back whatever the cost.’
Keating puts it to him that the beating went on for an hour. ‘No, no,’ he says. That he went outside to get his breath? ‘No comment, I can’t comment,’ he repeats over and over. He lost control, he can’t remember. He buries his head in his arms and weeps hard now. He’s so ashamed; ‘Molto pentito,’ he sobs.
Robson takes over, less patient, pushing harder than Keating but getting no further. You remember all sorts of details, he tells the old man, what you were wearing, all sorts of things, but not a single thing about the beating. ‘Now you say you’re sorry. You’re not sorry. I put it to you that you’re only sorry you’ve been caught.’
They tell him he is to be charged with recklessly and intentionally causing serious injury and drive him home, outwardly friendly but unfooled.
‘Crocodile tears,’ Keating sneers later. ‘Mate, I saw that poor kid’s bruises.’
They call Keating ‘Keg’ for obvious reasons: he’s barrel-chested all the way down to his hips. ‘You look like a keg on legs,’ yelled one of the instructors at the academy a dozen years ago and it stuck.
Likeably gruff, with an equally exuberant moustache, he’s been a copper for 12 years and with the sexual investigation unit for the past 14 months. Keg came to the force as a 30-year-old after working as a rep for health insurance company HBA. Got bored doing the same thing day after day, decided it was time for a change. ‘It’s amazing what you can get used to,’ he says. ‘I try not to let it worry me any more but when I first came here I thought “Crikey”. You really don’t believe how much of it goes on. Certainly the general public wouldn’t have a clue.
‘There are cases where, yeah sure, it depresses you a bit, but your main aim is to get them down the end of the track, to get them into court and convicted.
‘It’s just a shame to see, especially with a lot of the baby files – they’re the worst ones, babies going to hospital with broken bones and burns and bits and pieces and no-one’s saying anything. If an eight-month-old baby could talk we’d be laughing in this job.’
Born and bred in Newport and a mainstay of the lawn bowls club just over the rusty railway lines, he derides the view of Melbourne’s west as some sort of Appalachia – an epicentre of abuse. ‘The western suburbs, it’s a working man’s area, some spots within the district are pretty rough and you get a lot of physical abuse but there’s no set area, no set social class where these things happen.’
Tuesday, 2.30 pm
The phones have been ringing hard since 9 am, batches of notifications from the Department of Human Services rolling in. Since the implementation, in 1992, of a system designed to end confusing and risky duplication of child abuse investigations, the department has clear child protection responsibility but must involve the squad if there’s any suspicion that a crime has been committed. So sometimes you get calls like this.
Sharon McKinnon smiles wryly at the apologies of the department worker on the other end of the line. Had to let you know, he says, about a woman dobbing in her neighbour for abusing her eight-year-old son. Reckons she yells and shakes him and he’s so scared he hides up a tree, says she saw bruises on his face three weeks back.
‘But it’s the worst notification I’ve ever received,’ he says. When he asked why she’d waited three weeks to make the report, the woman says she had an argument with her neighbour while putting out the bins that morning. ‘And, besides, she owes me $200.’
Thanks but no thanks, says Sharon. The squad will sit this one out for now – like the other notifications: a school reporting a boy who claims his mother hits him with a belt, yet has never been seen with a single bruise; a nine-year-old boy touching a schoolmate intimately; two Koori sisters, 13 and 14, found sleeping rough in the city who say they’ve run away from home in Albury because Mum and her de facto belt them with cords and frying pans. Victorian and New South Wales missing persons are contacted, the LEAP computer scanned, but the names the girls have given can’t be matched. No Community Policing Squad involvement. For now.
Meanwhile, Keg and Robbo are at Kingsville for their first interview with the 17-year-old who hurt her baby. She’s tiny and pretty in a striped knit top and jeans and now, finally having rolled over and admitted hurting the child, she smiles shyly as Robbo regales her with stories of his new daughter, 11-week-old Annie Isobel.
Robson, 30, has been 11 years in the job, six as a detective at Sunshine and Footscray CIBs. A self-confessed motormouth, he reckons he was born with the gift of the gab but turned it into an art form in his previous life as a car salesman. This is his second relieving stint with the Community Policing Squad and he says he’s enjoying it more than many other detectives who get roped in: ‘Some coppers like doing armed robberies, others like doing arson or homicide, some coppers like booking cars. I prefer to help out the victim.
‘The victims you get in this job are more victims than anybody else you deal with. These are people that, when they come to a place like this and ask for help, they want that help, need that help more than anyone else.’
And not always just the victims. That’s why he’s prepared to help out this kid. ‘What comes first, the chicken or the egg?’ he says later. ‘I wasn’t prepared to look at her as a crook and say “You’re a rotten bitch, you’ve punched the shit out of your kid” – though she has, she’s damaged her child, we’ve now got a broken baby. But she might be as much broken as the child.
‘I think I’ve been around long enough not to be too naive but now that she’s admitted it I can’t see her even contemplating doing it again.’
Wednesday, 10.25 am
The kid doesn’t like the jacks much, in fact she almost did a bolt over the back fence when they rang up this morning, thinking for a minute they were chasing her for something. But all they want is to take a quick witness statement.
She’s a freckled redhead, 17 going on 13, nervous and distracted, not too sure how to react to having two policewomen, Sharon McKinnon and Senior Constable Kylie Towk, in her cluttered, footy-trophy-decorated living room. She covers her mouth with her hands and talks between the fingers.
On Monday, just before midnight, Kylie Towk and David Walsh, out in the van on night-shift, were called to a report of an alleged rape of the girl’s mother.
The mother told them she had gone to her ex-boyfriend’s house the previous Friday to borrow some cigarettes. She said he had kept her imprisoned in the house over the weekend, assaulting and raping her a number of times and cutting her clothes and shoes into strips before taking them out and dumping them. She fled when they went to a bank in West Footscray on Monday.
The woman said she remembered her daughter coming to the house on the Friday, knocking on the doors and yelling for her. She said she was not allowed to answer.
Now the girl tells Sharon she was trying to drop off some shoes for her mum. She left them at the door and they were found with the other dumped clothes. It is strong corroborating evidence, a good result in less than 30 minutes.
Back at Newport, the notifications keep piling up. A woman reports her husband for punching their 16-year-old son but neither will press charges. Counterpunching allegations from a couple in a custody battle over a three-year-old girl, a claim of physical assault trumped by a counter-claim of molestation, the child a pawn in their nasty game. Nevertheless, a joint visit is arranged.
A school reports a little girl with a cigarette burn on her hand. She says it was an accident when she reached across to get a drink from her daddy. Plausible except that Dad’s known to police and the LEAP file shows he has a scar from a burn in exactly the same spot. That’s too much of a coincidence for Sergeant John Flynn’s liking, so he and Senior Constable Jane Walsh head out to the school. In the end the story stands up, but there’s no point taking chances.
Flynn, 37, and 21 years a policeman, came to Newport from Ballarat in April 1995 and immediately felt the culture shock: ‘I thought “My God”,’ he says. ‘And the sex – at the time I started there was a hell of a lot of sex abuse and child sexual offence is arguably the worst offence you can imagine, the worst experience a child could go through. But I think just recently the physical abuse has increased – and mainly against children.’
You can see why people get stressed. ‘Police, we don’t deal with happy people. You go to a burglary you don’t see a happy person there, you pull over a car and they’re not too happy with you, you go to thefts and murders and you don’t find anyone glad to see you …
‘But here you go to the extreme, dealing with the tragedies really, absolute life tragedies. Kids, and adults, dealing with us are not going to forget it overnight, it’s a long-term thing. We’ve got to help them get through it as best as possible.’
Wednesday, 1.30 pm
The two little boys are highly strung at the best of times and it was their first visit to a cemetery, so you can see why they had the night terrors. They started talking about ghosts and monsters and couldn’t sleep. They kept crying and sooking and carrying on until it all got too much for their dad.
They arrived at school on Tuesday and the teachers couldn’t help but notice the bruises, one all over one boy’s upper arm, and a six-by-six-centimetre welt on the other’s thigh. Daddy had hit them, they said. With his shoe. His very best shoe.
But the school hadn’t reported the incident until today and now Kylie Towk is reading the riot act to the welfare co-ordinator. It’s mandatory reporting, she reminds, mandatory. All it needs is a teacher to pick up a phone. Who knows what else could have happened to those boys in the intervening 24 hours?
Kylie, Dave Walsh and two Department of Human Services workers conduct separate interviews with the brothers, who repeat their story. Walsh asks one how he felt about being hit. ‘Half happy, half sad,’ he answers. Sad he had been hit but happy that he would learn not to be naughty.
At 3.40 the parents arrive at the school. Dave and Kylie introduce themselves and, before they can say anything else, the mother walks into the foyer and collapses, crying loudly. Curled up in a ball, she sobs that the boys are lying and their father never hits them. The father is calm and says he understands he must be investigated.
Eventually, the mother settles down and accompanies the boys to the Gatehouse Centre where they are examined and pronounced fine, except for the bruises. They are then taken to Newport for their VATEs.
One of the boys says he loves his dad and knows he loves them very much too, but sometimes he hits them, though never before with a shoe. He says he wishes his family was happy and that Daddy could get a job.
Late that night they are allowed to go home. Though a department officer says one bruise is the biggest she’s ever seen, they decide not to ‘apprehend’. She believes it would distress the boys too much to be taken from their parents.
‘One of the common things people say is “I hit you because I love you”,’ says Dave the next morning. ‘You can’t take the hard line and say don’t ever, ever hit your children, but people have to learn what’s acceptable and what’s not. I think, in this situation, the father’s realised he’s been, um, over-zealous. We can’t stop what’s happened but hopefully this will stop it happening again.’
‘I don’t know,’ says John Flynn. ‘You sit down and say, “What has that fella done?” It only takes one incident to be a child abuser, whether you’re angry or not, and this one I think goes well beyond legal chastisement.’
Thursday, 7.30 pm
‘He’d be the best teacher in the world,’ says the girl, ‘if he just didn’t do these things.’
She’s 18, tall and coltish and terribly embarrassed, just days away from the start of her VCE. She has come in to Newport with her mother to make a statement about one of her teachers who has become far too familiar with her and another girl. He has been touching her, making suggestive comments and, on her birthday, kissed her on the neck. The final straw came the other day when he bit her ear.
She reported him to her principal who, under mandatory reporting provisions, contacted the Community Policing Squad. She’s nervous now, doesn’t want to get him in any further trouble because he can be like her best friend at times, and makes an official request, as she is entitled, that police take no further action.
Sharon, painstakingly tapping the details into an ancient ValueMagic computer, explains there is little chance the matter will be ignored. ‘This is a person in a position of authority and trust and, if this is true, he has abused that trust,’ she says.
The mother is surprised the police would take their time over something ‘so trivial’.
‘I don’t think it’s trivial at all,’ says Sharon. ‘Frankly, I’m appalled.’
It’s her second complaint involving a teacher this evening – but the first, at 5.45, was about a student. A female teacher from Sharon’s old secondary college calls to report a campaign of harassment. A 14-year-old girl has been making phone calls and sending pizzas to her home. The harassment has gone on for six months and the school has failed to act and now the woman is at the end of her rope. But she is reluctant to seek an intervention order.
‘Linda and I might go speak to the girl in the morning,’ says Sharon later. ‘Hopefully that will wake her up to what she’s doing. ’Cos basically it’s stalking.’
Friday, 8.30 am
‘Oh, fantastic. As if I really need this,’ says Gary Carson, looking into the mouthpiece of a telephone and seeing months of careful investigation disappear into the ether.
The kid was only in yesterday afternoon, reviewing his VATE tape, and travelling pretty well. They gave him a can of Coke and he thought it was Christmas. A 13-year-old, with attention deficit disorder, he had alleged that when he was about nine, his uncle had begun forcing oral sex on him.
The uncle had been charged with sexual penetration of a child under 10 and they were due in the Melbourne Magistrates Court for a contest committal hearing. But now the local divvy van boys were on the line, saying the kid had climbed onto the roof of his house and wasn’t coming down. ‘I’m not goin’ to no court. I’m not goin’ nowhere,’ he’d yelled.
Carson, a copper for 15 years, 10 of those as a detective, got on the phone to the boy’s home and slowly, softly cajoled him into coming down. Now he’s heading out to chauffeur him, hostile and reluctant, to court, but seeing his case slip away.
Meanwhile, Terry Keating and Jane Walsh are shepherding a florid-faced old man, in his late 70s, across Sun Crescent, Sunshine, and up the stairs of the local CIB offices. He’s shaking so violently that Keg fears the poor old couta’s going to have a heart attack.
Earlier this year his daughter came in and alleged that, in about 1980, when they lived in New Zealand and she was eight, he began having sex with her – once a week, when her mother was at a women’s committee meeting. The abuse continued until she was 14 and after they came to Australia.
The police all arrive back at Newport about the same time that afternoon and – surprisingly – everyone’s grinning. ‘The old fella rolled right over, made full admissions,’ says Keg. And Gary’s uncle, after half an hour of debates between lawyers outside the court, decided to stick up his hand and plead guilty.
And now the father of the boys hit with the shoe comes in and makes admissions as well. Unshaven and harried, he says he ‘cracked the shits. To tell you the truth, I didn’t realise I hit them so hard’.
‘Not a bad end to the week,’ says Keg, heading out to the bowling club. But it’s rarely this good. Sometimes you go home wondering if it’s all worth it. On those days, he sits down and talks it through with his partner. Then he goes out and plays bowls.
Carson takes the exact opposite approach: ‘You start taking it home and it’ll drown you,’ he says. ‘My family wouldn’t have a clue about what I do, I don’t talk about it. I don’t want them to be part of this type of life, sexual abuse, physical abuse, incest.’
And anyway, there’s always something worse tomorrow. ‘We’re never out of work,’ says Linda Bennett. ‘That’s the sad thing here.’