Domestic abuse, with pets as a weapon

The ACT party wants to criminalise coercive control using pets, but one expert questions why only this type of abuse is being singled out for attention

When his wife and children wouldn’t do what he wanted them to, he lined them up in front of the goldfish tank and tipped chemicals into it so the kids would see their pets die.

This is just one of the stories Julie Chapman, the founder of the Pet Refuge Charitable Trust, can tell about ways abusers weaponise their pets to control their victims.

It’s “sadistic, psychotic sort of stuff”, she says.

This man would go and buy more fish, so there would always be a constant threat in the home.

About 40 of those goldfish ended up at pet refuge while the family escaped to safety. The refuge houses everything from those small fish to ducks, guinea pigs, cats and dogs, horses and goats - any loved pet that is being weaponised by an abuser.

The ACT party wants to criminalise this “coercive control”, in a five point plan that also includes making sure a victim’s pet is included in a protection order, and bring in legislation to prevent abusers selling, giving away or otherwise getting rid of a pet.

Its policy was launched at Pet Refuge in Auckland, although leader David Seymour and entourage had to sign non-disclosure agreements to keep its location a secret.

On Wednesday’s episode of The Detail we look at whether such a policy would work, and the ways abusers are using loved animals, and new technology, to control or keep track of their victims.

Chapman says Pet Refuge has been asking for some of these measures for some time, including compulsory reporting by front line staff when pets are present in a household where they attend family violence incidents.

“I really believe you can’t measure the quantum of a problem or an issue without having the data to back that up,” she says. “We know it’s a big issue but we don’t know how big, and so for us to be able to design our services in the future, we’d really love to have some data on how prevalent this really is. And then we can do more.”

She says it’s important to bring the issue of pet abuse as part of family violence more into the light, and that protections for family pets are strengthened.

“We know that we have the highest reporting rates of family violence in the OECD, and 63 percent of Kiwi households have a family pet,” she says. “I think what we’re seeing at Pet Refuge is really the tip of the iceberg of what’s going on behind closed doors.”

Pet Refuge receives between five and 10 calls a week for help in these situations, with the abused person not willing to leave until the animals are safe. Ninety percent of the pets that come into the organisation’s care need vet treatment related to their abuse, all paid for by donors.

Associate Professor Carrie Leonetti from the Auckland University Law School says she has mixed feelings about ACT’s plans, and believes restrictions on coercive control should go further.

“In and of itself it’s probably a good policy, but it does sit in a really odd context,” she says.

“Aotearoa New Zealand, unlike a lot of other countries, has never criminalised coercive control. We don’t have a coercive control offence in our Crimes Act, so as far as I can tell they’re criminalising coercive control of animal abuse, but not criminalising any other form of coercive control.

“I’m not sure if this is motivated from an animal welfare place but it seems odd to me to have such a narrow coercive control offence.”

Leonetti says the offence is covered in our Family Violence Act, but only in the context of issuing protection orders.

The UK and Australia do have the offence as a crime, but we don’t.

“There was a big move globally, maybe six, seven or eight years ago; you saw a bunch of countries starting to criminalise coercive control. The preliminary data suggests it’s actually been bad for domestic abuse victims, particularly in the UK. There are data that suggest the police are arresting abuse victims for coercive control more often than they’re arresting the perpetrators.

“The fundamental problem we have globally is that police and other justice system actors don’t understand coercive control; they don’t understand the dynamics of domestic abuse; they don’t identify it; they don’t respond appropriately, and so just sticking another domestic abuse tool in your Crimes Act does no good whatsoever if the people whose job it is to enforce the statute don’t understand the crime they’re being asked to enforce.”

An example she gives is the domestic violence victim fleeing the house and taking the pets with her, and the abuser calls the police to report her for coercive control involving a pet - she gets arrested for taking the animals with her when she leaves.

Now there’s a new issue that Pet Refuge has to contend with - the use of technology to track where those animals, and therefore the victim, is going.

So far they’ve had one dog with a tracker on it, which was taken off in time and driven “far, far away”, says Chapman. But all collars, toys and blankets now get checked for GPS devices.

Such trackers are getting cheaper, better, and easier to obtain.

Netsafe’s chief online safety officer, Sean Lyons, says if you think of it “in isolation from the scary things, this is the technology that people have been asking for - you know, ‘I’m sick and tired of losing my keys’; ‘I keep getting calls when the dog gets out’. All of those things are technology responding to those issues that we’ve had and producing products, and companies doing very well out of them.

“But like with so many technologies, what we then see is another wave, I suppose, of people that find another way to use it.”

Some examples: a cat food camera or a nanny cam, or a sticker the size and weight of a fridge magnet that’s a GPS tracker.

Sean Lyons says when a couple breaks up their first thought is not necessarily to do an audit of what shared services they had, access to video or location trackers, or even devices that might have been installed without the other person’s knowledge - a security camera on the doorbell, or a sticker inside the dog’s collar.

He says the technology we see on the movies where people walk around holding devices with aerials that go bleep to discover surveillance gear doesn’t exist … but you can look around the house and work out what might be using wifi.

“Very obvious devices … ‘what is that thing? Why is that there? I’ve never questioned it before but maybe I now need to think, what is that funny-looking book in the bookshelf? What’s that strange looking teddy with the big eyes on the kid’s bedside table? What is that big round thing in the middle of the cat feeder and why does it look like a camera?’

“But if people are endeavouring to try and hide those devices then they can be very skilful at it, and it can be very difficult to find something you had no idea was there.”

Lyons also says location services can be used if you’ve forgotten they’re turned on, and even things as simple as posting photos and saying where they are - all those location services can build a picture, not just of today at midday, but maybe of next Wednesday at midday.

“This isn’t just the preserve of people who are highly technically literate,” he says. “This is not for computer science graduates. These technologies are available easily, freely on websites and even high street stores, designed for another purpose and then mis-used for something else.”

Check out how to listen to and follow The Detail here.

You can also stay up-to-date by liking us on Facebook or following us on Twitter.