YOU ARE NOT ALONE

What you can do tonight

Keep your records. That is the whole of it, and it costs nothing.

If this ever has to be looked at by somebody neutral, the thing that will speak for you is not how well you tell it. It is what was written down at the time, by machines that were not taking sides.

Keep

• Every message, not just the texts. WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram, Snapchat, whatever they actually use. A phone bill only catches calls and texts, so a conversation inside an app leaves nothing behind on the record. If it only lives in the app, it only exists if you keep it.
• Call logs. Your phone company holds them too, but hold your own. Times matter more than lengths.
• Bank statements. Dates and places, not amounts. A card tap puts you somewhere at a time.
• Toll tags and fuel receipts. Same job as the card taps, and nobody ever wrote one for an argument.
• Emails as files. The original file carries the real time. A photo of an email does not.
• Every letter, form and reference number from any agency.

Write down

• How your child was, every single time. Flat, bright, quiet, clingy, rehearsed. Date it. One line is enough, but do it every time, not only the bad ones.
• What they actually said, in their own words. And note it when a phrase does not sound like a kid. Children repeat what they hear at home, and house words sound different from their words. Write both down and keep them apart.
• Every contact with any agency. Who, when, what was said, and the reference number.

Do

• Never let a child deliver what an adult should deliver. Arrangements are between adults. A child carrying the message is a child carrying the blame when it goes wrong.
• A child saying it is okay to come is not an arrangement. However much it hurts, do not turn up on that. Do it the right way, front door, lights on, agreed by the adult and in writing. Hard, and worth it every time.
• Know what you are actually liable for. Get it from the source, in writing, and keep the letter — even when an agency tells you something different over the phone.
• Change nothing. A record you have edited is worth less than no record at all.
• Keep it in one place, backed up, and leave it alone.

Why this exists

The crime with no photograph

A broken arm can be photographed. A broken window, a black eye, a kicked-in door. You take the picture to a counter, somebody writes it down, and the law knows exactly what to do with it, because the law was built for things you can photograph.

Now try photographing ten small things spread over a few years. A phone that rings out at the wrong times and gets answered at the right ones. Money that is always a bit tight for one person in the house and never the other. Friends who slowly stop ringing. A rule that applies to you and never to them. Being the last to know something about your own life.

None of it is a crime on its own. Most of it is not even rude on its own. Put ten of them in a row, over years, aimed at one person, and it can take that person apart — and there is no camera on earth that can take a picture of it.

Every country knows it is real. Every few years a law gets written for it, and every few years it turns out to be harder to use than anyone hoped. It is always for the same reason. There is nothing to point at.

There is a name for part of it. In 1997 the psychologist Jennifer Freyd described a pattern she called DARVO — deny, attack, and reverse victim and offender. It has been studied for nearly thirty years, and the reason it works is simple. It happens in a room, and the person doing it is better in a room than the person it was done to.

Forty years of trying to name it

In 1986 a French psychiatrist, Paul-Claude Racamier, set out what he called perversion narcissique — narcissistic perversion. Forty years on it is still not in the DSM or the ICD, the two books clinicians work from. It has a name in France, a following, and no official standing anywhere.

And the English does it real damage, in two directions at once.

The first is that perversion in English drags in sex, and there is none in this. What the term describes is moral, not sexual — a sickness in the bond between two people, which is how the French write about it. French law keeps the two apart on purpose. Moral harassment, harcèlement moral, has its own article of the criminal code. Sexual harassment is a different article entirely. The thing described here is filed under moral, and it was never anything else. The English word picked up a meaning the French never put in it, and it points the reader at a crime nobody is talking about.

The second is that the same word waters it down. Perversion sounds like something a person has. A quirk, a condition, something you would mention once at a dinner party and move on from. What this describes is something a person does, to somebody else, on purpose, over years. A soft name is easy to live next to, and that is part of how it keeps getting away with it.

So it needs a name of its own, built from scratch in plain English. Giving it one is part of the job.

The law has been trying too

France made it a crime in 2010. Repeated words or behaviour that wear a partner's life down and damage their health. That is the offence, near enough in their own words.

Australia has started. New South Wales went first, on 1 July 2024: seven years' jail for a run of abusive behaviour aimed at controlling a partner, or an ex. Queensland followed on 26 May 2025, and went to fourteen. The rest of the country is at every different point on the same road.

And every one of them walks into the same wall. Writing the offence down is the easy half. Proving it is the other half, and nothing about putting a thing in a statute makes a pattern photographable.

The South Pole and the North Pole

The South Pole is where people live. Rooms. Meetings, counters, waiting rooms, courtrooms, phone calls, kitchen tables. In the South Pole everything is decided by one person looking at another and deciding who to believe. The people who do the thing with no photograph are the best in the world at the South Pole. It is home ground. They have never lost there.

The North Pole is where the records live. It is cold and there is nobody home. Every call logged with a time on it. Every message, every transfer, every toll, every login. Not written by anyone. Not written for anyone. Just the machine doing its job, which is noting what happened and when.

You cannot cry at the North Pole. You cannot charm it. There is no face to read and no room to work. The skill that wins every single time in the South Pole is useless up there, because there is nobody to use it on.

The South Pole has never been able to see the North Pole properly, or in time. The crime with no photograph lives in the gap between the two.

What this is

Somebody comes with their story and their records. Phone logs, messages, bank statements, whatever they have. The records get read, not the story. The timestamps either show what is being said or they do not.

How it works, on one page: two lines, one set of dates, and the three questions.

Sometimes the person who comes in has done this before, and arrives with a performance and half a story. Half, because the other half would sink them. Half a story is still timestamps, and when the other half of the record goes in beside it the two do not line up, and they cannot be made to, because nobody wrote either of them for an audience.

Those people are not a nuisance. They are what makes it work. You cannot build a detector out of one kind of example. A machine that has only ever seen honest input does not know what dishonest looks like, because it has never seen the difference. Every person who comes in and tries it on teaches the system the exact shape of half a story, and the next frightened person through the door is protected by it. That is how a bank catches fraud, and how a spam filter learns.

There is no witch hunt in this

The person who makes the complaint never sees a single thing about anybody else. Not a phone call, not a bank line, not where someone had a coffee. Nothing. Handing one person another person's life to go digging through is exactly the game this exists to stop.

The records go to a machine. The machine reads both sides, does the arithmetic, and either raises a flag or it does not. If it raises one, a judge sees it. Nobody else does.

And the machine convicts nobody. Two plus two is four, and a machine can tell you it is four. Only a person can tell you what that four is worth, whether it is a warning or a sentence, because that needs a conscience, and a machine has not got one. The North Pole does the counting. The South Pole does the judging. Each one doing the only thing it is good at.

The North Pole has no idea who you are. It does not know your colour, who you go home to, where your parents were born, whether you are the man or the woman in the story, rich or broke, charming or hopeless in a room. A timestamp has never once cared about any of that. Every single thing that wins in the South Pole is invisible in the North Pole.

It has been done before, just not for families

In April 1976 NASA and the American aviation regulator set up a system where pilots and controllers report their own mistakes and near misses, confidentially, with no punishment, and the reports are stripped of names and turned into warnings for everybody else. NASA runs it rather than the regulator, and it has no authority to correct anything itself — it works through others. It has received more than two million reports.

Australia has its own. It is called REPCON, the Australian Transport Safety Bureau runs it, it is voluntary and confidential under Commonwealth regulation, and it covers aviation, marine and rail.

Flying went from something that regularly killed people to the safest thing a person can do, and it did it by pooling failure, nationally, with no blame and no names attached.

That is not a metaphor for this. It is the same machine, pointed at a different problem.

One law for a kid in Brisbane or Bankstown

When it comes to children, borders make no sense at all.

Parenting is federal. Protecting a child is not. Every state and territory has its own child welfare law, its own department and its own children's court, and the test for stepping in is written differently in each one. In some of them the harm has to be serious before anybody moves at all. So which side of a line a child sleeps on decides what counts, when it starts counting, and who is allowed to go and have a look. The criminal law is the same story, which is why one state has had a coercive control offence since 2024 and the state next door only since 2025.

Western Australia never handed its family law powers over at all, and runs a family court of its own.

This is not a new complaint, and it is not one man's complaint. In 2010 the Australian Law Reform Commission and the New South Wales Law Reform Commission called it "an especially fragmented system with respect to children", and told the states to hand the powers over and close the gap. And it is a real gap, not a technicality: a federal family court can decide that neither parent is safe to have the child, and still have no power to order the state to step in. Sixteen years on, it is still sitting there.

And the Commonwealth is already in this business when it wants to be.

It writes criminal law and it prosecutes it. It charges drug smugglers. It also charges people who abuse children — offences committed overseas by Australians, and offences committed down a phone line or an internet connection, with sentences running up to twenty-five years. The Commonwealth's own prosecutor runs those cases, working alongside the federal police, Border Force and every single state and territory police force. And where a state charge sits close to the federal one, there is already an arrangement for the Commonwealth to run the state charge as well.

It builds no courtrooms of its own to do any of it. Federal cases are heard in state courts, which have been allowed to hear them since 1903. The Commonwealth rents the room.

And there is more than one way to go about it. Canberra took industrial relations off the states by using the corporations power in the Constitution, and the High Court let it stand in 2006. That lever will not reach a family, because a family is not a company. Two others will.

The first is the one that built family law in the first place. Between 1986 and 2008 the states handed their powers over children across to Canberra, every state but Western Australia. They can do it again, and in 2010 the Law Reform Commission told them to.

The second is money. The Constitution lets Canberra hand a state money on whatever conditions it likes, and it has been steering the states that way since the roads money of 1923. For an idea of how hard that lever pulls, look at the Americans in 1984. States that would not lift the drinking age to twenty-one lost ten per cent of their highway funding. Every one of them lifted it.

So the machinery is a hundred and twenty-three years old, and it is already pointed at children. What is missing is not the power, not the prosecutor, and not the courtroom. It is the decision.

Federation was 1901. A hundred and twenty-five years, and the states still cannot agree on this one.

A child should be protected by default, not by which side of a border they happen to live on. A kid in Brisbane and a kid in Bankstown should be under the one law. Until they are, the records are the only thing that reads the same in every state.

Check it for yourself

Nothing on this page asks to be taken on trust.

• DARVO — Jennifer J. Freyd
  The pattern, described by the researcher who named it in 1997.
• Aviation Safety Reporting System — NASA
  Confidential. Voluntary. Non-punitive. Running since April 1976.
• REPCON — Australian Transport Safety Bureau
  Australia's own confidential reporting scheme, for aviation, marine and rail.
• Queensland's coercive control laws now in force
  The Queensland Government's own statement, 26 May 2025.
• The law itself, if you want the citations.
  New South Wales: section 54D, Crimes Act 1900 (NSW), in force 1 July 2024. France: law number 2010-769 of 9 July 2010, article 222-33-2-1 of the Code pénal. The Commonwealth's child offences: Divisions 272 and 474 of the Criminal Code Act 1995 (Cth). State courts hearing federal cases: section 68, Judiciary Act 1903 (Cth). The money lever: section 96 of the Constitution.
• Minding the gap — Australian Law Reform Commission
  The hole between the federal family courts and state child protection, and what was recommended about it in 2010.
• Overview of the family law system — Parliament of Australia
  Who holds which power over children, and where Western Australia sits.
• Australian child protection legislation — Australian Institute of Family Studies
  Every state and territory, its own Act.
• Child exploitation — Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions
  What the Commonwealth already charges, and who it works with to do it.
• How power has shifted from the states — Parliamentary Education Office
  Section 96, tied grants, and how Canberra has steered the states since 1923.