A Perth mother has made an agonising decision. Fearing for her life and her children's safety, she has packed her family and left Western Australia entirely. Her reason: the courts released her ex-partner on bail, despite his history as a serial domestic violence offender.
The woman's choice to flee the state exposes a troubling gap between what the law promises and what it delivers in practice. Western Australia's bail framework is supposed to be protective. Serial family violence offenders who commit a category B family violence offence will not be released on bail unless there are exceptional reasons, and if released must be subject to electronic monitoring. Yet here is a case where such a release has occurred, forcing a victim to take the most extreme measure available: leaving her home state.
The decision to flee is not made lightly. It means uprooting her children from their schools, their community, their extended family networks. It means starting over in a new state, away from established support systems. But for many women in abusive relationships, it can seem like the only option when institutional safeguards appear to have failed.
Her ex-partner's release raises uncomfortable questions about how courts assess risk in domestic violence cases. What constitutes "exceptional circumstances" for bail in such cases? Who determines whether a victim's fear is reasonable? When a woman with knowledge of her abuser's history believes she must flee the state to protect herself and her children, something in the system has gone badly wrong.
The broader policy context matters here. WA's Family Violence Legislation Reform Bill 2024 was introduced to ensure repeat and high-risk domestic violence offenders are tracked across the justice system, and it is estimated the new laws will apply to about 550 domestic violence perpetrators each year who will be forced to wear monitoring devices. Electronic monitoring, in theory, is designed to provide reassurance to victims. But if a victim does not believe these measures are adequate, and she chooses to leave the state entirely, the question becomes: what is electronic monitoring actually achieving?
The case also raises important questions about institutional accountability. When a victim of domestic violence feels compelled to flee across state lines, the courts and police have failed their most basic function: protecting vulnerable people from harm. That failure may be technically lawful under the current legal framework, but it is a failure nonetheless.
The woman's departure is not an indictment of the existence of bail laws themselves. Bail serves important purposes; it allows people to prepare a legal defence while awaiting trial, and it recognises the presumption of innocence. The genuine tension here is that reasonable people can disagree about how to balance those principles against victim safety when the accused has a history of repeated family violence.
Her choice to leave the state sends a clear signal: despite the existence of protective orders, electronic monitoring provisions, and bail conditions, she did not believe them sufficient. That gap between what the law offers and what victims actually need deserves serious attention. If WA's domestic violence reforms are to be meaningful, they must convince victims that they are safe. So far, in this case, they have not.