Kaliyah

Kaliyah, in her late 50s, described herself as ‘a woman with multiple disabilities’. They include cognitive impairment, memory processing difficulties, an acquired brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder.

She is also a survivor of domestic violence, perpetrated by her ex-partner Michael. ‘So I have a lot going on in this body of mine,’ she told the Royal Commission.

‘And my thoughts are that it's hard enough dealing with abuse, domestic violence, family violence as a normal person, but it is extremely damaging to manage everything that I've had to manage with all of those disabilities.’

Michael is abusive and violent. He is also Kaliyah’s Centrelink-registered carer.

‘A lot of the time that perpetrator tried to silence my words. He was going around telling everybody that I was crazy, not to listen to me because I was just crazy and mental,’ Kaliyah said.

Michael has breached an apprehended violence order (AVO) many times, but when Kaliyah reported him to police, they took his side.

Recently, they arrested Kaliyah. Michael had taken out an AVO against her and accused her of breaching it. She was taken to the police station, where no-one explained what was happening and officers suggested she didn’t have a cognitive impairment at all.

‘I have a brain injury and they treated me like a normal person … So it was a terrible situation,’ she said.

The matter was dismissed in court, but Kaliyah continues to live in fear of Michael’s visits.

Kaliyah is searching for alternative accommodation where she can feel safe, but has so far been unsuccessful. She feels let down by the domestic violence housing services she has dealt with, which stopped helping her after a certain time had passed.

‘I needed them desperately but they treated me like I was a normal DV victim and that I just needed to hurry up out of their system and get on to something else,’ she said.

‘So what's happening is I don't hardly have time to build that trust with any of the workers. They're not establishing that I have disabilities and I just need to take my time slowly, and I might be longer than other women who don't have disabilities. But they're just rushing me through the system.’

Kaliyah wants Centrelink to remove Michael from his role as her carer, but staff at the local office refused. She asked Centrelink to give the payments he receives as her carer directly to her, but this was also refused. She applied for a Centrelink crisis payment, which was approved – but they paid it to Michael, as her carer.

‘I thought that was unbelievable.’

Kaliyah applied for NDIS support but wasn’t successful.

‘I asked "Can I please know the reasons why?" and [it’s because] some person made a decision in some department. When I tried to get the reasoning off that person I could never get a hold of that person.’

She intends to appeal but says it’s hard to ‘appeal something you don't even know the reason for’.

Kaliyah said Michael’s abuse and the difficulty of moving on to a life without him has impacted her health.

‘It's caused me to have no control over my bladder, one of the incidents. It's caused me to be hospitalised so many times. It's caused, it's caused me to be at my lowest in life.’