Gabby
Content Warning: These stories are about violence, abuse, neglect and exploitation and may include references to suicide or self-harming behaviours. They may contain graphic descriptions and strong language and may be distressing. Some narratives may be about First Nations people who have passed away. If you need support, please see Contact & support.
Gabby is in her 60s and has ‘multiple diagnoses of a psychiatric nature, but mostly particularly trauma’. Gabby lives in public housing which she describes as a ‘Kafkaesque dystopia’.
‘Living here [is] a kind of trauma pinball machine. It’s the best way to describe what living in social housing for me is like … Tenants live in fear on a continual basis.’
Gabby told the Royal Commission that despite laws giving her rights as a tenant, she doesn’t feel safe.
‘Which just seems to me fundamental, if you’re a person who’s come in with a very intense trauma history … homelessness, psychiatric hospitalisations, and so on and so forth, and a drug and alcohol history, to come into here and then just experience repeated re-traumatisation, unsafety, with no right to safety, it just seems incredible to me.’
For example, one of Gabby’s neighbours makes so much noise the ‘glass will shake on your table and the windows are rattling’.
‘I lodged a complaint and the [housing] department went in and spoke to this tenant. And as soon as they left he started screaming my name calling out, “[Gabby], you fucking cunt.” Sorry about the language, but I’m just being honest. Screaming that. Now, I have to pass his door every day on the stairwell. I’m an older woman with arthritis.’
Gabby said the neighbour continues to make noises that wake her up several times a night.
‘I have bipolar disorder as well and sleep is the biggest thing for wellbeing for someone with bipolar … It’s really a struggle to have a day-to-day life.’
Another tenant installed a surveillance camera in a public area.
‘I complained about that, got victimised by him. He ended up buying a great big dog … What [the department is] doing now is allowing [him] to abuse other people, and the abuse is extensive and not addressed.’
One night, there was a fire in her building.
‘I look after an elderly neighbour … a person with disability, vision-impaired, prone to falls, has [an emergency telephone] system in her home, right? [The department] put her in a hotel apartment, a roomful of mirrors with tripping hazards … no phone.’
Gabby said her elderly neighbour ‘kept banging into the walls because she didn’t know they were walls because they were mirrors’.
‘She had no accessible toilet, no accessible shower, no food … No planning with regards to the placement of a person with disability in an emergency.’
Gabby won’t let friends visit her public housing unit because it’s not safe.
‘I don’t have relationships because it would be completely unmanageable. I would not want to expose anyone else to the kind of world that I live in.’
Gabby told the Royal Commission people with disability living in public housing need a new system that protects them.
‘Nobody is looking at any of this and so nobody sees the problem, except people who have to endure this.’
Disclaimer: This is the story of a person who shared their personal experience with the Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability through a submission or private session. The names in this story are pseudonyms. The person who shared this experience was not a witness and their account is not evidence. They did not take an oath or affirmation before providing the story. Nothing in this story constitutes a finding of the Royal Commission. Any views expressed are those of the person who shared their experience, not of the Royal Commission.