Lilianna and Alessandra
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.
Alessandra and Lilianna were around the same age and good friends. Liliana, who had cerebral palsy and used a wheelchair, died a few years ago in her early 60s.
‘[Lilianna] couldn’t feed herself, toilet herself, she had the most horrendous buckteeth you’ve ever seen,’ Alessandra told the Royal Commission. ‘It was very hard to understand her, so a lot of people thought she wasn’t intelligent as a result of her speech. But she was a highly intelligent woman.’
Alessandra met Lilianna more than a decade earlier at her church, after another church had rejected Lilianna.
‘They had said, “This probably isn’t the right place for you … Why don’t you try the mob up the hill?” So, she did and she rolled into our church one day … So, I introduced myself to her and we got talking and we became friends.’
Alessandra said Lilianna had lived in group homes where staff abused and neglected her.
‘[Lilianna] often went hungry because she was reliant on people feeding her. And I would meet her at 9.30 and she’d say, “Can you feed me my lunch?” and I’d say, “[Lilianna], it’s only 9.30. I’ll, you know, feed you your morning tea,” and she’d go, “Yeah, but I might not be able to find someone to give me my lunch.”’
Alessandra took Lilianna home frequently to cut her hair and nails. ‘It was just the little things, you know, just making her feel special that she never got from that house.’
‘You know, they often would shave her head and she couldn’t even give me eye contact because she was so ashamed when they shaved her head, but that was an easy way for them to do her hair.’
Alessandra said a support worker sexually abused Lilianna at one group home. When she reported it, management moved the support worker to another home.
Lilianna eventually moved to another home. Here, a support worker punched her in the face giving her a black eye.
‘I said, “[Lilianna], you need to complain about this,” and she said, “Oh, they just get frustrated, you know what it’s like,” and I said, “I do, but they still don’t have the right to do that.” … She didn’t want to complain about him because he was one of the “good ones”, and she just said, “He just lost patience and he just got frustrated.”’
Alessandra said the home refused to let Lilianna have a cat ‘because they didn’t want to clean up after it’.
‘One of [Lilianna’s] greatest sadness, and this will always haunt me … was that she desperately wanted someone to love her. She wanted a pet.’
One Christmas, Alessandra organised for Lilianna to go to a Christmas lunch, but the staff wouldn’t help her travel there.
‘She was absolutely distraught.’
When Alessandra visited after Christmas, she found Lilianna in hospital with a chest infection.
‘She tried to transfer out of that house to another house where she got accepted, [but] in the end it just all fell through and she realised that she was going to have to stay in [the group home] so she kind of said in herself, “I may as well die, everybody wants me to die.” So, she kind of stopped eating.’
Alessandra tried to smuggle Lilianna’s favourite food to her, but someone took an intervention order out to prevent her from visiting.
Lilianna was eventually moved into a palliative care unit.
‘She said, “Well, they’ve said to me I can’t go back to the house, that I’ve become problematic,” and, basically, she felt that she was going to be homeless and that they’d send her to a nursing home, so that was it. She just said, “Nuh, I’m not going to a nursing home.”’
Alessandra told the Royal Commission that Lilianna should not have died.
‘I just want justice for [Lilianna] and for all the other people out there who are in the same circumstances.’
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.