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Domestic & Family Violence

I Was Never Asked: The Spouses Missing from the East Timor Family Study

No one counted the spouses who came forward during the East Timor deployments. The one study that produced a number reached partners only through the soldier. I was never asked.

Jacqualine Roche

Jacqualine Roche

— 7 min read
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An empty chair beside a window, in black and white.
Photo by Elimende Inagella on Unsplash

Versión en español: Nunca me preguntaron: las esposas que faltan en el estudio de familias de Timor Oriental

Related reading: What the Record Would Not Hold, Domestic Violence Pattern Recognition: The ADF Context and the Unacknowledged Casualties series.

Introduction

I was married to an infantry soldier who deployed to East Timor. There was violence in our home, and the army knew.

Years later I went looking for a number: how many spouses came forward about domestic violence when Australian soldiers went to East Timor. I wanted to know whether I was one of them, in the sense that counts for research — whether what happened in my house was ever written down as a figure someone could use.

There is no such number. And the one study that came closest never asked me.

Development

What the army knew

The army was aware. There were major episodes, the kind that almost ended the marriage, and some of them brought the police to our door. I never pressed charges. I was told, many times, that it would ruin his career. I did not understand then how that worked to keep me silent, or that my silence would do nothing to protect me.

Each time, the response was the same. We went into marriage counselling together, and he attended anger management counselling separately. It was arranged and paid for by the army or the Department of Veterans' Affairs, through the Veterans and Veterans Families Counselling Service, known then as VVCS and now as Open Arms. It worked for a while. It never fixed the problem. I do not know what would have fixed it. I know that everything offered at the time was temporary.

So this was not a hidden household. It was known to the police, known to the army, and known to the government's own counselling service. It was managed, episode by episode, without ever being resolved or counted.

Being on record is not the same as being asked. A police attendance is a record of an incident. A counselling questionnaire is a record made for treatment. Each was kept by the agency that made it, for its own purpose. Neither asked me what my life was like, and neither was gathered into any figure I can find.

I asked Open Arms for my counselling records in June 2026. They have told me it will take time, because of how far back the records go. I have told them to take the time they need. I would rather this were done properly than quickly.

The count that does not exist

I could find no published count of domestic violence reports made by the spouses of Australian Defence Force members during the East Timor deployments, or in the years after. The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare gathers national data on family violence. Where it reports Defence's own incident data, the figures are for sexual offences, from 2020–21 onward. There are none for family and domestic violence reports.

What a spouse told a unit, a chaplain, a Defence social worker or the police at the time stayed, at best, in that agency's files. It was not gathered into a statistic.

The only number

The one figure comes from the Timor-Leste Family Study, conducted by the University of Queensland's Centre for Military and Veterans' Health and funded by the Department of Veterans' Affairs. It was the first Australian study designed to examine how recent deployments affected the health of Defence families. Its questionnaires went out in 2011, twelve years after the first deployment.

About 10 per cent of the partners who responded screened positive for domestic violence. With 1,332 partners in the study, that is roughly 130 women.

The report did not minimise the finding. It called it the first estimate of the possible level of partner abuse in ADF families, and stated that the acceptable level for domestic violence is zero. It found that domestic violence was significantly associated with poorer mental health and more symptoms of post-traumatic stress in partners, and that it had a negative effect on children's prosocial, or helping, behaviours. It also found no statistically significant difference in reported intimate partner violence between the partners of members who deployed to Timor-Leste and a comparison group who did not.

How a partner got into the study

The number depends on who was asked, and the report describes that plainly.

More than 20,000 current and former ADF members had deployed to Timor-Leste. More than 7,000 current and ex-serving members were invited into the study. Partners were not approached directly. Members were encouraged to provide their partner's contact details on the study consent form, and when a member did so, the partner was invited.

Three gates stood between a spouse and the questionnaire:

  1. The sample. Her husband had to be among the members invited.
  2. His response. He had to reply. Of the members invited, 36.8 per cent (2,854) completed their questionnaires.
  3. Her contact details. He had to write them on his form.

Only then did an invitation reach her. Of the current partners who were invited, 36.1 per cent (1,332) completed the questionnaire.

The former partners

The study also had a questionnaire for former partners, reached the same way. Only 24 completed it. To protect them from being identified, their responses were not included in the analysis or the results. The report says it is not clear whether their answers would have significantly changed any findings.

Analysis

The report is candid about its limits. It notes that domestic violence is often under-reported, and that its measure did not explore the frequency, duration or severity of abuse, in order to cause partners as little distress as possible. Those are honest constraints.

The constraint that matters most is structural. In a study of family wellbeing, the route to the partner ran through the member. Where there was violence in a household, the person with the most to lose from the partner's answers was the person who decided whether she would be asked. The report does not say that any member withheld a partner's details for that reason, and I do not claim it. The design simply cannot rule it out, and it cannot measure it.

The second gap is time. Twelve years passed between the first deployment and the questionnaire. Marriages that ended in that period were, by then, former partnerships — and former partners could be reached only if an ex-husband supplied their details. Twenty-four replied. Women who had left the relationship, including any who left because of violence, were the hardest for the study to find and the first to be removed from its results.

The pattern repeated. As Part 3 of the Never Too Late series sets out, the larger 2015 research programme included partners only where the member agreed to their being contacted, and it excluded former partners altogether.

So the 10 per cent figure is real, and it is a floor. It describes partners who were still in the relationship, whose husbands took part, who were nominated, and who replied.

The Department that paid for our counselling is the Department that funded the study. The counselling service itself was among the bodies the researchers consulted when they designed the questionnaire. The system knew my household in one place and did not ask me in another.

I do not remember being contacted. I cannot know which gate closed: whether my former husband was outside the sample, did not respond, or did not write my name down. That information belongs to his record, not mine. What I can say is that I was never asked, and that nothing I could have told the researchers is in their figure.

None of this required bad faith. It required only a design in which the family was reached through the soldier. A study built to hear from spouses would do three things differently: recruit partners and former partners directly, through channels that do not depend on the member; ask about the forms of abuse now understood as central, including coercive control and financial abuse; and count those who left.

What I am asking for

This is not an attempt to vilify my former husband. I am not asking anyone to pass judgement on him, and nothing in this article depends on doing so.

What I seek is acknowledgement from the system. There was violence in a Defence household. The army knew, and the counselling it arranged did not last. The consequences were real: it cost me the life I had, and it separated me from my children. The aftermath has been worse than the events themselves: complex post-traumatic stress, anxiety, depression, hypervigilance. It keeps going. Those are facts, and they have never been recorded anywhere that counts.

Acknowledgement is not blame. It is the institution saying that this happened, that it was known, and that the help it gave was not enough.

Conclusion

How many spouses came forward when the soldiers went to East Timor? Nobody knows. The reports that were made stayed in files, and the one study that produced a number reached partners through the men they were married to.

I was one of the spouses that number could not see. On 3 October 2026, I wrote to the Veteran Family Commissioner to ask why, and whether former spouses will be asked next time — not for my own sake alone, but because research can only work with the accounts it receives, and a late account still counts. I will publish the reply.

If you need support

Australia: Emergency 000 · Defence Member and Family Helpline 1800 624 608 · Open Arms 1800 011 046 · 1800RESPECT 1800 737 732

New Zealand: Emergency 111 · Women's Refuge 0800 733 843

Sources

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