Shortcut: From Prison to Preventing Violence Against Women

**Meshel Laurie** (0:03)
This is Australian True Crime with Meshel Laurie.
Unfortunately, we don't hear a lot of stories about long-term prisoners transitioning successfully back into society. But we have one for you today. Pete Bates runs The Pete Bates Project, a fast growing platform dedicated to exposing coercive control, post-separation abuse and the behavioral patterns that put women and children at risk. He joins us to talk about his mission.
This is Australian True Crime. We acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which this podcast is created, the Wurundjeri Woiwarrung people of the Kulin Nation. And a warning, this episode of the podcast contains graphic descriptions of violence.

**Pete Bates** (0:45)
I remember going to pubs with men and they say, if I ever saw a bloke do this to his woman, I'll do this and I'll do that. And then being at barbecues where a bloke has said something to his missus or put his missus down or disrespected her and all the men at the barbecue look at their shoes when that gets said, you know? Yeah. So just with my past and where I've been, I feel like I'm in a position where I can stand out front and say something. And I remember being that little kid hoping that a man like me would come through that door, and grab me and get me out of that house, you know?
So in a way, I sort of feel like I'm speaking for those kids now, you know, that are looking at the door and hoping someone comes along and saves them, you know?

**Meshel Laurie** (1:33)
Can you, I mean, you talk about it a bit on your socials. Do you want to talk about some of the things that happened when you were a kid, the sort of environment that you grew up in?

**Pete Bates** (1:43)
I don't have to talk about anything, mate. I talk a lot about how women are, everyone goes, why don't you just leave him? Why don't you just leave him? Now, I used to watch my father knock my mother out against the fridge and hold her up with uppercuts when she was unconscious. So, and then the police would come and by the time the police got there, us kids were given scripts to say to the police, she was given scripts to say to the police, she had her busted lips, whatever. And then the police had ended up joking and laughing with the police and she's just being silly, she's drunk again. Now, the one time that she did get the courage up to leave him was the scariest moment of all because he went quiet and he disappeared. She was in the room packing her bags, she had the suitcases on the bed and then he disappeared for a few minutes. He's come back upstairs and I was sitting in the hallway.
And then as he's come back through the door, he had 20-liter jerrycan full of petrol and he just started dousing all the furniture, walked up the hallway where I was sitting, poured petrol over me and he said to her, are you still going to leave slut? And then he pulled his lighter out and she had to submit. She submitted to save my life.
He probably would have went ahead and let us up. Now, so many women are in that position where, that's why they don't leave because the consequences are so much worse.

**Meshel Laurie** (3:11)
And also a lot of cases, they don't have any money of their own. They don't have anywhere to go. They're unaware of services and what's available to them because they haven't been allowed to use the phone whenever they want to, hadn't had the privacy to talk to a doctor about it. All of those practical issues, where do you go?

**Pete Bates** (3:31)
It's systematic. It's part of the thing that these men do where they isolate the woman.

**Meshel Laurie** (3:35)
Yeah.

**Pete Bates** (3:36)
No friends, no family.
My mother wasn't allowed to wear makeup. She had no friends. She wasn't allowed to work. If for some reason someone called her, this is back in the old days, he'd go and pick up the other phone in the house and listen to what was going on. He used to check the odometer on the car to see. She had to go down to Coles to get some shopping. He'd check and why is there an extra half a kilometer on there or something like that. At that stage, as a young fellow, I saw I run away from home at 13 After the petrol incident and a million other incidents with the old man, I just went, fuck it, I'm out of here. I run away at 13, I started using heroin. So I was addicted of living on the streets, and violence was something that I was doing because I was feeling so much pain inside myself as a child.