Ivan Clarke was nine years old when he was taken from his mum. Soon after, he was dropped into the clutches of a pedophile.
“He raped and tortured me, fed me ethanol and drugs, and he did that to me and a number of other children in the neighbourhood, his own children included,” Mr Clarke reveals.
“So I then moved on to another family who I call my family now. My mum died when we were in care, my dad died before we went into care, so I had a lot of trauma.”
Mr Clarke admits to journeying through life, fuelled by drugs and alcohol, with a really broken view of himself and the world.
“I had a lot of anger issues, and I met a lady here in Sydney. She fell pregnant to me. We have a daughter together. Sadly, she passed away a couple of years ago, but I took her as a hostage in the relationship and caused her great trauma as a result of my trauma,” Mr Clarke said.
“I didn’t know enough about love to know how to be in love. And I didn’t know enough about relationships to be in one. I didn’t know enough about being a parent to be a parent, and I kind of seduced her into believing that I was more capable than what I really was and sadly, I caused her great harm.
“I was a perpetrator of domestic violence, controlling as a result of my own experiences of trauma. And yeah, I wasn’t a nice person.”
Mr Clarke did time in jail for resisting arrest, assaulting police and abusive language, and while his domestic violence wasn’t physical, it was just as destructive.
Now, the Barkinji/Malyangappa man has poured that lifetime of lived experience, academic qualification, and frontline counselling work into the blueprint behind a groundbreaking proposal to break the cycle of family violence.
‘Safer men – Safer families’
Teaming up with Claude Robinson, the manager of a transition house in Sydney called Rainbow Lodge, and former police officer and criminologist Dr Vince Hurley, Mr Clarke is backing a state government proposal called Safer Men-Safer Families.
The initiative recognises that men’s behaviour is at the centre of domestic violence, “so that’s got to be the solution”, Mr Robinson says.
The plan – which needs a $6 million investment from the New South Wales Government – flips the current response to domestic violence on its head.
Under existing responses, families are routinely forced to flee their homes while perpetrators remain.
The proposed initiative aims to keep mothers and children safely in their family home, while the male perpetrator is removed under court direction to a 24/7 managed residential facility for assessment and intensive rehabilitation.
The program will operate in direct partnership with leading women’s domestic violence service WAGEC (Women’s and Girls’ Emergency Centre) to ensure mothers and children receive concurrent support.
“Currently the system is you either go into a women’s refuge or a men’s program, and they’re nearly in competition,” Mr Robinson explains.
“Our idea is that we would partner with WAGEC … So when we’re going to work with the men, at the same time, they would go and work with mum and the kids.”
“We just saw this cause and effect and went, ‘We just need to do something about it,’” Mr Robinson adds. “We’re just building more and more refuges for women and families to escape, and what we’re doing is not working. It’s got to be something different.”
Nicole Yade, CEO of WAGEC, says the initiative complements crucial frontline support for victim-survivors.
“Ending domestic and family violence requires all of us to be part of the solution,” Ms Yade says. “Our focus will always be on continuing the urgent work of supporting women and children, but we recognise that men must also be part of the change.
“Safer Men Safer Families is about trying new approaches that encourage men to take accountability, reflect on their behaviour and change. This complements our work at WAGEC and is an important step towards safer families and a safer society.”
‘I can’t be accused of being a bleeding heart’
It’s a solution strongly backed by former NSW Police homicide detective Gary Jubelin, who spent over 34 years investigating Australia’s most horrific crimes before hosting the I Catch Killers podcast.
Having spent decades coming in at the “tail end” of violent crimes after victims were already dead, Jubelin says the system needs an urgent overhaul focused on intervention rather than endless, reactive punishment.
“My view should carry a little bit of weight in that I can’t be accused of being a bleeding heart,” Mr Jubelin says.
“I was a cop for a long, long time. I’m quite happy putting away the bad guys. But what’s the purpose of putting them away? Most people that we put in jail are going to be released at some point in time. It’s in everyone’s interest to make sure that when they are released, if possible, they’re better people than when they went in.
“I’ve spent some time in prisons speaking to the inmates, speaking to people that have been in there for domestic violence situations. And they say, we don’t get any counselling in there. Invariably we take them from the family home, we get put in custody, and then we might be sharing the cell of someone in there that’s also in there for the same thing. So it’s two blokes talking about how angry they are and how frustrated they are … I don’t think that’s a recipe for success upon their release.
“It’s not about getting hard on crime. It’s getting smart on crime. If we get smart on crime, we reduce crime. If we reduce crime, there’s less victims. Surely no one can argue the logic.”
Mr Jubelin also points out the immense logic behind keeping families safe in their own homes while court-bailing offenders into managed facilities through proposals like Safer Men-Safer Families.
“You’re not disrupting the family, the costs of disrupting the family … the ideal situation would be that the family, the victims of domestic violence, whether that be the wife, partner, children, are able to stay in their own location or stay in their home, not break ties, not move away from their schools, not being able to attend sporting events and give the family some stability,” Mr Jubelin says.
“If men are the problem in domestic violence, let’s try and address that situation.”
What made him violent
Mr Clarke now understands that his own domestic abuse was fuelled by that exact blend of fear, addiction, and unaddressed pain.
“I was controlling and manipulative, I was selfish, I was very fearful,” he says.
“She was younger than me by six years and I took advantage of that age difference as well. I manipulated things and yeah, took advantage … It was fear motivated. At the same time, I also wanted her to dearly love me … But that faded ultimately because she didn’t trust me and I was so broken.
“I hid in drugs and alcohol and violence and violence external to our relationship. And yeah, a lot of isolation with that, of course, which meant that I was abandoning her and my daughter … I didn’t know at the time that that was all as a result of my own experiences of trauma.”
By 2000, Mr Clarke was living on the NSW north coast as everything in his life slowly unravelled.
“I decided that I was going to take my own life because I could not find a place of balance. I couldn’t find any wellness, I couldn’t find any purpose.”
An intervention landed him in Sydney’s We Help Ourselves rehabilitation program. Over a year spent in treatment, halfway houses, and transition homes, Mr Clarke finally disclosed the child sexual abuse he had suffered and began professional counselling.
“I came to realise that there were a whole lot of behaviours that came about as a result of being treated in the way that I was treated by the pedophile. But also, there was a whole lot of pain and heartache as a result of my removal from my mum, not having my dad in my life.”
Driven to understand the psychology behind his actions, Mr Clarke qualified as a counsellor, studying alcohol and other drugs, trauma, grief, loss, and social and emotional wellbeing.
He began working with Stolen Generation survivors – particularly Kinchela boys’ home survivors – where he saw a clear, devastating pattern.
“I just saw all these traumas … being removed from their family, and then 90 per cent of them ended up in jail with drugs and alcohol issues. It was all too much of a parallel to ignore.”
Invited by the Education Centre Against Violence to co-design programs, Clarke helped create Strong Aboriginal Men, taking it to over 30 communities across NSW.
“Through my own experience, I could look through the lens of those men and understand that they weren’t bad men, they were men with trauma … I was able to relate to their experiences as a result of my own experience.”
Time to try something new
Mr Clarke doesn’t claim to have all the answers. And he is careful not to preach, but calls for a fundamental shift in how society tackles family violence.
“I’ll be mindful here, because I have a tendency not to tell women how to do things, because I think as a man telling a woman how they should do things, it leaves the door open to a misogynistic perspective or behaviour or an attitude,” Mr Clarke says.
“And I’m mindful not to tell women, but I would invite a conversation that says, I think we need to look at domestic violence really differently, because for the years I’ve worked in the field of men who use violence, one of the things I’ve observed is that there is an over-representation of women telling men how to address the issue of domestic violence.
“And I find that to be quite a deterrent for men to want to engage in the process, to learn how to change and to address. I think domestic violence and violence in general is a men’s issue.”
Claude Robinson agrees.
“The problem is the men, so that’s got to be the solution. What we’re doing now is not working,” Mr Robinson says.
“This program is so innovative; there is no other program of its kind in Australia. We believe that this model could be rolled out across NSW and Australia.
“Our long-term goal is to have 10 Safer Men-Safer Families centres across NSW in geographical areas linked to courts and police districts, with at least three being specialist First Nations centres,” Mr Robinson said.
“This could provide support to keep 500 families a year in their homes and communities, who are intensely working with 500 male users of violence and control to make intergenerational impact on family domestic violence in NSW.”
Women’s sector leaders agree that tackling male behaviour is vital to keeping women and children safe in their homes.
NSW anti-domestic violence minister Jodie Harrison told news.com.au: “Both myself and the Department of Communities and Justice have met with Rainbow Lodge regarding their proposal”.
“I commend the important work they are doing in the community and would encourage them to apply when appropriate funding opportunities are identified”.