The teachers noticed, and they tried to help at first, but this only resulted in aggressive confrontations with my stepfather. They then wanted absolutely nothing to do with either himself or me.

http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/nsw/child-death-cover-...

The Department of Community Services was responsible for overseeing cases such as child abuse etc in during that time (or DOCS as we called it). My counsellor spoke in great depth to me about it, but he was not confident that much would be done (as seen above, many many cases are left behind or ignored). He put in a lot of requests to DOCS to look into my situation, and they did only a few of those times, but their methods were shocking and they did absolutely nothing. They interviewed my stepfather once and it more or less consisted of "have you mistreated a minor in your household?" "No?" "Oh okay well thanks anyway, bye". On another occasion, they spoke to me about it. I honestly couldn't remember what we talked about, as I felt a bit too young to fully understand what was really going on. I spoke to so many people about it and no-one was able to help, including the police.

(I'm wondering if the department was understaffed or suffering some other internal crisis? They still are apparently.)

In 1999, I would've been 10 years old, so when I finally left, I was 17 nearing 18 as the new year approached. Goodbye teen years, but it would've been a lot worse if I was a kid. A lot of the physical nasties that occurred stopped as I grew older, perhaps out of the fact that my stepfather was aware I'd be a lot wiser about how to tackle it (ie I could more easily convince police of something going on.). He was very careful to get as close to the border-line of crossing the arrest threshold as he could, without ever actually going over it. He never hit my mother, but he hit us and we were raised by him to believe that getting either choked, kicked in the back etc was "Discipline" rather than abuse.

I'd have to agree on the inadequacy of both child protection and law enforcement here, as it's been shown in the last couple of days with the "terrorist" in sydney, the justice system here is seriously broken. The same man who deprived us of liberty was walking free on around 40-50 other charges, including break and enter, sexual assault of a minor, assault etc, much like the fellow who held up the cafeteria. I don't know where the break down is, but the justice system always seems to "let people off with a warning" or a light sentence. If you assault someone, expect to walk free. If you break into someones house and molest a child as he did, you walk free with a big scary "warning". If you continue, it's another big scary "warning" etc.

He's still out today, and I haven't pursued it, because I know that there is no way he would ever be behind bars, the justice system completely let us down and I wouldn't trust it with my life. One of the first men I rented my first apartment with was exactly the same; multiple charges that should have landed him behind bars, yet he was walking free but with police coming to the door from time to time to "check on him". Of course it wouldn't stop any crook from doing something stupid if they are clever enough not to be caught.