“Never an excuse”: Why Katrina still can’t stand the smell of bourbon

Even now, Katrina Harrison visibly recoils when she describes the smell of bourbon. Years after the fact, the thought is still a potent reminder of the excuses her ex-partner Cameron* made. It wasn’t him, it was the alcohol.

“His excuse all the time is he got too drunk and he’d black out, and that seemed like [he thought that meant] it was okay for him to do what he did to me,” Katrina told FW’s There’s No Place Like Home podcast. “They’re just full of excuses. You know, they’re just [using] one excuse after another.”

The proud Palawa woman met Cameron on a night out and, as is the case for many abusive relationships, their partnership progressed quickly. Cameron only began to reveal his true nature after he’d asked Katrina’s children to call him dad. His behaviour was malicious and erratic.

“I remember coming home one day from my lunch break – because I was working at the time – and he’d been drinking moonshine. And he was like ‘oh, look, I’ve cleaned the house’ and then smashed it up. Horrible, just horrible.”

His abuse against Katrina would ultimately send him to jail. He’s served his sentence and has been released. Katrina still lives with what he did to her – in more ways than one. She acquired a brain injury from a stroke that happened years after she left him.

“I do believe [Cameron’s] non-fatal strangulation caused my stroke.”

Based on all available evidence, there is no proof that using alcohol or drugs on its own can cause a person to become abusive. The perpetration of violence is always a choice.  However, Australia’s National Research Organisation for Women’s Safety (ANROWS) notes a “solid and persistent connection” between domestic abuse and alcohol.

“They want to wear you down to where you just go, ‘Yep, I’ll go back’. And you don’t sleep. You never sleep.”

The kind of excuse-making Katrina describes isn’t new to Dr Brian Sullivan, who has been running men’s behaviour change programs for more than two decades. He says that many men in his group – “as much as maybe 50 percent” – may have drug or alcohol issues.

“As I say to men [in my] group, there’s many men who drink and do drugs who aren’t choosing to be violent. Alcohol and drugs aren’t an excuse for driving under the influence. You’ll get charged. If you’re an alcoholic and you choose to be violent to someone, you should be charged with domestic violence.”

Cameron continued to harass Katrina after she left him. He maintained that it was the drugs and alcohol that caused him to abuse her, not his own choices, and that she should come back to him.

“When we were breaking up, it was always stalking,” she said. “I can remember he followed me in the car one time and rammed my car and I had three of my kids in the car. Yeah, he rammed my car. They want to wear you down to where you just go, ‘Yep, I’ll go back’. And you don’t sleep. You never sleep.”

Katrina felt the impact of Cameron’s violence on her children. But even though she knew leaving was the right thing to do, separation wasn’t straight-forward. She felt guilty for not keeping her family together.

Efforts to reduce and prevent domestic and family violence are full of complex conversations. This is one of them. But, as Katrina knows, there is one part of the discussion that remains very simple.

“You don’t need to be treated like that. Your family wouldn’t want you to be treated like that. You can be anything you want to be.”