‘I wish you were dead’: Couple tell of son’s terrifying 18-month campaign of abuse

For almost two years, Sharon and Ian were under siege in the very home they’d built to spend a peaceful retirement enjoying. The person holding the Queensland couple hostage through a campaign of threats and violence? Their own son.

While Sharon and Ian’s experience sounds extreme – and extremely frightening – it’s more common than you might think. Every year, up to 14 per cent of older Australians experience some form of elder abuse, according to the government’s Australian Institute of Family Studies. And that number is thought to be an underestimate, because many cases almost certainly go unreported. Close family members are the most common perpetrators of the abuse.

Sharon and Ian’s nightmare began in 2015, a year after their son, Andrew, moved into a self-contained shed on their acreage in a large north Queensland town. For the first year, Sharon and Ian had a cordial relationship with Andrew, happily sharing the property. But in 2015, Andrew reunited with his ex-wife, Karen, and asked that she stay with him in the shed for a few weeks.

“I said to Andrew, whatever makes you happy,” Sharon recalls. But it took just three weeks for Karen to show her true colours.

“It began one night when we were cooking bolognaise together,” Sharon goes on. “I always put sugar in my bolognaise to take the tartness away, so I asked her if she does that too, and she shot back at me ‘what the f**king hell are you talking about?’.”

Taken aback, Sharon says she tried to placate her unexpectedly angry former daughter-in-law but “she went on giving me more abuse”. “My son came in about 10 minutes later to talk to me but she saw us talking and started shouting out the window of the shed at me,” Sharon says.

After that experience, Sharon started talking to Andrew and Karen about finding their own place to live, but they refused, on the grounds that he couldn’t afford to do so and she was unable to find work.

“Then my son started to get really funny with us,” Sharon explains. “It came out of the blue … one time, he started pushing me around, asking me questions about what I’d said to Karen. I kept trying to get up out of a chair and he continued to push me back. It took me four goes to get out of the chair and walk away from him. It was so nasty and all unnecessary.”

The attack left Sharon bruised and shaken. Meanwhile, Sharon’s husband Ian suspected his son and former daughter-in-law, who had access to their house on the property, were going through their personal paperwork.

“I’d questioned him before about how much electricity they were using and later he handed me our electricity bill and said ‘I paid the bill’,” Ian says. “I said thanks, but after he went away I thought, how did he get hold of our bill? He’d have to have gone into our bedroom.”

Ian says that Andrew and Karen were careful to never leave the property at the same time, which meant he and Sharon felt trapped in their own home and sufficiently threatened that they changed their wills to remove Andrew as a beneficiary and ensure Karen could not benefit from their estate.“We couldn’t go out, the both of us at the same time, because we knew they’d try to get into the house,” Ian says.

“We couldn’t even go to the shops for half an hour. We put deadlocks on the doors while we were away on holidays because Andrew wouldn’t give us the key to our house back. Sharon didn’t want me going outside the house because she was scared something would happen to me.”

Ian and Sharon kept the escalating campaign of intimidation secret from other family members until Andrew phoned Sharon’s other son, who lives in the UK, to rage that he couldn’t gain access to the family house. That meant they had to tell others what was going on, Ian says.

With family support, the couple took the advice of the Seniors Legal and Support Service, a free service provided by the Queensland Government, and began the legal process to remove Andrew and Karen from the property – all while the verbal abuse continued. “You’re not my mother anymore, I wish you were dead,” Sharon recalls her son telling her.

With a 30-day notice to vacate the property ordered by the court, Andrew and Karen were eventually escorted from his parents’ land. Sharon and Ian subsequently obtained a domestic violence protection order that prevents their son and his ex-wife from contacting them or entering their property for five years. But the pain caused by their 18 months of hell at the couple’s hands is ongoing. Plagued by nightmares about the events, Sharon says the hardest part is acknowledging that it was her own son who caused so much pain.

“He’s still my son at the end of the day, I’m his mother, I’ll always love him,” she says.

According to Aged and Disability Advocates Australia CEO Geoff Rowe, such conflicted emotions are normal in cases of elder abuse cases, with victims often blaming themselves for the abuse – and that’s what sometimes stops them from asking for help, Rowe says.

While there are no official figures to support the claim, many experts believe that amount of elder abuse being perpetrated increased during Covid-19, with many older Australians cut off from their usual support network and thus more vulnerable to physical, sexual, mental and financial abuse.

Deirdre Timms, co-chair of Elder Abuse Action Australia, says financial abuse is the most common type of elder abuse and is often heightened at times of economic crisis, as has occurred during the coronavirus pandemic.

“Families will be under significant pressure, with a million people suddenly out of work,” she explains. “It wasn’t a planned experience and many will be short of money. This sadly means some may put pressure on older people to access their funds. And older people will feel like they have to give up their money to support the family.”

Timms notes that her organisation had recently experienced a rise in enquiries about end-of-life and estate planning tools such as enduring powers of attorney, advance care planning and wills. She says: “That could be because people are being pragmatic, but it could also be because people are being pressured into making these documents.”

Now, a few years after their son was removed from their property, Sharon and Ian remain unsure what triggered Andrew and Karen’s attacks, though Sharon suspects they hoped to drive them from their mortgage-free home and take over residence. But they are certain that it’s vitally important older Australians know they don’t have to suffer elder abuse.

“The message needs to be spread that people can get help and that you don’t have to be frightened to ask for it,” Ian says. “A lot of this abuse comes from family members, so it’s hard. But have the courage to speak out. The sooner you do it, the better.”

If you or someone you know is experiencing elder abuse, the 1800 ELDER HELP line (1800 353 374) is a free call phone number that automatically redirects callers seeking information and advice to a service provider in their area. If you feel your own or another person’s life is in immediate danger, however, call emergency services on 000.

All names have been changed for legal reasons.