Sarah was on a sponsorship visa where she worked casual jobs, and then a bridging visa where she wasn’t allowed to work or study, and was dependent on her partner.

When her son was a few months old, Sarah left the relationship and stayed with a friend.

“I was lucky because I would have had to move into a women’s shelter or a refuge if I didn’t have her, but even in those houses you have to pay around $150 a week and I didn’t have that,” she said.

“I [would] think ‘Oh god it would be so much easier to go back [to him],’ but I can’t personally take it and play happy and pretend we are living in a happy family.

“I am quite a strong person and I knew I wanted my little son to grow up in a healthy relationship and to learn how to treat women.”

In December Sarah was accepted on a permanent visa, but there is a two-year waiting period before she is eligible for a single parent payment, which is for principal carers (responsible for the bulk of day-to-day care) of children under 8 years old.

“I had no income and to get housing I needed to show proof of my income, which would have been Centrelink, but I wasn’t eligible for Centrelink so I couldn’t pay rent; I didn’t have a job; I didn’t have childcare; and I couldn’t go back [to my home country] because my son’s dad wouldn’t let him come with me,” she said.

For three months Sarah said she was stranded.

“I tried to call up Centrelink three or four times a week and I went in again and again at the beginning until they told me they couldn’t do anything,” she said.

It wasn’t until Sarah approached the National Social Security Rights Network (NSSRN), a community organisation providing free legal services to income support recipients, that she made any progress with Centrelink.

“They helped me quite a lot because they got into contact with Centrelink and did all the calling … when you have to call the hotline with a little baby and you have 45 minutes to an hour to wait it is really hard, because I don’t have anyone else to look after him,” she said.

In Senate estimates this year it was revealed out of the 23.3 million calls to Centrelink classified as “successful” from July 2017 to March 2018, 14 million were “answered” and 4 million were “abandoned”.

Sarah’s appeal was ultimately successful.

“I had three months of not knowing what to do and where to live and how to feed my baby and myself, and how to find a safe place to live, and that was hell.

“This exception shouldn’t have been made just because I was in a violent situation with a baby. What if I had just been new to the country and it didn’t work out with my partner, and I would have been completely alone with a little baby?”

The NSSRN released a policy paper in August looking at social security and domestic and family violence, drawing on casework experience from its member network of community legal centres.

“The women who come to us for legal assistance have been unable to access the support they need, and are entitled to receive at a critical time when they are trying to escape violence,” the network’s executive officer Leanne Ho told BuzzFeed News.

“Many of them have a right decision made, but only after a stressful appeal process, which is time-consuming and costly for the system.”

The paper found there were significant delays in payments for people “in crisis” experiencing violence, and that women were often deemed to have been living as a member of a couple and were left with large social security debts while their violent partner or ex-partner had no financial liability. The network has represented women whose partners had refused to share their income with them and their children and withheld information about income or assets, making it impossible to accurately inform Centrelink.

One client requested a crisis payment from Centrelink so she could move out of the house where her boyfriend assaulted her. The network said Centrelink then raised a Family Tax Benefit debt of almost $4,000, saying she had been living as a member of a couple and not declaring her partner’s income.