In the tiny island community of Galiwinku, there are so few escape routes for women wanting to leave violent relationships and home environments that one of the common solutions is simply to stay strong.

That is the experience of a young Northern Territory mother born and raised in the isolated Elcho Island community — a place with high rates of overcrowding, homelessness and family violence, no women's safe house, few privately owned properties, and a public housing wait list so long that it is indeterminate.

"I can't find a safe place to go," she said.

Jane, whose name has been changed due to legal reasons, left a physically abusive relationship in 2008 after a long and traumatic process involving once intentionally overdosing to escape.

Jane was then admitted to hospital and was visited by mental health services.

"I told them that I wasn't mental. My brain's not sick. I just did this to get away."

After that experience, Jane moved in with family and applied to the NT Department of Housing for her own Galiwinku public housing property.

Many years later, her own lease has still not been allocated and the constant level of verbal intimidation, threats and property damage allegedly occurring at her current residence is taking an emotional toll.

Jane regularly reports these disturbances to police, confirmed in a letter sighted by the ABC, but she does not want to press charges due to cultural reasons and a fear of community reprisal.

When things get too much, Jane stays with other family members in their also overcrowded homes, however even then she does not feel safe.

"If there's domestic violence, women have to run away to the bushes and hide," she said.

Women have no clear escape routes

In November, the North Australian Aboriginal Justice Agency (NAAJA) acting on behalf of Jane detailed her case to NT Housing Minister Bess Price in a letter also sighted by the ABC.

Those with an "urgent need" due to a risk of homelessness, serious medical or social problems, or domestic and family violence are given priority by the department for public housing.

But NAAJA senior civil lawyer Lauren Walker, whose Aboriginal legal aid role involves advising people on public housing matters, said chronic housing shortages in many remote Territory communities rendered these priority wait lists largely ineffective.

"[Jane's] options are unfortunately extremely limited," Ms Walker said.

"She can apply for a house in Darwin. She can try to get on the priority housing list and she might wait between two and three years to get into a house [in Darwin] depending on her situation.

"While she might make an application for housing [in her community] and it be deemed high priority by the Department of Housing, the lack of available houses means there's simply no properties to allocate her."

In remote Indigenous communities across the Territory, groups have come together to address family violence. ( ABC News: Avani Dias )

North East Arnhem, where Galiwinku and several other Indigenous communities are located, has the highest rate of homelessness in Australia at 28.78 per cent of the population.

In Galiwinku, this situation has become more dire due to two cyclones that struck the community a year ago, destroying 80 public housing properties.

But Jane's story is by no means isolated to Galiwinku, Ms Walker said.

"It's a common story that if somebody is feeling unsafe in their home that they don't have real alternatives," she said.

Ms Walker's clients have included a woman in a remote Top End community who was not on her home's tenancy agreement and, in a situation largely beyond her control, was facing the return of her violent husband to this residence.

"Her husband was in jail and about to be released. The reason he was in jail was for stabbing her," Ms Walker said.

"She didn't feel safe [staying] in the house when he returned to the community.

"We were advised by the Department of Housing that there were no vacant dwellings in the community [for her to transfer into] and it wasn't often that one became available for reallocation.

"The Department of Housing recognised that if the client was in fear she was to simply contact the women's shelter and local police and that was all that could be done.

"And the difficulty in her situation is she couldn't move in with other family members because the other houses in the community were already overcrowded.

"That was in 2014, but the situation is unchanged. There has been no further building of houses in that community."

After that response from the department, NAAJA referred the woman to a specialist legal service for her next option — applying for a domestic violence order (DVO) — yet this legal process also comes with many hurdles for remote women.

Flow-on effects include women losing children

North Australian Aboriginal Family Legal Service (NAAFLS) solicitor Fernanda Dahlstrom has spent several years filing DVOs for remote Territory women.

She said stringent DVOs that placed no-contact conditions on offenders were not commonly filed due to the small size of most remote communities and the reality of victims continuing to live with their attacker due to housing shortages.

"No-contact DVOs can be quite difficult to enforce for obvious reasons in small places and, in some communities, the police are quite strongly opposed to the idea of them," Ms Dahlstrom said.

Much more commonly filed are DVOs stating that "the person is not allowed to threaten them or abuse them or physically assault them" — a measure Ms Dahlstrom openly admitted was essentially enforcing something that was already illegal.

"Some people will pay attention to be served with an order like that and others will just continue their behaviour," she said.

After applying for either type of DVO, a woman's last remaining legal option is to press charges, however Ms Dahlstrom said there were many pressures on women that stopped them doing this.

"It can provide a victim with respite while [the offender] is serving a sentence, [but] it is only a temporary respite because then they come back home and nothing has changed," she said.

"She could find somewhere else to live, but that is complicated by often having family members who aren't supportive of the victim ... there's often shame associated with reporting domestic violence.

"A lot of women are in a position of not having any earning capacity, not having any work history, not having fluent English, and not having connections to anybody outside their communities."

Given all this, Ms Dahlstrom said it was not difficult to understand why women either stayed in violent relationships or went back to them after DVOs expired or housing applications did not eventuate.

"We see a lot of clients [where] all the relationships they've been exposed to are violent relationships and they have this attitude of acceptance. There's a resignation to it," she said.

"You feel you're working at quite a superficial level when you can only offer people the option of taking out a DVO or making a claim for compensation without anything else changing.

"There's no realistic way for them to escape."

Fernanda Dahlstrom says one of the most difficult things about the lack of options for Indigenous women is that children are also affected by the violence. ( ABC News: James Dunlevie )

Ms Dahlstrom said one of the difficult things about this lack of escape routes was that children were often involved and, in extreme cases, taken away from mothers that could not offer them a safe home environment.

"We have a handful of child protection matters afoot at any given time and the situation is often quite similar. The father is a perpetrator of violence which the mothers can't protect the children from," she said.

"Then the mother who is the victim of violence will have to go through a lengthy court proceeding in the attempt to get her children back into her care.

"It can be very difficult to do that if she doesn't have anywhere that she can take the children where she can keep them safe from violence.

"In some cases they'll be placed with an aunty or grandmother which is preferable to an unknown family in Darwin."

Calls for more focus on housing and prevention

Both Ms Walker and Ms Dahlstrom said there was no one solution to the swirl of factors working against women in remote communities, however more funding for public housing, women's shelters in places like Galiwinku, and counselling services for both perpetrators and victims were obvious and "urgently needed" starting points.

"I think [domestic violence] is taken seriously but I don't think there's enough recognition of how interrelated it is with other issues," Ms Dahlstrom said.

"It's not an issue that can be dealt with in isolation."

The ABC was unable to secure an interview with either Ms Price or the Minister for Department of Children and Families, John Elferink, whose department funds women's shelters and deals with child protection matters.

Aboriginal legal aid lawyers have called for an increase in domestic violence rehabilitation programs for offenders in remote communities. ( 105.7 ABC Darwin: Emilia Terzon )

In a statement, Mr Elferink said there were several services for women and children impacted by family violence, including 30 safe houses across the Territory that provided respite for up to three nights and funding for families trying to escape small communities without shelters.

"I am happy to look at the particular issues in Galiwinku and determine the best path forward," he said.

In a statement, a spokesperson for the Department of Housing said it was "in the process" of releasing a new domestic and family violence policy after removing its previous policy from its website in 2013.

"Women's policy is a subject close to my heart," Ms Price said in a statement.

"The longer term goal is to provide an early intervention model that will reduce demand on emergency accommodation and health services."

Back in Galiwinku, Jane said she was determined to stay strong until a women's shelter and more public housing was available in her island community.

"It's a lot of stress and depression but I'm still fighting. It hasn't ended yet. I have to focus on positive things. I have my ups and downs," Jane said.

"I just stay at home and make myself feel strong. I say to myself, 'don't give up'. I want to be strong."

