Anita Bloom* said she never intended to hurt her husband and his new girlfriend.

On the evening she drove four hours and broke into their home in country Victoria, her plan, she said, had been that her ex would snatch the blade she was holding — an old boning knife she claims he once stabbed into an armchair she was sitting in — and use it against her.

"I wanted him to kill me, I just wanted it to end," Bloom told ABC News from the Dame Phyllis Frost Centre, Melbourne's maximum security women's prison.

"He'd had his hands around my throat so often, he often said he'd kill me ... and that night I'd had enough."

He'd left her a furious voicemail, she said, shouting and swearing at her for not making a mortgage payment the way he wanted. "I couldn't even live my own life, you know? It was always there, he was always hassling me."

She said she can't explain why instead she lunged at his screaming partner, stabbing her in the chest and puncturing her lung, before attacking him.

But as he sentenced her to six years and three months in jail earlier this year, Judge John Smallwood recounted a different story entirely.

"The fact that you have made threats essentially to kill both your husband and [his partner] previously," he said, "indicates that, in my view, you went there to hurt them."

"I am not going to buy into the family history leading up to all this," he told Bloom, who pleaded guilty in the County Court to four charges: two counts of intentionally causing injury, making a threat to kill, and aggravated burglary. The previous day, Bloom had been charged with assaulting her daughter.

"There has been a fair amount of material placed before me in terms of domestic violence," the judge continued.

But "the fact of the matter", he concluded, was that Bloom had "clearly" been "very angry" about the breakup of her decades-long marriage and, in light of the threats she'd made, having told her ex's neighbour on the phone she had "a bullet" for each of them and one for him too, must have gone to their place to deliberately hurt them.

Under the rage, Bloom was in pain

Six years and three months. A 50-something woman with sandy hair, Bloom's eyes stung as the words echoed around the courtroom.

She had been angry, she said, because more than six months after she'd separated from her husband, "he was still harassing me, still trying to control me, wanting more and more". "I was walking on eggshells all the time," she said. "Always looking over my shoulder ... always worried I'd say the wrong thing."

Why, she wondered, could the judge not see past her rage to her pain, accumulated over decades, as a victim herself?

Bloom, who has accepted culpability for her offending, is not a sympathetic case study, and it is difficult to see how her actions might qualify as self-defence: after all, she drove several hours to get to her ex's place before breaking in and violently attacking him and his new partner.

But experts are now suggesting that shifting the legal focus — from whether an alleged victim of family violence was defending themselves against imminent harm to the cumulative effects of their abuse — may result in more weight being given to evidence of domestic violence in cases like these.

An ABC News investigation recently revealed growing concerns that Australian courts are still often ignoring the significance of family violence and its impacts on women who kill abusive partners, with most ending up in prison despite arguing they fought back to save their own lives.

Now there is evidence the same challenges are plaguing women charged with non-lethal violence, with experts warning attention must urgently be turned to how the justice system treats those who fight back against but don't kill abusive partners.

In lower courts, too, women are often unsuccessful in arguing their stabbings and assaults are a defence against — or response to — their partner's violence.

The problem is threefold: sometimes the full picture of their abuse may not be tabled by lawyers, accepted by courts or given sufficient weight by judges. That's providing evidence even exists — that women have sought medical treatment, for instance, or reported the violence to police.

In addition, the actions of women in such cases — vicious and terrifying assaults, sometimes with dangerous weapons — can seem completely out of proportion or out of character, particularly when they cannot provide evidence to support claims they "snapped" and retaliated after experiencing years of abuse. Some make serious threats before they strike.

"It is entirely credible that a woman who has suffered years of coercive control and violence would drive several hours to commit an act of self-defence if she believes the threat of domestic violence is inescapable or ongoing," said Professor Patricia Easteal, who provides expert evidence in cases where women have killed or assaulted violent partners.

Concepts such as immediacy, proportionality and premeditation usually don't fit an abused woman's "reality", Professor Easteal said, because many have lived with the symptoms of PTSD for years. "Good lawyers who are defending women charged with violence against allegedly abusive partners must ensure that the jury, judge and lawyers are equipped with ... an expert who can explain why these concepts are not applicable in these cases."

Courts need to recognise the potential need for women to defend themselves against non-physical violence, says Stella Tarrant. ( Supplied: University of Western Australia )

Stella Tarrant, an associate professor at the University of Western Australia's Law School, said cases of women charged with non-fatal violence against a current or former partner are far more common than homicides and, because they move more quickly through the justice system, are more likely to fly under the radar.

"The issues are the same," Tarrant told ABC News. "This is not particularly about homicide, it's about the way we see gender relations ... how we perceive the perpetration of violence and defences against it."

'The lawyers let me down big time'

One of Bloom's many problems was her failure to prove she had been a victim of abuse, and the effects it may have had on her. Judge Smallwood didn't dispute the idea that domestic violence may have occurred in her relationship but, he told her, there was "little objective evidence to support that".

As a result, she believes she was wrongly perceived in court as a "jealous, vindictive" ex-wife who sought to punish her husband for leaving her.

"Everything was brushed aside," Bloom said. "You're just a jealous woman, that's it. That's all they could see."

She partly attributes her behaviour that evening to the "huge amount" of Valium she said she'd taken the day before, which she'd been prescribed to help her sleep but that she said she'd swallowed in a desperate attempt to calm herself down.

"I regretted what I'd done straight away," Bloom said. "Back in the police cells, as soon as the Valium had worn off and I realised what I'd done ... I felt disgusted. I still wanted to not be here ... I realised how much worse I'd made everything for everybody. Of course [I felt] remorse."

But the judge wasn't sure she did, noting a report by a psychiatrist who found Bloom presented with "limited remorse for her behaviour" and continued to perceive herself "as a victim in the offending".

"In those circumstances," he said, "in my view, there is little to be said to actually mitigate it."

But judges can't be expected to consider evidence if they don't see it.

Bloom wishes her lawyers had worked harder to gather evidence of her ex's violence. ( ABC News: Janelle Barone )

Evidence of family violence and its impacts on victims has been crucial in defending women who have fought back, including in homicides involving premeditation.

For instance, in 2006 Victorian woman Claire Margaret MacDonald was acquitted of murdering her husband after a jury accepted her argument she'd acted in self-defence. During her trial the court heard Macdonald dressed in camouflage clothing and hid in a "sniper's nest" before shooting her husband six times with a high-powered rifle. But evidence Macdonald had suffered years of physical, psychological and sexual abuse was tendered, including from a psychiatrist who testified about its impacts, which likely contributed to her killing response.

To that end, Bloom believes her lawyers failed to gather documented evidence to demonstrate her ex's pattern of violence — not to defend or excuse her offending but with a view to at least partially explaining it.

She claims there were hospital records from the time he allegedly shoved her into a table and both her lungs collapsed, landing her in intensive care for a week.

She also says she made a report to police when she thought his aggression and abuse had begun escalating. She didn't want an intervention order, she said she told the officers, "because it would make him angrier" — she just wanted them to know that if the neighbours called triple zero, they should come straight away. "The lawyers let me down big time," she said.

Is the justice system 'refusing' to see family violence?

Despite the challenges women in these cases can face, momentum is slowly building to address the weaknesses in the system, and some political leaders are already taking action.

Last month Western Australian woman Jody Gore, who was in 2016 convicted of murdering her abusive ex-partner, was released from prison just four years in to her minimum 12-year sentence under so-called "mercy laws", after evidence not presented during her trial was uncovered (she was not acquitted).

Announcing his decision to intervene in Gore's case, Attorney-General John Quigley said he would be changing the criminal code to make it easier for defendants to introduce evidence of abuse and its cumulative harms as part of their defence.

The reforms, Quigley told the ABC, would also apply "across a wider menu" of domestic violence-related offences than murder, including grievous bodily harm or other serious assaults.

George Giudice, a Geraldton lawyer who has represented several women who've killed or assaulted abusive partners, said he hoped the amendments would help address common misconceptions of women who fight back.

"You need expert evidence because the prosecution always says she could have walked out the door, she didn't have to do what she did," Giudice said. "Whether it's a killing or a wounding or hitting him with a rolling pin, it doesn't matter. They say she could have walked out the door."

But experts, he said, "will tell you that there are good reasons why women don't leave abusive relationships ... that the most dangerous time is when people leave."

Women charged with violent offences are also often seen as unlikeable and vindictive, Giudice said, which can be a difficult narrative for defence counsel to overcome.

"Prosecutors paint them as cunning, conniving, vengeful, angry, jealous people," he said, not as women who've lashed out in response to ongoing abuse.

"This is really about a human being defending themselves against a risk of actual or imminent harm."

Experts are now calling for dedicated research to determine the nature and extent of the problem: how many victims of abuse are being let down by the justice system's apparent blind spots for domestic violence? When defendants plead guilty, how do courts weigh an alleged history of abuse as a potential mitigating factor?

"It is absolutely important to examine what's happening in cases of non-lethal violence where women have acted in self-defence," said Danielle Tyson, a senior lecturer in criminology at Deakin University.

"Whether we're seeing that same deficiency in the lower courts or not is currently unclear ... but it's definitely something we should be focusing on in future research."

*Names have been changed for legal reasons.

Editor's note: This story has been updated to provide more context and clarity around Anita Bloom's version of events and to include Professor Patricia Easteal's comments.