It's a Monday morning in an outback courthouse, in northern Western Australia.
Warning: This story contains references to domestic violence.
The old building sits off the main road in the tourist town of Broome, surrounded by lush gardens that play host to the local markets on weekends.
This morning, people mill around the front of the building, chatting to lawyers in hushed tones or wrangling children as the heat of the day takes hold.
A man is asleep under a boab tree, waiting for his turn before the local judge.
The magistrate has 70 cases to get through before the end of the day.
A national shame
A series of high profile domestic violence-fuelled crimes have dominated headlines around the country in recent months.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics found one in six women and one in 18 men had experienced physical violence since the age of 15.
One in four women and one in seven men have also experienced emotional abuse over the same time frame.
Rates of violence in LGBTQ+ spaces often outstrip national averages, and Indigenous women are the most likely demographic to experience violence at the hands of a partner.
As the country's policymakers discuss a way to put a stop to the scourge of domestic violence in Australia, the prevalence of the crisis has become clear.
[general statistics datawrapper]This courthouse knows these statistics intimately.
This is a typical Monday court sitting in Broome, where one magistrate can sit and listen to anywhere up to 80 matters across the eight-hour day.
It encompasses weeks of offending, and pulls in cases from nearly 400 kilometres away in Fitzroy Crossing, and as far south as the state's largest remote Aboriginal community Bidyadanga.
The court covers a huge expanse of country, and it is reflected in the cases it hears every week.
[datawrapper types of offences]Inside the courtroom
The police prosecutor, defence lawyers, social services, and local sheriff will sit through the cases of 73 alleged offenders.
Today, there are 304 charges due before the Broome Magistrates Court.
Fifty-one of those offences are allegedly violent.
Nearly all of them relate to domestic violence.
In a brief interlude, a woman sits down and speaks quietly to a lawyer at the back of the court.
"It was my fault, I should have listened," she whispered.
"He hit you, but you don't want to charge him?" the lawyer asked.
"It's the first time he did this. The police charged him anyway."
On the front line
A man was walking along a suburban street in the town back in March when he saw his sister-in-law standing out the front of her property.
He couldn't find his partner that day, and he told the court he had a feeling the sister-in-law was meddling.
He began screaming at her and picked up a set of pliers from the side of the road, hurling them at the windscreen of her parked Holden Commodore, shattering the glass.
He was fined $750, and had to pay for the windscreen.
[types of violence datawrapper]A man and his partner were broken up last month when he turned up to their house drunk, belligerent and trying to pick the lock.
The woman didn't want him inside, and asked him to leave.
Instead, the court heard he went around the back of the house and picked up an axe.
"You wait, you'll get what you deserve," he yelled.
"His intention was not to threaten his ex-partner, but to use it when the police arrived in his defence," his lawyer said.
Police arrived and he dropped the axe almost immediately.
He was given a seven-month community-based order and fined court costs.
A man was waiting around for his partner to get back from a walk to the local shops, after she'd gone to get cigarettes with a friend.
The court heard he thought something was going on between them.
When they got back, he wasted no time confronting his partner about his incorrect belief and punched her repeatedly in the head.
Then, he grabbed her neck and started squeezing.
She drifted in and out of consciousness.
"The victim believed she was going to die," the police prosecutor said.
When he let go, she fled.
His lawyer said he was repeating a pattern he'd started witnessing when he was just 10-years-old.
His family had no qualms about sorting out disagreements with violence, and he had not learned how to model a respectful relationship in his relatively short life.
In sentencing, the magistrate was thoughtful.
"Change the story," he said.
"What you grew up with, you're making the same mistakes now."
He was given a nine-month intensive supervision order and fined.
A man was walking around the back streets of the tourist town, looking for his partner.
His lawyer couldn't tell the court why he was seeking her out that day, but he soon found her out the back of a local house.
He gestured at her to come inside.
She knew what was coming, but reluctantly got to her feet and followed.
He smacked her hard across the face, and walked away.
Despite completing course after course on domestic violence and drug and alcohol use, his lawyer said he kept repeating the same behaviour in new relationships and he'd even been imprisoned before on similar charges.
But, he was a product of his upbringing.
"He was homeless at 12-years-old and suffered a great deal of unaddressed trauma in his life," he said.
"His stepfather was a South African man from the Northern Territory, and absolutely hated black people.
"He was thrown out of a moving car by him when he was just 10.
"He left the home because of the stepfather."
He had been homeless for nearly 30 years, and had never understood how to treat his partners with respect due to his own upbringing.
He was declared a serial family violence offender, and put in jail for nine months.
He's eligible for parole.
A snapshot of regional Australia
The stories that come before the court on this Monday are unending.
A man smacked his daughter across the knees with a chopping board as he chased her from his home.
Another woman smacked in the head as she tried to escape her abuser.
A woman with a restraining order against her own son.
A woman who had been so badly beaten a piece of her spinal bone had severed an artery in her neck. Those charges might be upgraded, says a lawyer.
Finally, a boy entered the court.
He was barely tall enough to see over the dock and was flanked by two security guards.
He stared blankly ahead as people with law and social work degrees discussed his life and where they should house him to keep him out of trouble.
He did not want to stay at the bail-house and would run away if they tried to put him there, he told his lawyer.
But home isn't an option either.
"There are issues [there] and when he gets upset, he just takes off," his lawyer said.
The 12-year-old's trial is set down for November.
