“He said he won’t stop until he’s ruined me.”

My client was pointing to where her ex-partner had hidden in her front yard, commando-crawling through her garden, under her house, to find a way inside. He’d been to jail many times for breaching intervention orders, but every time he got out, the violence continued. Even losing his high-flying career hadn’t put him off.

This was October last year, when family violence was having one of its cyclical – and crushingly brief – periods of prominence in the headlines. Media, community leaders and politicians around the country lamented the murders of five women in just nine days. “Will I be the sixth?” wondered my client.

Now more women are in the headlines, and the stories are appallingly familiar.

Just before Molly Ticehurst was allegedly murdered in NSW, for example, her ex-partner Daniel Billings was charged with stalking, rape and animal cruelty. If a terrorist had displayed as many red flags as Billings had waving around him, a special tactics squad would have been kicking down his door. Instead, despite the recommendations of police, Billings was granted bail.

Joel Svensson recovering a Bluetooth tracker from a DV victim’s car.

The UK is trialling a program that tracks men flagged as dangerous the way police might monitor someone who’d sent threatening letters to an MP. It’s been proposed here too in recent months. And while it might seem radical, my time on the front line tells me it’s necessary.

I work in security support for victim-survivors of family violence – we sweep homes and cars for trackers and bugs, add CCTV systems and proper locks to homes, scour online accounts for infiltration, sometimes help women and children flee. The fact that my job even exists shows the lengths some men will go to stalk, harass and attack women.

We find microphones and tracking devices secreted in pot plants, sewn into children’s toys, dropped into strollers. My colleagues have found ex-partners hiding in ceiling crawlspaces, under beds. They’ve been chased out of homes with machetes. Last year, I was confronted by a man who’d been staking out his ex-partner’s apartment, waiting until she’d left so he could plant more tracking devices in her things (he found me and my bug-sweeping equipment instead).