A woman feared she would have to dig her own grave when her partner accused her of infidelity and kidnapped her to a remote area outside of Canberra, a court heard Friday.
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Two weeks later, the man kidnapped the woman a second time in what his lawyers say was a bid to protect her and her unborn child from her methamphetamine habit.
The 38-year-old man, who has not been named to protect the identity of the woman, pleaded guilty in the ACT Supreme Court, where he appeared on Friday to be sentenced, to charges of unlawful confinement and common assault.
The couple had been in an on-again off-again relationship for more than six years when on January 10 last year, the man drove to the woman's flat in Braddon with two others.
He accused the woman of trading sexual favours for drugs and slapped her before he pushed her into the car's front passenger seat and drove away.
The woman soon jumped from the moving Ford and ran screaming for help.
The man chased after her and picked her up by the hair, forcing her into the back seat of the car between himself and a child's car seat.
They drove to a remote area near Sutton.
When the car stopped, the man tied a rope around the woman's waist and walked her away from the car. She asked him if she would have to dig her own grave.
On January 24 that year, the couple had recently found out she was pregnant.
The man picked her up from her apartment and then produced a rope with a loop already in it and told her to put her hands inside it.
He drove her to an empty house in Banks that his parents owned and they slept there overnight. She asked why he wouldn't let her go. He told her she was killing their baby and herself because of the drug ice.
The next morning he drove her back home and the woman called police and told them she had been kidnapped.
Defence lawyer Michael Kukulies-Smith told the court the man's actions had been the result of a "misguided intention" to protect the victim and his unborn child.
In the first instance, he was trying to protect the woman's reputation and cause her to re-evaluate her actions, and in the second he had been attempting to prevent her taking drugs, Mr Kukulies-Smith said.
But prosecutor Trent Hickey said the man had used ropes to enforce his own will on the woman.
"You just can't do that, you can't enforce your will by tying someone up," he said.
He said despite the woman appearing to blame herself, in incidents of domestic violence the community needed to step in.
Justice David Mossop noted the relationship was outside the usual circumstances of domestic violence.
He noted the woman had been charged with conspiracy to defraud over a "bizarre exploitative" incident against the man in which she staged a fake hostage situation.
He noted too that the use of physical violence by men against women to control their behaviour was a significant problem.
The man rarely consumed alcohol, was not a illicit drug user and did not suffer mental illness.
He worked full time and had a limited criminal history. He had sole custody of the couple's older daughter because of his partner's drug use.
He lived with his parents on a property near Royalla, the court heard, to which he contributed to the mortgage.
He told the court he accepted what he did was wrong.
The man spent 20 days in custody when he was arrested.
Justice Mossop sentenced the man to 18 months jail, to be suspended Friday on him entering a three-year good behaviour order.
The judge told the man he had been lenient.
"You should obviously make sure you take the opportunity that's been given to you, and stay out of trouble in the future and continue to support your family."
