What Is Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs?
The Basic Idea
In 1943, American psychologist Abraham Maslow published a theory with a simple but profound premise: human beings have needs, and those needs have an order.
We cannot meaningfully pursue love if we are starving. We cannot build self-esteem if we do not feel safe. We cannot reach our potential if our home is under threat.
Maslow arranged these needs into a pyramid of five levels, stacked in order of priority. The lower the level, the more urgent and fundamental the need. You cannot focus on higher needs or sustainably live at a higher level if a lower level is destabilised.
From the Top to the Bottom: What Happens When the State Fails to Act
Prior to the conduct of the parties she has documented, Jess operated at the apex of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, a self-actualising founder with an established business, a professional identity, and a clear vocational direction. She had built what most people spend a lifetime working toward: purpose, community, income, and a home.
That is the documented baseline. What followed is not misfortune. It is the measurable, attributable consequence of institutional failure.
The Hierarchy — and What Was Done to It
Maslow's Hierarchy describes the layered structure of human need. At its base: shelter, safety, survival. In the middle: belonging, esteem, stability. At its apex: purpose, growth, self-actualisation. The model assumes that losing the upper levels does not threaten the lower ones. It assumes someone is protected.
Jess was not protected.
The conduct she has documented, enabled by systemic Victoria Police inaction and questionable conduct across multiple intervention points, did not merely cause financial harm. It triggered a documented cascade through every level of the hierarchy. Professional esteem destroyed. Community belonging severed. Physical safety threatened to the point that courts granted intremim protective orders against multiple respondents. And now, imminent housing loss, the final blow that has placed her at the most basic level of human survival whilst dealing with severe compounded trauma as per her February 2026 diagnosis. Trauma in need of recovery support through Victims of Crime support channels, Victim support Victoria Police continue to block, conduct Jess says is keeping her stuck in crisis-mode and reliant on future civil proceedings to recover debt owed by her building managers for damages and loss of quiet enjoyment to grant her the means for recovery, but that payment might take many months or even a year plus.
She did not fall. She was pushed and the institution that exists to prevent exactly this looked away.
When Police Become Part of the Problem and What the Law Says About It
Victoria Police first failed to respond to Jess's requests for protective intervention in March 2025. She has made those requests many times since. Each time, the response was inaction. That inaction did not merely fail to help; it actively enabled the conduct against her to continue, compound, and escalate, with the most recent escalation by perpetrators occurring as recently as this past month.
But this particular escalation is not simply a case of inaction. It represents something graver, conduct that adds to an ongoing pattern of behaviour now under review by integrity channels, and that crosses a threshold the law treats with the utmost seriousness.
The recent documented incident names a Victoria Police officer directly. It alleges that an officer encouraged a perpetrator's conduct against a victim, conduct Jess alleges is part of a sustained harrassment campaign, a retalitory deliberate act to discredit Jess's response to public attacks on her reputation, discredit her future testimony and effectively force Jess back into silence. Central to the documentation is an allegation that the named officer disclosed private information about Jess to a documented perpetrator; a person she had formally reported to Victoria Police from April 2025, and multiple times since.
What This Means for Every Member of the Public
When you call Victoria Police, you are not asking for a favour. You are invoking a legal and institutional obligation. Police in Victoria exist, are funded, and are empowered under law to protect the public — including, specifically, victims of threats, harassment, and violence.
That obligation is not discretionary.
When a police officer not only fails to protect a victim but allegedly discloses that victim's private information to the person they reported, the very person the law was invoked to protect against, the entire premise of public safety is undermined. It means that the act of reporting to police can become a mechanism of further harm. It means the most vulnerable point of contact a victim has at the moment they ask for help can be turned against them.
If this can happen to someone with documentation, with a formal record, with integrity bodies already engaged, it can happen to anyone.
The Legislative Framework and Where the Breaches Lie
The conduct alleged is not merely a policy failure. Jess's assessment of what the documentation alleges, engages multiple pieces of Victorian and federal law:
Victoria Police Act 2013
Police officers in Victoria are bound by professional standards requiring them to act with integrity, impartiality, and in the public interest. Conduct that actively assists a perpetrator or discloses information to one is a direct breach of the professional obligations the Act enshrines. The Act also empowers integrity bodies to investigate exactly this kind of conduct.
Charter of Human Rights and Responsibilities Act 2006 (Vic)
Section 13 guarantees the right to privacy, including protection of personal information held by public authorities. Section 21 protects the right to liberty and security of person. Section 8 provides the right to recognition and equality before the law including equal protection against violence. A police officer disclosing a victim's private information to their alleged perpetrator engages breaches of all three.
Privacy and Data Protection Act 2014 (Vic)
Information Privacy Principle 2 governs the use and disclosure of personal information held by Victorian government agencies, including Victoria Police. Disclosure of a victim's information to a third party particularly a reported perpetrator without lawful authority is a prima facie breach of this Act.
Beyond these potential breaches identified in Jess's assessment, perverting the course of justice is a serious criminal offence under Victorian law. Conduct that interferes with a victim's ability to pursue legal proceedings including by emboldening a perpetrator, discouraging a complainant, or compromising the integrity of an active matter falls squarely within the scope of this provision. The allegation that a police officer encouraged retaliatory conduct against a victim who has active relevant proceedings before the courts and under review by multiple agencies and channels is conduct that must be assessed.
The Sum of Institutional Failure
What is alleged here is not a rogue incident. It is a pattern of questionable conduct beginning from March 2025, documented, reported, and now before appropriate channels in which a person sought protection from the institution designed to provide it, and that institution is alleged to have instead become a mechanism of the harm it was asked to stop.
The law is clear about what that is. The question is whether the institutions with the power to enforce it will act before the damage becomes irreversible.
Where She Sits Now
Jess is not waiting for a miracle. She is waiting for the law to work.
She has recently engaged every available channel; courts, integrity bodies, oversight agencies, formal complaints mechanisms. She began engaging them in late December 2025 and early January 2026, a decision she made alongside something that cost her enormously: breaking a decade of personal public silence - she typically doesnt engage with social media on a personal level, all while under active and ongoing intimidation.
She did not break that silence carelessly. She made a public address directly responding to malicious reputation attacks and deliberate interference with her business operations, attacks orchestrated by a market displacement operation involving more than ten parties, none of whom will be named here by reason of active legal proceedings. She made a public safety disclosure to create community awareness and to prevent further harm to herself, to other operators, and to the broader community.
It was her last-ditch effort. To be safe. To be free from harm. To recover what was taken from her. And to stop the same thing happening to someone else.
Those channels are moving. But they are not moving fast enough.
Where the Power Now Sits, and Where It Does Not
This is the critical point. The power to prevent what happens next does not sit with Jess still barricaded behind a door and unable to go outside and be certain of her safely. She has exhausted every avenue available to a private citizen. She has documented, reported, filed, appeared, and escalated; repeatedly, formally, and on the record.
The power now sits with the courts, the integrity bodies, and the oversight agencies that have formally received her disclosures.
It sits there and nowhere else.
These are not informal complaints. These are active proceedings. Formal records. Matters before institutions that exist precisely to act when the primary institution, in this case, Victoria Police has failed. The oversight is live. The documentation is before them. The trajectory of harm, if intervention does not come, is visible to anyone who reads the record.
That means the question of what happens next is not Jess's to answer. It belongs to the bodies now holding her disclosures. It belongs to the legal system that had granted interim orders and are overseeing the civil proceedings that can put an end to this and give Jess back the stability required to move forward with life and make a full recovery from the criminal and institutional trauma she has faced. It belongs to the integrity body that has received her complaint. It belongs to every agency that has formally received notice of the matter.
They have the power to de-escalate this. They have the power to compel accountability, to acknowledge what the record shows, and to intervene before the harm becomes irreversible.
If they act, a life can be stabilised. If they do not, the collapse of that life; documented, foreseeable, preventable sits on their record too.
What Happens If They Don't
If the institutions now holding this matter continue to move at a pace that does not match the urgency on the ground an urgency Jess has made them aware of, the outcome is not abstract. It is a woman who built a business, supported those around her, contributed to her community, and asked for help rendered homeless, financially destroyed, and unable to recover because the people with the power to act decided, at every turn, that her safety could wait.
And here is what every person reading this should sit with:
This is not a story about someone on the margins. This is a story about a founder. A professional. Someone with receipts, with documentation, with a paper trail that spans years. Someone who did everything right and was failed anyway first by police, and then by the clock.
If it can happen to her, the question is not whether it could happen to you. The question is: what would you need to lose before someone with the power to act decided it was worth their attention?
The Distance
The distance between where Jess was and where she now operates is not bad luck. It is not poor choices. It is the direct, traceable, documented result of a criminal campaign against her and of a police service that was asked, repeatedly, to intervene, and chose not to.
The matter is now formally before the bodies that exist to correct exactly this kind of failure. The record is there. The harm is visible. The clock is running.
The power to stop this escalating further no longer lies with Jess. It lies with the institutions that have received her disclosures, and they know it.
This is not embellishment. This is the documented baseline against which the harm is measured.
Where Jess Was: Self-Actualisation (Level 5)
Before the relevant conduct began, Jess had achieved what most people spend a lifetime working toward:
- Founder and operator of a growing events business (600+ guests at the March 2025 event before a forced safety pause on all business operations in April 2025 to address security threats. Unfortunately protection never came, resulting in a full stop, Documention proves the cause was due to premeditated criminal threats, Jess reported the threat in real-time to Police, they ignored Jess and allowed the criminal threats to become a reality)
- Multiple prior businesses demonstrating entrepreneurial capability and the planned launch of a second nightlife event business in late 2025 - a project she began in late 2024, venues were engaged and booked.
- GM and c-level leadership by her mid-20s
- Professional expertise and professional reputation
- A clear vocational direction and long-term purpose (eventual life-purpose work with at-risk youth alongside her events business )
- Creative and professional identity
- A functioning home, income, and social environment
The Cascade: How Each Level Was Stripped
⬇ Level 4 — Esteem Needs (Destroyed)
- Recognition, reputation, professional standing, sense of achievement
- Business reputation undermined through the conduct of respondents
- Forced public silence broken only to run a disclosure campaign; the only available channel to try and seek safety and forward movement so her life can recover
- Professional identity as a founder and operator collapsed with NSFW Events
- The transition from entrepreneur to self-represented litigant is itself a form of esteem deprivation, it consumes the same cognitive and emotional resources that built the business
⬇ Level 3 — Love & Belonging (Destabilised)
- Community, sense of place, social connection, professional networks
- The events community she built and operated within was severed
- The environment in which the conduct occurred was one that should have been a place of professional belonging (her building, her business context)
- Police conduct meant there was no institutional validation of her experience; a form of social erasure and acknowledgement needed to begin. Trauma recovery
- The PSIO process, while it provides safety, requires her to confront people who harmed and targeted her
⬇ Level 2 — Safety Needs (Actively Threatened)
- Physical safety, financial security, health, property, work opportunities
- Personal Safety Intervention Orders filed against multiple respondents — her physical safety was sufficiently threatened to require court intervention
- Business destruction resulted in total income loss
- Victoria Police's failure to act when it had both the obligation and the evidence left her exposed
- The integrity complaints and civil proceedings exist precisely because safety-level failures were systemic, not incidental
⬇ Level 1 — Physiological Needs (At Risk)
- Shelter, food, financial survival, basic functioning
- Imminent Homelessness
- Loss of business income removed the financial basis to meet basic needs
- The physical and psychological toll of managing simultaneous legal proceedings, court appearances, and public advocacy while in crisis is a severe and revictimising physiological burden
The Inversion: What Makes This Significant
Before
- Self-actualising founder
- Income-generating business owner
- Esteem-building professional
- Community-connected operator
- Goal-directed long-term planner
After
- Survival-mode litigant
- Zero income, fighting eviction
- Fighting for safety via channels outside first responders and PSIOs
- Isolated, publicly disclosing under extreme duress
- Day-to-day crisis management
The distance between Level 5 and Level 1 is the measure of harm. That distance was not caused by market forces or personal failure. It was caused by identifiable illegal conduct, by identifiable parties, in an identifiable sequence. Preventable conduct Police were made aware of before it escalated; the failure of Victoria Police to intervene at multiple documented junctures allowed that cascade to complete