Page 4047 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 26 November 2014
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The government hopes the review will help to achieve the objectives of both the national plan to reduce violence against women and their children and the ACT prevention of violence against women and children strategy, which is midway through its implementation period.
The announcement of the review came in the same month that Prime Minister Tony Abbott launched the second stage of the national plan to reduce violence against women and children. Recent high profile domestic violence cases have drawn national attention to this human cost of family violence, with calls by women’s rights and domestic violence campaigners to establish a royal commission into domestic violence, and it has become a hot issue in this weekend’s Victorian state election.
Family violence campaigner and Victorian nominee for Australian of the Year Rosie Batty says that there needs to be a major overhaul in the way that the justice system deals with family violence, along with improvements in the way agencies work together to support victims of violence. As members will know, Rosie is the mother of 11-year-old Luke Batty, who was brutally murdered by his father at cricket practice in February this year, and she herself endured a decade of abuse by her former partner.
Calls for a national commission have also been put forward, including by social activist Phil Cleary, who has campaigned against domestic violence since 1989 when his sister was murdered by her former boyfriend, who was then granted a provocation defence and sentenced to less than four years in jail. In an online opinion piece this year Mr Cleary told the story of the changing way that we view family violence. He is quoted as saying:
Twenty-five years ago, I spoke in the Melbourne Town Hall at one of the first major gatherings to discuss violence against women. The women who led this campaign came from the battlegrounds, the community centres, refuges, legal centres and anti-violence agencies where frightened women sought protection and comfort from the terror.
We’ve come a long way since those days. No longer do we believe ‘family violence’ by men is private business. No longer can judges make inappropriate comments with impunity in ‘wife killer’ trials, even if juries still find such men not guilty of murder. No longer will the community simply shrug its shoulders when a local woman is killed. No one held vigils in the ‘old days’. Now they have become part of the ritual of the epidemic of violence against women.
Mr Cleary went on to express powerfully his feelings of frustration. He said:
But I’m sick of the vigils and the endless violence. I don’t want to be crying about another murder and remembering what it was like when the woman about whom we now shed tears was my sister. We need to end the carnage. We need far reaching cultural change. For that we need a royal commission.
This is a very powerful expression of the issue from someone who has obviously very personally felt the loss brought about by domestic violence.
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