Page 708 - Week 03 - Tuesday, 17 March 2015
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Affairs, Minister for Women and Minister assisting the Chief Minister on Social Inclusion and Equality) (12.10): Violence against women and children is unacceptable in any form and under any circumstances in any community. As the Minister for Women and Minister Assisting the Chief Minister on Social Inclusion and Equality, I am entirely clear that we must do everything in our power to stop this violence.
I will always want to improve the services available to victims, but more than that I want this violence to end. We cannot claim to be a just and fully socially inclusive community while violence against women and children is a part of this city. Domestic violence remains a serious problem for our community. It has a devastating and lasting effect on women, children and families. For all women, it undermines our right to live without fear. For those who experience it directly, it undermines their health, their education and their employment prospects. It undermines their economic security and, in the most tragic of circumstances, their lives and the lives of their children.
Here in the ACT we watched and were shocked beyond belief at the recent tragic death of a mother of three young children. I, like many other Canberrans, had a deeply emotional reaction that came from putting the face of a young woman to a problem that is too often spoken about in the abstract. In the first instance I was deeply saddened by this violence. I am furious about the fear that women living in our community live with because we still have a society where some men feel a deep need to control the women in their lives. And then I was frustrated that I lived in a society where this could still happen.
But when I had conversations with the women’s sector, the people I know whose lives have been the aftermath of this kind of violence, what I heard loudly and clearly was what I already knew: there is no easy solution here, and we owe women experiencing violence more than just talk. The ACT government has a renewed focus on working across government to address the impacts of domestic and family violence and remains steadfast in working to end violence itself.
What I heard when I spoke to the sector was that they wanted us to work collaboratively with the community to address the causes of violence and abuse against women because the consequences are far-reaching and affect our children, our families and our community. They did not want to attend another meeting. They wanted action on the work that they and governments around the country have been undertaking through the first phase of the national action plan. They wanted the work done to make sure that domestic and family violence and sexual assault is stopped.
It is a sad but important step forward that it is now widely understood that in Australia around one in three women has experienced physical violence and one in five has experienced sexual violence since the age of 15. This is a shocking statistic: one in five women having experienced sexual violence. This is why the commonwealth, state and territory governments worked with the community to develop a 12-year national plan to reduce violence against women and their children from 2010 to 2022. The national plan sets out what we are doing to reduce violence against women and their children. It is a vision that Australian women and their children live free from violence in safe communities.
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