Page 4201 - Week 11 - Wednesday, 24 October 2018
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
being a migrant or refugee is at best already destabilising in the life of a child. Children from refugee backgrounds, especially, may have even more complicating factors, including having witnessed extreme violence in the form of war and having previously been forced to flee their homes.
Obviously, these and other impacts can have lifelong consequences in the lives of many children if not adequately addressed. Research suggests, for example, that those who experience violence in the home when they are young are more likely as adults to experience violence in their own homes. The ACT’s Coordinator-General for Family Safety recently stated that female children who witness violence at home double their risk of being victims of such violence when they are older.
Some studies suggest that witnessing or being the victim of violence as a child has a direct impact on later perpetration of partner violence. Other studies have called this linkage into question. In any case, we have enough clear evidence that witnessing or experiencing violence in the family negatively impacts many of the children affected by it in significant and lasting ways.
It is in the context of this increasing understanding, both here and overseas, that the ACT’s Domestic Violence Prevention Council called an extraordinary meeting this past April significantly to move the conversation towards including children who have witnessed or experienced personal and family violence. The council’s report, released at the end of August, makes a number of important observations.
First, young people who have experienced violence in the home have special needs in addition to the needs of the adults around them. This is an important point, Madam Assistant Speaker. For many years, we seem to have operated under the assumption that caring for the needs of the parent has automatically met the needs of the children. But children are individuals and in many, though not all, cases, they may have their own needs. Responses to violence can almost never be a one-size-fits-all.
The DVPC report’s second main observation is:
Many at risk children and young people are “invisible” in the ACT’s domestic and family violence system.
This observation strongly resonates within me. As I have noted once or twice in the past, I grew up in a home that was plagued by domestic violence for much of my childhood. From my earliest memories, my father abused my mother and my four siblings. This violence did not stop when we migrated to Australia but after some time our mother made the difficult decision to rescue us. She managed to save up the bond for a small flat and, with the assistance of a borrowed shopping trolley, we quickly packed up our few possessions and fled, pushing our belongings in our shopping trolley.
Very few of the people who knew me as a child would have known about this abuse. As is so often the case with domestic violence, it was not something we talked about. I certainly did not tell my classmates or teachers at school, where, as a migrant, I
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video