There’s a war going on and it’s killing thousands of Australians.
It’s a pretty one-sided war. The victims aren’t dying on distant battlefields. They’re women and children dying in their bedrooms and living rooms at the hands of their male loved ones.
We hear about these tragedies from time to time but it hardly attracts wall to wall media coverage like an alleged terrorist plot. When you stop and think about it, it’s truly horrifying.
Each week, one of these women dies a brutal, terror-filled death at the hands of their partner. And for every woman we mourn, many more are being assaulted or abused every day.
Women in every suburb and every town in Australia are literally living in fear in their own home. One in three Australian women has experienced physical violence in some form since turning 15. One in five has been sexually assaulted.
Partner violence presents the greatest health risk facing Australian women under 45. Not heart disease, not smoking – but serious harm caused by a male loved one.
There are some amazing organisations working at the frontline of this issue, supporting and assisting women at risk, but as more and more are murdered, beaten and intimidated, we have to acknowledge that we, as a community, are failing them. This failure starts at the top, with a Government that prioritises budget savings over women’s safety.
Earlier this month, the Prime Minister and state leaders discussed the need for national action on family and domestic violence at a Council of Australian Governments (COAG) meeting. The Prime Minister called the problem ‘urgent’.
But it’s hard to believe the Government takes this crisis seriously when you consider that they wanted to cut vital funds to women’s legal and support services – until thousands of Australians raised their voices in protest and they were forced to reinstate the funding.
Meanwhile, billions of dollars are ploughed into counter-terrorism measures aimed at protecting the community from a terror attack. Why isn’t this same level of protection, this same level of resources invested into protecting women and children from violent partners, husbands, fathers?
Each year, the Government also finds $3 billion to lock up less than 2000 people in unsafe, sub-standard offshore detention centres, including 126 women and 107 children on Nauru. Yes, $3 billion. The women on Nauru share a number of things in common with many women in our suburbs – both live in fear, both are at serious risk of harm, both are left unprotected and neglected by a Government that places very little value on their lives.
This Government has had a report before them since February which details serious sexual and physical abuse against asylum seeker women and children in detention on Nauru. They have done nothing about it.
Women continue to live in fear for their safety. Children as young as five continue to develop severe psychiatric illnesses because of the terrible things they have been exposed to.
When workers first started to speak out about Nauru, the Government’s response was to cast doubt on their allegations and accuse whistle-blowers of starting trouble. But in the end, they couldn’t silence the multitude of doctors, nurses, child welfare experts, teachers and other workers who had seen first-hand what women and children are forced to endure in this Australian-run institution of horror.
Despite many facing professional backlash for doing so, they have spoken out to tell heartbreaking stories of women wetting the bed because they’re too scared of the guards to get up and go to the toilet at night. Of children displaying sexualised behaviour because of what they’ve seen or experienced themselves.
The Government has paid lip-service to improving the situation on Nauru but it’s not good enough. There’s only one way to ensure the safety of children and their families and that’s to shut down Nauru and bring them to Australia.
No Government can pretend to care about women and children – nor can we as a community truly tackle this issue – when people without a voice, people who have fled violence and persecution in their own country, are unsafe. It’s hard to imagine how much more suffering women in Australia and asylum seeker women on Nauru will have to endure before their lives start to matter.
Kon Karapanagiotidis is the founder and current CEO of the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre, and is known for his provocative ways of bringing attention to asylum seeker issues. You can donate to the ASRC here or follow Kon on Twitter here.
Read more:
We’re not tackling domestic violence education in the classroom. But we need to be.
The lonely struggle facing Syria’s refugee women.
“I always heard the word refugee, but I never imagined I would be one.”
Top Comments
Thank you for including all women, the ones that have/will die, the ones that are/have been abused and the women and children in asylums who have suffered beyond what we can imagine. This all needs to change, thank you for speaking out.
Maria Portas.
It is not a one sided issue, your facts are misleading and needs to include men in any and all solutions. Gender neutrality or it it just sexist at it's core.
Lets not forget men made up 64% of all murder victims in 2014 according to the ABS, so lets look at things from the perspective that murder is murder whether its done to women or men.
Again detracting from the situation at hand. They are talking about what little value the government gives the women of its country. Women cant even go for a jog in the park anymore without worrying who will attack them. Out of those 64% of men that were murdered how many of them were murdered by women? Now lets take that figure and work out how many of those women killed in self defence or protecting their children? How many of those men were minding their own business and were mureded just because. Or been walking home late at night and had groups of women follow the making derogatory comments and threatening rape or better yet actually raped them because they were walking alone at night or because their clothes were "revealing". Men really have no idea what it is like to live in fesr at all times
now who's missing the point.
you refer to the little value the Government gives women, how ever men get so little value they don't even deserve a mention in statistics.
Men have also died this year to DV. Why don't you just campaign for both men and women instead of being sexist and excluding an entire gender? why is it so hard to have Gender neutrality in all things?
Being scared is a pretty normal response to walking alone at night. I guarantee you men are being cautious when they do have to be in that situation but if you want to go off statistics Men are far more likely to be injured then women as well.
You seem so set on blaming all men because they are a greater number of offenders, even if it is only 5% women as offenders don't you think it's a good idea to include them in a solution? or shall we just ignore female offenders and let them go on destroying things in their way?
even if men were only 5% of victims don't you think it's a good idea to also include them in a solution? or shall we just toss them to the side like they don't matter?
Try just for once to think of everything as Gender neutral, and see if you genuinely thank it's a bad thing to do.