() – The murder of five women in 10 days in Australia, allegedly by men they knew, left Manuela Whitford feeling “numb”.
“We’ve gotten used to it… you hear it all the time, I’ve become so numb to it,” she said. “On the other hand, I think, ‘Oh my God,’ I’m doing something good for the people I can help.”
Whitford is the founder of Friends with Dignity, a Brisbane-based charity that provides families fleeing domestic violence with everything they need to feel at home in emergency accommodation.
Most of them are mothers with children, who leave with few possessions but carry the weight of fear and worry about where they are going and how they will manage.
“They are very isolated. It’s been years of conditioning people that they’re not good enough, that they’re not worth it, that they’re not valuable,” Whitford explains from the charity’s warehouse south of Brisbane.
On the shelves of the warehouse, located at the back of an industrial estate, are piled high with household goods, boxes of toys and washed mattresses, stacked and ready to be delivered to the apartments of social welfare agencies.
Donations are expected to help save lives, but it is the women who have been unable to escape from allegedly violent men who have dominated headlines in Australia in recent weeks.
The five women killed in 10 days include a 21-year-old water polo coach who had reportedly recently separated from her alleged killer, and a 65-year-old woman whose elderly husband has been charged with murder.
Now these are numbers from a national count that reaches 43 so far in 2023, according to Counting Dead Womena research project initiated by the feminist group Destroy the Joint, which takes its name from a 2012 slur uttered by an Australian radio host who accused women leaders of “destroying the joint.”
The latest suspected murder was uncovered on Monday when security staff at the Crown Towers hotel in Perth, Western Australia, received a phone call from concerned relatives of Alice McShera, a 34-year-old lawyer.
They searched a bedroom and found McShera’s body, Washington police Inspector Geoff DeSanges told reporters Tuesday. A 42-year-old man found in the same room with suspected self-inflicted injuries was later charged with murder.
Last Sunday, Analyn Osias, 46, known as Logee, suffered fatal injuries at a home in Kangaroo Flats, according to Victoria Police. A 44-year-old man has been charged with murder.
Days earlier, 21-year-old water polo coach Lilie James was found dead with head injuries in the toilet of a private school gym in Sydney, according to New South Wales police. The body of her ex-partner, 24, was later discovered at the bottom of a cliff after it was suspected that he had committed suicide.
That same week, Thi Thuy Huong Nguyen, 65, was found with multiple stab wounds in the kitchen of her home in Canberra, ACT Police reported. Police arrested her 70-year-old husband, who also had injuries. He appeared in court from hospital bed to face a murder charge.
Two days earlier, the body of 38-year-old Krystal Marshall was recovered from the charred remains of her home following a house fire in South Australia, According to the police of this state. A 48-year-old man He was later charged with murder.
The number of women who have died from violence in Australia has ranged from 43 to 84 each year since Counting Dead Women began tracking deaths in 2012.
That same year, Whitford founded Friends with Dignity in her garage. Since then, she has noticed a shift in the way people, including police, respond to domestic violence.
“It is about believing, it is about listening to the victim,” he says.
According to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW)the proportion of Australian women reporting experiencing domestic violence by an intimate partner in the previous 12 months fell between 2016 and 2021-22, from 1.7% to 0.9%.
However, the National Community Attitudes Survey on Violence Against Women (NCAS) The most recent survey from 2021 showed that 23% believe domestic violence is a normal reaction to everyday stress.
And 91% believed that violence against women was a problem in Australia.
There have been repeated calls for help from the government, which last year launched its National Plan to End Violence against Women and Children 2022-2032.
The First Action Plan 2023-2027 was published in August, and the first point on the list of 10 is to advance gender equality.
Australia may be a modern and wealthy country, but sexist attitudes persist in a culture where women They do more unpaid domestic work and earn less throughout their lives than men, according to the United Nations.
Men still dominate boardrooms and many positions of power, as they do in Parliament: the country has only had one female prime minister, Julia Gillard, who gave a speech on misogyny that has since been criticized has accumulated millions of views on social media.
A survey conducted in 2022 by the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership, The House of Representatives, now chaired by Gillard, revealed that Australian men find misogynistic comments on the internet more acceptable than the global average.
The First Action Plan includes funding of 3.5 million Australian dollars (US$2.24 million) for a three-year trial ofThe Healthy Masculinities Projectto find out what works to counter harmful messages directed at men and boys on social media.
The government’s press release does not mention his name, but experts cite the example of Andrew Tate, the self-proclaimed misogynist internet influencer who will soon be tried in Romania on charges of human trafficking and rape.
For over 20 years, Andrew Lines has worked to counter Tate’s misogynistic and dangerous messaging style through “The Rite Journey,” a program that works with schools in Australia, New Zealand and other countries to teach students to find positive role models.
She says it is becoming increasingly difficult to tackle the negative messages children see on their mobile phones, from abusive and disrespectful comments to easily accessible hard-core pornography.
“The hateful rhetoric that they read is something that I would never have been exposed to as a child,” Lines says. “It doesn’t even have to be an incendiary comment. You can go and read the comments on a lot of threads and there’s hateful, judgmental stuff.”
According to Lines, many men are taking a more active role in parenting than previous generations, but family dynamics have also changed, meaning fathers are spending less time with their children.
On the other hand, overparenting (taking on too active a role) can create its own problems, she says.
“If children haven’t learned how to deal with failure and rejection in the small experiences of childhood, and they go on to the bigger experiences, I think there’s a problem,” she says.
But until those lessons are learned, state authorities are beefing up their responses to domestic violence.
In July, NSW Police launched the country’s first Domestic and Family Violence Register to record repeat offenders, and last week the government of western australia He said he wanted more offenders to be tagged with electronic tags.
Until meaningful change occurs, people like Whitford of Friends with Dignity will do what they can to support those affected.
Every Tuesday, volunteers gather at the charity’s warehouse to assemble personal care kits and fulfil agency orders for people in need. Companies also get involved by sending their staff on days off as part of their social responsibility programmes.
Housing shortages mean fewer apartments are available to furnish, so more basic necessities are provided to women who are unable to leave violent homes.
Whitford says the community needs to come together to prevent more women from falling victim to domestic violence.
“A lot of people don’t ask you if you’re okay because they don’t know what to do with the answer,” she says. “So do your research, find out what resources are in your area.”
Add Comment