The Catholic Leader Keeping Faith with You

SURGING domestic violence cases during the COVID-19 crisis is a pandemic within a pandemic, according to Church workers on the frontline of domestic violence education and prevention. They say Church communities “provided no immunity” to the domestic violence scourge. Months of restrictions have created “a perfect storm” of conditions with stay-at-home orders, school closures, and many workers laid off or ... Read More »

WHEN Natasha Stott Despoja wrote a book last year about family violence, she described it as “a national emergency”. Now she has spoke out again about “the body count, the slaughter in our suburbs” – domestic violence that destroys too many Australian households, fractures entire communities, and has spiked during COVID-19. “I described it as a national emergency and it ... Read More »

SOCIAL distancing measures have increased domestic and family violence pressures as women and children struggle to escape perpetrators isolated at home with them who limit their access to help, Centacare Domestic and Family Violence frontline workers say. “The risk that social isolation with the current pandemic raises is that domestic violence often happens in silence,” Centacare Maroochydore Family and Relationship ... Read More »

CAMPAIGNERS against family violence are pressing for the outlawing of coercive control between partners as a way to stop domestic homicides. Queensland is set to hold a domestic violence summit late this month, as police and politicians search for solutions to the domestic violence scourge following the Camp Hill murder of Hannah Clarke and her three children.  The Queensland Women’s ... Read More »

THE man stood in the halls of the Southport court barely able to string three words together. A dominating, fearful figure in his own home, he was a pale, bumbling mess. He was about to walk into a court room to listen to police request that a domestic violence order be placed on him. For 12 years, he had intimidated ... Read More »

THE first phone call to police came five months after her wedding. The woman sobbed that her new husband had bashed her. He had pushed her head into a wall repeatedly.  She said she didn’t require medical treatment but she was frightened for her safety. Could police please visit her?  When police arrived at the couple’s upmarket home, the woman’s ... Read More »

ARCHDIOCESE of Brisbane frontline domestic violence workers have urged a closer focus on strangulation in a bid to lower the number of fatalities in Queensland homes. Centacare’s Family and Relationships Services say any evidence of non-lethal strangulation places a victim immediately in a “high-risk” domestic violence situation. Their urgings are supported by a State Government advisory board that has issued ... Read More »

DOMESTIC violence – the scourge that goes on behind the closed doors of our suburbs and towns – is now claiming the life of one woman a week murdered by her current or former partner. Every two minutes, police are called to a family violence matter. One in every three Australian women have experienced physical violence since the age of ... Read More »

FOR years, domestic violence trapped the woman like a fog that wouldn’t lift. Every part of her life, from home to work and her relationship with her teenage son, had been impacted by her abusive partner. He was physically violent and he was emotionally abusive. He would monitor the odometer on the car to know how far his partner had ... Read More »