TWENTY-FOUR. That’s how many women have died violently in Australia so far this year, according to Destroy the Joint’s Counting Dead Women campaign.
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We’re not quite a quarter of the way through the year and already the figure is 24. If that pace keeps up, we’ll exceed the figure of 84 dead women recorded for 2014 in Australia.
Destroy the Joint, on its Facebook page, writes: “Counting Dead Women Australia counts all the women who have been killed as a result of violence against women. We do not confine our count to those murders traditionally attributed as domestic or family violence. The majority of these cases are now in court where our legal system will try to find the facts behind the deaths; and in 17 of those alleged murders, the person charged was known to the victim in some way. Our community wants all violence to stop.”
Just to add a little more emphasis to the point by Destroy the Joint, how about this quote from Queensland woman Dani Keogh, who is a domestic violence survivor now campaigning for change: “He punched me until I was unconscious, strangled me four days before my son was born and again when I was seven months pregnant with my daughter, punched me in the face whilst my children screamed, terrified – we fled when my daughter was just six weeks old.”
Ms Keogh is fighting back. She has launched a petition on change.org to encourage greater government action on domestic violence. Her petition calls on the government to:
- Create a law that says breaking a domestic violence order sends you to jail, with immediate effect.
- Force domestic violence perpetrators to pay child support.
- Allow family violence victims to move with their children interstate away from their perpetrators, so they can feel some kind of safety.
- End the crippling debt for domestic violence victims by making legal aid free – and force Legal Aid to represent the victim over the perpetrator.
Ms Keogh’s petition is still on change.org and has attracted more than 78,000 signatures. Here’s hoping she can give a greater voice to those who can’t always speak for themselves because even one victim on the Counting Dead Women list is too many.
- Jody Springett
