IT’S AN innocuous red-brick building on the fringes of Wagga’s CBD.
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But the euphemistically named Wagga Women’s Health Centre houses one of the city’s most important services.
It offers everything from yoga to craft classes, but its speciality is helping piece together fractured lives.
A staggering 83 per cent of its visits so far in 2016 have been related to the silent scourge of our city – domestic violence.
It’s a crime category that continues to head in the wrong direction.
Domestic violence chews up a mountain of police resources, with officers in Wagga attending to, on average, between nine and 14 incidents daily.
It’s psychological impact on families is harder to quantify but no less alarming.
How one crime category can march inexorably upwards despite an army of frontline workers fighting to contain it presents a complex question.
Part of the answer lies in the emotional maelstrom afflicting the modern Aussie male.
Without the resources or experience to deal with emotional pain, some men project their anger outwards.
Violence against a loved one is too often the target of their cowardly decision.
A groundbreaking new report, released on Monday, has helped give more insight into the city’s wrestle with domestic violence.
Most jarring is the report’s finding that the city’s leaders are drifting between “denial and vague awareness” on the issue.
Overwhelmingly male leadership, services working in silos, a chronic funding shortfall and a bias towards crisis response, rather than prevention, are exacerbating the problem, the report found.
It also concluded conservative attitudes in the community are helping create a culture of silence.
This report alone will not affect change. That change can only come from you.
There is no more urgent challenge confronting us as a community.
We must first acknowledge that we are in the throes of a domestic violence epidemic.
And then we must resolve to do something about it.
This isn’t something that just happens on the other side of the tracks – it’s grasping reach is indiscriminate and real.
Only by sparking a community conversation around domestic violence, and condemning violence in every form, can we start to slay the monster.