By CASEY NEILL
“AT Dandenong Magistrates’ Court we are dealing with 400 applications for family intervention orders every month.”
Magistrate Leslie Fleming revealed this shocking statistic to gasps from a packed Drum Theatre following the inaugural City of Greater Dandenong Walk Against Family Violence last Tuesday.
“That’s the busiest court in the state,” she said.
“Why is that happening in this region? That’s too many.”
About 500 men, women and children walked from Dandenong Market to the Drum carrying banners and wearing White Ribbon Day T-shirts, making a united stand against family violence.
“In this room I see hope,” Ms Fleming said.
“We’re all here about the catastrophe of family violence and we’re all on the same page about how we feel about that.”
She referred to a mother of four’s death in her Noble Park home earlier this month.
“She was in our court in 2009 but then she’d gone off the radar.
“What happened there? What went wrong?”
Ms Fleming said agencies richly serviced the region, but she wanted to see more co-ordination between them.
“So if someone’s slipped through one service they’re picked up by another,” she said.
“We do have strategies. Strategies that work.
“We can save people.”
But she said women needed to speak up.
“If we remove that loaded feeling of shame we bring to the discussion people are prepared to go to court and to report,” she said.
“Then the strategies kick in.”
Walk participant Janelle echoed Ms Fleming’s plea.
She is living through family violence and spoke up.
“It’s still quite raw,” she said.
“It was actually my own adult children.”
Her primary school aged daughter has been through 12 months of trauma counselling and insisted they attend the march.
Janelle said the event was an important step toward stopping family violence and hoped to see it return next year.
Victoria Police Southern Metropolitan Region Assistant Commissioner Luke Cornelius said 44 per cent of assaults committed across the state were family violence related.
That figure is 9 per cent higher in Greater Dandenong, Casey and Cardinia.
“These numbers represent those instances where the screams have become so loud that next door neighbours call police and ask for help,” he said.
“Or the injuries that are presented at hospital are so serious they can no longer be covered by makeup or by a cover story about a fall down a flight of stairs.”
Mr Cornelius urged the crowd to think about the psychological and physical injuries that go unreported and unobserved.
“We all know what fear looks like,” he said.
“And yet it’s very clear that we choose to be blind to it.”
He said men needed to wake up to themselves.
“We all ought to commit to calling our mates to account, to pulling up the blokes that are telling the off-colour joke, who are speaking in disparaging ways about women,” he said.
Anti-violence campaigner Phil Cleary’s 25-year-old sister was stabbed to death by her ex-boyfriend in 1987.
“She’d ended the relationship with a man she didn’t want to be with,” he said.
“You must accept, men in the room, that a woman is not your possession and women have every right to assert their independence.”
Mr Cleary said men had to stand between women and violent men, and urged women to speak up.
“Don’t ever be scared to go to your brother or your mates or the men in your world and tell them you want their help,” he said.
“If my sister had come to me and told me that the man in her life was dangerous, she would be alive today.”
