It’s an established statistic that one Australian woman is killed by a violent, controlling male she knows each week.
Candace Sutton’s article in the New Zealand Times reveals The forgotten victims of Australia’s female killings epidemic.
She points out the Family Law Act has a presumption of shared contact between parents, no matter how violent or threatening one of them has been.
This is despite the fact, domestic violence legal experts say that the majority of child custody and family matters involve domestic violence.
Statistics of Australian “intimate partner violence” show 79 per cent of these homicides are males killing females, 18 per cent are women killing men, and 1.9 per cent are men killing a male partner.
Women’s Legal Services Queensland CEO Angela Lynch said forcing mothers to share custody of their children with violent and threatening partners only puts them in the firing line to be killed or hurt.
Organisations such as White Ribbon Australia are essential to work with men to end violence against women.