Community leaders, frontline workers and advocates participate in the panel discussion topic ‘Men must be part of the solution’.
CatholicCare Wilcannia-Forbes has brought together frontline workers, community advocates and leading voices to explain the realities of domestic violence in regional, rural and remote NSW.
Hidden No More: shining the light on domestic violence in rural communities brought together more than 100 committed people as an important step towards lasting and practical change.
Its keynote speakers were NSW Women’s Safety Commissioner Dr Hannah Tonkin, the Hon. Stephen Lawrence MLC, author, professor and investigative journalist Jess Hill, NSW Police Incident and Emergency Management Commander Superintendent Greg Moore, and Magistrate Aaron Tang, Local Court of NSW.
CatholicCare Wilcannia-Forbes team members from Forbes and Parkes were part of the program’s panel discussions, joined by other community leaders, frontline workers and advocates.
Orana and Far West continues to record domestic violence-related assault rates more than three times the NSW average. In remote areas, women experience assaultrelated hospitalisations at 43 times the rate of women in major cities.
“Those are statistics, but for our team, we see real women and children, and the damage domestic violence does,” CatholicCare Wilcannia-Forbes CEO Anne-Marie Mioche said after the symposium.
“We’re trying to protect women and their children in areas with very few services,” Ms Mioche said.
“Services that are available in rural communities are often seeing two to three times the number of women they are funded to support.
Ms Mioche said she wanted both the federal and state governments to reassess funding allocations for regional and remote communities.
CatholicCare Wilcannia-Forbes is a provider of the Men’s Behaviour Change Program, which Ms Mioche describes as having “huge potential to transform behaviour”.“For the men who really embrace the program, it is not unusual for them to participate again by choice,” she said. “We need more programs like this, giving men the tools and strategies to stop that behaviour.”