Lift the Taboo (1 Jun 2024)
There was no reason for people living in the city to have any guns, licensed or otherwise.
It's an open secret that domestic violence is happening in the western suburbs.
Last week, the worst consequences of this were felt in a close-knit street in Floreat.
Days later, Curtin MP Kate Chaney summed it up: "It's often hidden in more affluent communities, but it is definitely there."
Around the country women are courageously standing up and demanding that men stop killing their friends and family members. But their fight is hamstrung by complicated practice around the media publicly reporting on family violence, a similar code of silence to that which contributed to hiding child sexual abuse and suicide. Inquiring reporters have often been told by police: "It's just a domestic."
Even minor instances of violence of the type you witness on the street often make the pages of newspapers, news bulletins and community social media groups. But the public doesn't know violence and abuse is occurring behind closed family doors until a woman or her children is killed.
As reporters, part of our job is to work with police to highlight crime in our community. It can help catch a perpetrator, and it acts as a deterrent. Domestic violence appears to be by far the most reported crime to police in the western suburbs, and police crime statistics bear this out.
Police attended more than 58,000 family and domestic violence incidents in 2023 in WA - the worst on record, though we rarely report on them.
Incidents when a woman has asked police to escort her while she tries to leave her husband, where neighbours have called the police because they've heard a man threaten to kill his own kids, or a woman takes out a protection order after being physically threatened, are deemed by police as not of interest to the media.
It appears to be the last vestige of the archaic notion that what goes on behind closed family doors stays behind them.
This is happening while women are being urged to speak out about what's going on. And many are. They are telling their family, their friends, their neighbours, hoping for some validation and support. They're telling police in the hope they'll be protected.
The Floreat killer's daughter, Ariel Bombara, told Australia this week their community is rallying behind women but authorities are failing to protect them. It would help if police began working with journalists to report on "minor" instances of domestic violence which, as Australia is witnessing, over time often escalate to the worst form.
Right now, the system is failing women at every step, the burden is on them to cross their fingers and hope they'll be believed and not killed.
Meanwhile, the people who harm them are afforded a right to silence and "privacy". It is well known that secrecy only benefits the people in power.
Related article: MP says ‘enough is enough’ as another man kills women (26 May 2024)
