STOP DV - Jess Hill To Speak At Conference

INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALIST Jess Hill will be amongst a high-profile line-up of speakers at a national Stop Domestic Violence conference at the Gold Coast this week (1-3 December).

After almost two years of intensive public and media focus on domestic violence in Australia, leading academics and researchers will gather for the conference, working together to break the cycle of domestic abuse.

The conference coincides with the release this week of a report to the Queensland Government about how domestic violence laws and systems can be changed to better protect victims and their children.

The Report was commissioned following the murder of Hannah Clarke and her three young children on 19 February 2020 when the young mother was ambushed while driving her children to school.

Jess Hill will speak at the conference about systems failures that enable perpetrators to have contact with victims via their use of policing and the family law system.

“Victims want to know what is going to replace the incident-based policing system that is not working,” Jess Hill said. “They want to know how the system this going to protect them better in future.”

“The McMurdo report will hopefully give us a clear picture about what needs to change. As a Court of Appeal Judge, Margaret McMurdo knows the limits of the system but she also knows now, from speaking to hundreds of people, how it is being misused and weaponised.”

The conference will bring together leading researchers, domestic violence workers as well as advocates and victims for keynote addresses, plenary sessions and workshops.

After almost two years of border closures and lockdowns, Jess Hill said the in-person conference was a welcome event for people to come together and talk about the serious things, get up to date and connect with one another and feel the solidarity.

At a federal level, Jess Hill said she would like to see the system of Family Court expert report writers overhauled so that victims of domestic violence can be better protected.

“I think that any system that operates with the kind of concealment that the Family Court does, is going to attract people who like to act invisibly. And anywhere you can act with impunity, you may attract bad actors,” she said.

“The current system was based on an underlying assumption developed during the 1980s, that children were better off seeing both parents after separation, but the system too often fails to properly consider cases where children were experiencing or witnessing violence and abuse,” she said.

“The court became a sort of social engineer to ensure that children had contact with both parents. What the Family Courts are only just now realising, and haven’t reckoned with for the past 20 years, is that the Court is now predominantly a domestic violence court, so judges are applying that logic to the cases that come before them and forcing children to see people who have abused them and their parent.”

“The system is a system to facilitate contact, not a system to protect children.”

The conference opens on Wednesday at the Marriott Resort and runs until Friday.

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Written by Amanda Gearing

Conference program

Speakers

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