Esteemed human rights lawyer and barrister Jen Robinson has dedicated her career to making the world a safer place for women, and yet, when it comes to family and domestic violence in Australia, she has been shocked the more she learns how big the problem truly is.
“We need better protections for women speaking out. We need to look at what’s happening in our family courts. We need to look at what’s happening in the child protection system,” Robinson tells Women’s Agenda.
“We need to look at the lived experience of women in our courts, whether in the criminal courts or civil courts or the family courts, and how, in practice, the law silences women from speaking out.”
As an internationally renowned advocate for ending violence against women, this is the basis of Robinson’s work. She co-authored the book How Many More Women? How the law silences women, which delves into the legal response to the MeToo movement in Australia and around the world.
For any woman feeling trapped by the system that’s silencing them, Robinson says “we wrote our book for you because we want to empower with knowledge”.
At an event on Tuesday morning in Sydney, Robinson joined the CEO of Women’s Community Shelters, Annabelle Daniel OAM, in a discussion to explore how the law is silencing and adversely affecting women experiencing family and domestic violence, and what needs to change.
Shelters and refuges offer life changing support for women experiencing domestic and family violence, and Robinson told Women’s Agenda that just at today’s event alone, she heard many “anecdotal stories from frontline services workers, where women are being threatened for defamation, where frontline services workers are being threatened for defamation, where children who are survivors of domestic violence are being threatened by their perpetrator father with defamation and they want to speak out about it.”
“This is a much bigger problem than people realise, than even I realised before I wrote this book,” she says.
Ahead of the upcoming federal election, Robinson says it’s important for all of us voting to “look carefully at what the respective parties are promising in terms of domestic violence”.
“We care about violence against women. Vote, and vote accordingly,” she says, noting that more resources and more funding needs to go into ending violence against women.
Violence against women continues to be one of the most prevalent human rights abuses in Australia, and around the world.
While Robinson’s critical advocacy in this space is making global impacts, her drive for change stems from very personal experience.
“I’m really motivated by my grandmother’s example and her lived experience,” Robinson says.
“There were no shelters for her when she left my violent grandfather in the early 60s, there was no support for her. She then dedicated her life to working in the refuges to provide safe spaces for women.”
Thankfully, there’s more resources available now, like Women’s Community Shelters, that are offering safe spaces for women escaping violence. However, more support for these services is urgent.
For Robinson, seeing the reality of shelters and refuges as a child and hearing about her grandmother’s experience allowed her to understand the privilege it is to live free from violence and the importance of advocating for change.
“We used to play with the kids in the refuge, and I have these very vivid memories of being around very traumatised children who had escaped a violent home, and I saw firsthand the life changing impact of my grandmother’s work,” she said. “I remember her teaching us about the privilege that it is to live free from violence and seeing the impact on those kids.”
Robinson says that “in her own way” she’s continuing her grandmother’s legacy through her book and her free speech advocacy.
“There are so many ways to contribute to this problem, whether it’s making a donation to the Women’s Community Shelters, whether it’s having difficult cultural conversations with friends and family to push back on [misogynistic] attitudes,” says Robinson.
“We can all take this up in our own way and have a very real impact.”
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