Labor MP Emma Husar has delivered an emotional speech in Parliament detailing her personal experiences with domestic violence, noting that for too many years she’s been embarrassed and ashamed when she should not have been.
Speaking in the lead up to White Ribbon Day tomorrow, she said she was discussing the “darkest corner of her life” to help advocate for change.
Husar said 29 of her 36 years have been marred by domestic violence, including her first 13 years when domestic violence was frequently committed towards her mother at the hands of her drunk and abusive father – a son of a World War 2 German soldier who had also committed acts of violence against his wife and seven children.
“My father had been raised in a home where violence was the accepted norm at a time when society said these things were private matters,” she said.
“Whilst the blows that landed on my mother during my childhood did not land on me physically, they might as well have. The trauma inflicted was the same. I recall it vividly – and in great detail. Each episode of this violence over my first 13 years was different, but the aftermath was always the same: dad would apologise and promise to be different, and that would work for just a short time.”
She recalled how her mother would put her and her sister in the family car to escape, noting they would go to various refuges in their community until after so many incidents, her father simply knew all the locations available to them and they were no longer safe.
“We then shifted to staying in hotels, which were located above pubs, where the people below were loud, and sometimes their noise would spill into the streets, waking me and reminding me that I was not in my own bed or in my own home. I was in a foreign place because I was not safe in my home.”
She recalled one evening when her mother attempted to leave, only to find her husband had tampered with their car. The police came, and Husar spent the evening in Penrith police station.
“The police did their best. Again, after this event, my mum returned home.”
She said too many women have to return home over and over again, even when their lives are so massively disrupted. She said she hopes the blame her mother received during the 1990s for not “leaving” stops being directed at other women.
“Eventually the courage rises up, services step up and women stand up, finally leaving, but not before one last terrible incident,” she said.
“There were 13 police cars the last time physical violence affected my childhood. But this was the end of the physical violence once and for all. Whilst the physical part ceased, other abuse around finance and control ramped right up.
Husar finished by thanking Opposition Leader Bill Shorten for his support of her personal situation, as well as the Penrith Women’s Health Centre which has been providing services to the community for 30 years, including to her mother and to her own family now.
