Page 2150 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 2 August 2016
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As well as supporting the Family Violence Bill, I support the Personal Violence Bill. It remakes the Domestic Violence Protection Orders Act to provide a scheme for personal violence and workplace violence orders. This act is repealed by the Family Violence Bill. Personal violence and workplace violence orders relate to a perpetrator other than a family member. The Personal Violence Bill also updates terminology and processes to ensure consistency with the changes made through the Family Violence Bill. I am pleased to support both of these bills and the many ways that they seek to address family and other violence in our community.
MS BERRY (Ginninderra—Minister for Housing, Community Services and Social Inclusion, Minister for Multicultural and Youth Affairs, Minister for Sport and Recreation and Minister for Women) (4.50): The Family Violence Bill 2016 and the Personal Violence Bill 2016 confirm the ACT government’s commitment to a safe and violence-free community in the ACT. There is nothing simple about domestic and family violence. The intertwined nature of people’s lives is what gives rise to situations where controlling behaviours are possible.
Among many reforms, the Family Violence Bill recognises and responds to the complexity of contemporary family and living arrangements. The Personal Violence Bill provides legally enforceable mechanisms to facilitate the safety and protection of people who fear or experience personal violence other than family violence. Together the two bills provide an important legal framework for protecting people who fear or experience violence in their homes, in their workplaces or in the community.
While the reforms set out in these bills aim to protect all victims of violence, they recognise that people with disabilities, particularly women with disabilities, are significantly more likely to experience violence, including domestic and family violence, than people without disabilities. People with disabilities experience violence in a variety of settings, including the family home, group homes, nursing homes, hospitals and other care and support settings.
These bills expand the definition of family to capture a range of contemporary living arrangements and allow for extended personal violence orders in circumstances where a family relationship is not established. This is designed to ensure that the family and personal violence order systems are able to respond to relationships of power and control that create the potential for violence in modern family settings and living arrangements.
The voices of women with disabilities affected by violence are both too rarely heard in our community and too often heard by the people that they report to. Women With Disabilities Australia have collected stories from their clients who were affected by violence. In one of those stories a young woman named Rebecca says:
I believe the big difference for a woman with a disability experiencing domestic violence is that people just do not believe you. They still have this underlying assumption that the able bodied partner is wonderful taking on a person with a disability. In my case it fed his ego. I was astounded by people who did not believe my fear when I eventually told them. They believed I was overacting. I remember the disbelief of some of my neighbours and one saying, “He would not do that. He has done so much for you for so many years.”
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