Resources

Tasmania requires a new Family and Sexual Violence Action Plan that is both strategically directed towards, and sufficiently resourced to deliver, community-based prevention and response activities that meet the needs of Tasmania’s highly dispersed, largely rural, socially and economically disadvantaged population.

In many ways the draft Strategy achieves its objectives in reflecting critical life domains in which women’s experiences are far from equal – in relation to safety and economic security, for example. In our assessment, however, it falls short of translating these objectives into realisable outcomes for the women we know and work alongside across Tasmanian communities.

Engender Equality calls for an adequate understanding of the role that organisational culture plays in enabling child sexual abuse in institutional settings and proposes that hierarchical allocation of power within bureaucratic systems reduces the opportunities for individual accountability, with the result of diminished transparency. Our submission has been researched and written by Dr Morag MacSween and is informed by over three decades of experience as a service provider, advocacy organisation and strategic partner in the Tasmanian family and sexual violence sectors.

The challenge for this decade is to shift the complacency that tolerates gender-based violence. The insidious belief that violence against women in an unfortunate but inevitable ill must be addressed at every opportunity. Our goal must be to bring to light the everyday behaviours that perpetuate this complacency. Talking about abuse should not create more harm than the abuse itself.

Developed in conjunction with Dr Morag MacSween, our submission to the Royal Commission focuses on the experience of people with disability in relation to violence, abuse, neglect and exploitation caused by family and relationship violence. This intersection is too often invisible in public debate.

Conducted by Dr Morag MacSween, this rapid evidence assessment summarises existing data about family and intimate partner violence against women with disability, concluding that current policy and service responses are overwhelmingly inadequate.

These findings were used to inform Engender Equality's submission to the Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability.

We strongly endorse the development of a legislative framework to uphold children's safety in response to the recommendations of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse – however, to be meaningful, the Bill must include measures that ensure it is applied consistently and transparently by Government and non-Government agencies alike.

Our Annual report summarises the impact of COVID 19 on the experience of family violence in Tasmania.

We know we are not in this alone! Please visit our Stakeholder Engagement Framework to read about our plan to work across the community to eliminate violence against women, non-binary and trans people.

As the Tasmanian community emerges from the severe restrictions of the early pandemic response Engender Equality anticipates complex ongoing impacts for victim-survivors of family, domestic and sexual violence.

In this submission Engender Equality addresses a wide breadth of issues pertinent to our clients’ immediate experiences and our own organisational learnings.

Achieving gender equity is about addressing the inequalities in access to basic human rights. It’s about embracing and welcoming the many experiences, genders and identities that are not properly recognised by our mainstream policies and systems and adjusting our social systems to be authentically inclusive.

This booklet is designed to help you think about love, intimacy and respectful relationships. It is designed to support conversations and encourage a greater awareness of relationship safety.