Emeritus Professor Thea Brown has been appointed a Member of the Order of Australia for her significant work in social welfare, particularly through family violence and child protection research. She's led two of the country's most comprehensive studies into 'filicide', and says she wishes more people knew about the issue.
Category
đź“ş
TVTranscript
00:00I had been doing a lot of research relating to parental separation and the family court,
00:08and I had noticed that they were categorising children as being abused, who in my opinion
00:14weren't being abused. Actually, their parents, in my opinion, were trying to murder them.
00:20And in one case, the father was charged with attempted murder. And I thought, I had not
00:27really understood this was a possibility for a child, that they would be so badly treated
00:32that this could happen. So we began looking at filicide in Victoria and found that, to
00:39our great surprise, there was very little known about it. And so we set up a big study
00:47beginning with Victoria and then went on to a national study, and we found that on average
00:52one child dies around every fortnight at the hands of one or other of their parents
00:58or step-parents. So having established that, we went on to do a lot of research looking
01:04at who were the perpetrators, why did this happen, what were the causes that led to it,
01:11and we have just finished a big study, again on Victoria, looking at the notion of what
01:18you might call red flag risks, showing the kind of factors that you could call risks
01:25and showing that the risks are constellations of risks. There's not just one risk. It's
01:31got to be a number of things happening at the one time that leads to or triggers the
01:37filicide.