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  • 2 years ago
The grief of losing a child is difficult to fathom, and even harder to understand is the horror of children being killed by their parents. But on average, a family goes through trauma like this almost every fortnight in Australia. It's called filicide. Australia's national research organisation for women's safety has worked with the Australian Domestic and Family Violence Death Review Network on new research out today.

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00:00The numbers in this report are heartbreaking. Between 2010 and 2018, 106 children were violently
00:07killed by a parent following some kind of domestic, family or sexual violence. Almost
00:12half of them were less than just two years old. ANRO CEO Dr Tessa Boyd-Cain says each
00:17of these numbers represent a family's grief and loss.
00:19A shocking indictment of the impact of domestic and family violence on children. And it really
00:25reinforces what advocates have long been arguing, which is that children are not secondary
00:30victims in domestic and family violence contexts. What we see in this report is that they are
00:36at real risk. And in the report that we've released, at risk of death as well as of family
00:42violence. Experts say this landmark study shows how
00:45important it is for children to be considered as victims at risk of family violence in their
00:49own right. And ANRO wants the research to serve as a wake-up call to those having the
00:53most contact with children and their parents. It's a real wake-up call for health, childcare,
01:00schooling and other practitioners to be able to understand and recognise the impact of
01:05family violence in children's lives and to know what to do about it. That includes education
01:10about the range of factors that shape family violence. It includes understanding pathways
01:15to services and to other help. It includes being able to talk to children and to families,
01:21particularly to mothers, about whether they're safe at home and how they can be helped.
01:25Researchers hope that their work analysing which children are most at risk can help bring
01:29those numbers down.
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