00:00In the suburbs of Hobart, a Christmas Day atrocity in 2021.
00:08Much-loved midwife Rachel Wake stabbed to death by her ex-husband.
00:12She is gone forever, but it will highlight the epidemic of domestic violence against
00:18women.
00:19Darren Wake was this week sentenced to 26 years in jail for her murder, Justice Helen
00:24Wood telling the court that all too often embittered men perpetrate brutal violence
00:30against women.
00:31It is becoming a national emergency and I don't think it's an overstretch to start talking
00:36about family, domestic and sexual violence as acts of terrorism.
00:41This can impact anyone and family violence is not a class-based crime, it's not in certain
00:47elements of the community, it's everywhere.
00:49According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, more than 70,000 women in Tasmania have experienced
00:55violence, emotional abuse or economic abuse at the hands of a partner they've lived with
01:01since the age of 15.
01:03That's almost one in every three women in the state.
01:06There's a very normalised culture of family violence in Tasmania and violence against
01:12women generally.
01:13It's a crisis of people experiencing family violence, but also that there is a huge number
01:18of under-reporting that we wouldn't see in those statistics.
01:22Over the past six years, the number of family violence incidents responded to by Tasmania
01:27police has surged more than 50 per cent.
01:30If people are concerned about family violence, we encourage them to report it, even if it's
01:35just a suspicion.
01:36We now have a dedicated command with different services and different pathways for victim
01:42survivors to access.
01:44To help keep victim survivors safe from harm, family violence support services say there's
01:49an urgent need for increased funding and resources.
01:54Specialist services can do risk assessments, they can do safety planning.
01:58That process of listening to and validating, believing victim survivors is absolutely essential.
02:04We need to make sure, if we are seeing behaviours, that we call them out, that we don't stay
02:10silent and do nothing.
02:12A call for action to deal with an ongoing crisis in the community.
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