Our average day could be anything. We could be locking down our office because a man has gone and kidnaped one of our women and they're driving around the city streets.
Colleena Morgan Wyman is the CEO of Elizabeth Morgan House, a refuge for First Nations women escaping violence.
We could be having three to four crisis situations which we have to respond to, or we could be holding a safe space for women to come over to our Winna's hub. It's a four unit high secure refuge bill fourteen years ago and we have one crisis accommodation property. We could be fighting for children not to be removed from their parents. We could be going into lockdown because a lady has been placed into the hospital and her man has found out that we're supporting them.
Aboriginal on Tyro straightlder women are thirty three times more likely to be victims of domestic violence and eight times more likely to be killed by their partner. And these sorry statistics don't seem like litting up anytime soon. Just last week, a twenty four year old pregnant Aboriginal woman was shot and killed by her ex partner in regional
New South Wales. Family violence and Aboriginal communities is a national crisis, often made worse by the systems they seek help from, and people within those systems that often misidentify the victim as the perpetrator.
Most of the time, what creates even more psychological trauma and stress to the women is the fact that they never ever know or informed about what is their journey through these services, what they can expect, and also where they can have the choice to have agency and make their own choices.
Colleena's work is focused on changing that, on helping women get their agency back as they navigate the most difficult times in their lives. Her work is relentless and goes unheralded, but without people like her, things would be so much
worse for women and families fleeing domestic violence. I'm Daniel James, and you're listening to seven AM today CEO of Elizabeth Morgan House Colleena Morgan Wyman on the issues confronting our most vulnerable, the tenuous funding environment for services like hers, and where the governments of all Persuasians are serious about addressing the family violence epidemic. It's Monday, January twenty sixth Colleena,
thanks for speaking with me. By the time a woman comes into contact with your organization, how would you describe what they've been going through?
They're escaping, they're actually escaping family violence, and they're sitting in parks or day long waiting for response to go into motil crisis accommodation. They may not have any money, they may not have phones. And we're the only statewide aboriginal service that is funded to give crisis accommodation program. It is a pilot program which is funded from the
federal government. And Elizabeth Morgan House applied for this funding and the pilot program because there was evidence and there was women's experiences of further being damage going into the motel crisis accommodation.
What as to the complexity of the cases of the people that you've seen, in particular Colenda and Elizabeth Morgan, Why are they deemed on the whole more complex.
Because there's a whole range of issues that you have to be able to address before you get to family violence. Victim survivors are perpetrators, perpetrators are victim survivors, and family violence is becoming very complex. We've got AOD, we've got mental health, we've got homelessness. Any woman that has not been able to find safety or security when she's been in high levels of psychological distress are a lot harder
to work with. We get handbled, very hard cases for women who may because when they're stressed, because when they're triggered, may actually choose to act in violence themselves. They might actually choose to damage property around them because they don't know any other way how to regulate their nervous system. The more damaged done to a woman's nervous system, it means the harder and more complex it is, because psychological trauma is just devastating.
Why did you get into this type of work in the first place, Cleana, It's a legacy.
Elizabeth Morgan is my grandmother. And what you'll find is, if you know anything about the history in Victoria of the establishment of our Aboriginal organizations, is it all come from one place, the Aborigine Needs Advancement League. And that's when it was recognize that we needed to create our own services, to create cultural safe space for our people to get taken care of. And so we walk in
the footsteps of giants. My nan Elizabeth Morgan was one of the longest serving directors in the Aborigines Advancement League. The formation of Elizabeth Morgan House wasn't just under ego we have an obligation to care for our women.
Does the work ever let up clean? I mean, is it tough for you personally and a team personally to deal with that kind of trauma day in day out?
It is really really hard. But what we do have to work a lot towards is being able to separate what is our personal trauma that we bring because every single Aboriginal woman has intergenerational trauma. We stand behind the work that we do. I think every other single organization in Victoria and Australia does. Who is a specialist Aboriginal
women's family violence service? I think the most frustrating, traumatizing element of it that occurs with our workforce is the fact that when we identify that our states and our systems are the one letting our women down and they're failing.
Us coming up the disconnect between announcements and outcomes.
Violence against women is indeed a national crisis. We know that when on average, once every four days, a woman is murdered by someone they know, by an intimate partner or format partner, that is a national crisis.
It's a scourgeon, it's a stain clina. We've seen successive governments try to address this issue, but at least fifty two women were violently killed last year according to the Counting Dead Women Australia Register. So what is going wrong? What is the government failing to do and what are we failing to do as a community to address this scourge.
I think we have to look at the broader social issues that are occurring and really start calling things out. I know that there's a lot of focus on extremism these days and the government is very quick to jump to that, but what they're not comfortable doing is being able to identify and say straight out the extremeism of misogyny and gendered violence. Society value of women or Aboriginal women is very live.
Well, it's a beautiful morning here on Gary's Eastern Beach, but it's a day marked by real grief and tragedy for the small, tight knit community here on the islands, but also.
Most recently, the young lady who died on Gary Island yesterday afternoon.
A floral tribute had been placed by loved ones of Piper on a sand dune overlooking the Struture Beach where her body was found.
Around Do you know what was in all the comments? The comments were all about it's Fraser Island. It's Fraser Island. I believe where Australia is desensitized to the fact that children, families, communities have lost a woman and our society does not see it as a crisis. How are we addressing that? How are we addressing the value of lives of women?
Where's the government falling short? Do you think they're fully committed to changing attitudes and ending the violence?
I don't believe that government is one thousand percent committed to ending violence. The amount of ministers that have churned through the portfolio of family violence, they could last six months, they can last one year, they can last two years. We might meet them and we might brief them and they might come across what they have to do as a minister to address family violence. There is no one minister that has the ability to really commit themselves to
what ending family violence is. That is the biggest problem. Furthermore, states aren't getting down and doing the dirty work. We recently found out that Victoria put in a bit to host what they call the Women Deliver Conference. Women Deliver is an international brand, it's an international organization in America. Whatever country is hosting that conference will make an announcement
about their investment into gender equity. Yet Victoria does not have a plan for gender equity and justice for Aboriginal women. We can spare millions and millions of dollars on the treaty process, We can spare millions of dollars on hosting a Women Deliver conference, Yet Victoria or Australia has not come to any Aboriginal group women's to say this is the announcement that we're going to make at the Women Deliver Conference. This is the investment that we're going to
make for grassroots gender equity. But it's about time that the state starts naming and defining state violence and systems violence, because that is the biggest impact to our women and communities.
Can you elaborate on that a little bit cleaner?
For example, what we can say is they've recently rolled back the bar law reforms in Victoria. They were first made as Pockham's Law and our women felt safe with these laws. It's moved by the Victorian government is an explicit decision to criminalize and.
Cage Aboriginal people.
We are already the most incarcerated.
Now they've rolled them back and more women are sitting in there with their bowl tests. We've got high rates of misidentification. There's more women sitting in jail, and ninety percent of them or victims to family violence. Misidentification happens because police officers aren't able to differentiate between the perpetrator or the victim survivor, and they apply this reasonable person's test, So police officers are trained for what would a colleague
in this situation do as a reasonable response. Any person that is found to be emotionally unstable in hysterics are often painted as the person who is the perpetrator, while mostly the perpetrator is a narcissist and they have the ability to manipulate and to psychologically present themselves in a way where they're calm and they're a reasonable person. And we have got so many case studies of women's lives being torn apart because of misidentification.
And so much The funding for your program Cleaner is pilot funding. What happens to the women your supporting when that pilot funding runs out?
Well, we have one pilot program that's through the federal government, which was our pilot crisis accommodation program. When we get to June thirty, we don't have the crisis Accommodation program anymore. We don't have our intake program anymore. The majority of our ferals comes from the Aboriginal Housing entry point for homelessness, but those organizations that run that program do not have any housing or crisis accommodation within their stock or assets.
We get all the phone calls from that housing entry point. We are the first porter core. So we're holding up the homelessness element of crisis accommodation in Victoria. So it's going to end up that those organizations where the housing point is, they will have no program or no crisis accommodation to refer to. And they are at the times when women are at their most crucial. Our women are homeless,
Our women have no homes to escape to. It's actually at a point in having them leave and not return to family violence, and it's the crucial parts of where the most harm will be done.
And finally, Klena, with all of that in mind, and with the experience both of yourself and of your family and the people that have been involved in Elizabeth Morgan House throughout the generations. Are things getting better or worse?
They're actually getting worse. What we actually see is that the increase of damage to our women's nervous system from trauma makes it so much harder to recover and to lead their whole life of journey. The state government has not increased their funding or changed their policy model to go isn't just about crisis funding. This is about getting to recovery and then what does healing mean? And there's
a whole continuum that goes along that line. And being funded for seventy one one on one canceling sessions in a whole financial year for how many women we know have intergenerational trauma, have trauma from violence, have trauma from parenting. How are we supposed to support our women to live life to the fullest, to live life free from violence if state governments and federal governments aren't going to invest in recovery and in healing.
Glena, thank you so much for your time. If this has raised issues for you or someone you know, please call the National Sexual Assault, Family and Domestic Violence Counseling Line on one eight hundred seven three seven seven three who also in the news. Greg Moriarty will be the next Ambassador to the United States, replacing outgoing Ambassador Kevin Rudd.
Moriarty has served as Defense Secretary for nearly a decade, was chief of staff to Malcolm Turbul when he was Prime Minister, and has served as ambassador to Indonesia and Iran. He is the first non political appointee in more than fifteen years. An immigration and Customs enforcement agents have shot and killed a thirty seven year old intensive care nurse in Minneapolis, sparking a further round of protests in the city.
Federal agents have attempted to betray the man they killed as a domestic terrorist who wanted to kill law enforcement, but the man, Alex Jeffrey Pretty, was described by the Minneapolis police chief as a US citizen with no criminal record. The New York Times has reviewed videos of the arrest that show he was at armed, despite claims from Ice that he pulled a weapon on them. We're planning a full report on the situation in Minneapolis and the broader
Ice cracked down for later this week. I'm Daniel James. This is seven AM. Thanks for listening.