By Women’s House, Woollongabba

Across Australia, on average, one woman is killed every week by a violent partner or ex-partner.

In Queensland this year, to date, domestic violence has been responsible for 18 deaths.

The most dangerous time for women and children attempting to leave violent partners is at the time of separation; of those women killed, it is usually within three months of their leaving the relationship. Women’s refuges provide a safe space for women and children who need to escape from persistent and dangerous perpetrators.

Women’s refuges in Australia have a proud legacy and wealth of experience and skills in working with women and children who have experienced violence and abuse. Refuge workers have a well developed understanding of the nature and impact of violence against women and children. They understand that women are not to blame for the violence perpetrated against them and that rather, it is part of a much wider systemic problem.

Refuges provide more than just a bed. They provide 24 hour support to vulnerable and isolated women who may be facing harassment and pursuit by controlling ex-partners.

Domestic violence refuges support women to obtain Domestic Violence Protection Orders (DVPO) and address the issue of lack of police response to breaches of DVPOs. They provide advocacy to enable access to housing, healthcare, independent income and relief from debt caused by DV.

Refuges provide assistance to women whose visas make them ineligible for social security support or public housing and assist with immigration issues. They provide advocacy in relation to children with Child Protection authorities’ involvement due to domestic violence, assistance to deal with continuing violence post separation, including the abuse of children on contact visits.

Further, refuges offer assistance to women whose DV experience is compounded by drug and alcohol issues, mental health issues or intellectual/physical disabilities which make it more difficult to establish a life free from violence.

Women’s refuges aim to be responsive to the needs of women whose lives have been affected by domestic violence and therefore will attempt to provide advocacy to access everything needed to build an independent and violence free life.

In addition to advocating on behalf of individuals, women’s refuges have a strong tradition of lobbying and campaigning for law reform and improved institutional responses to domestic violence (e.g. CentreLink, Police, Immigration, Child Safety etc.), as well as providing community education about domestic violence. From their activism and inspiration, other specialist domestic violence services have emerged, laws have been established and lives have been saved.

Women’s House opened the first domestic violence refuge in Queensland in 1974. It has a public office in Woolloongabba and provides services for women who have experienced domestic violence and sexual assault.

Women’s House is outraged at the recent loss of many valuable services for women and children, in particular, domestic violence refuges in New South Wales. Staff at Women’s House believe that women’s refuges in Queensland will be put out to tender next year.

Women’s refuges were put out to tender earlier this year in NSW. This process saw the redirection of funding away from smaller specialist domestic violence refuges to big generic religious charities (which, as the recent Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse has revealed, have an appalling record in relation to survivors of violence).

These organisations are able to submit cheaper tenders by cutting specialised support available to women and children. Over 20 women’s refuges have been defunded. In stripping funding from specialist domestic violence refuges, the NSW government has put the lives of women and children at risk.

Without specialist domestic violence support, women and children are less likely to leave abusive relationships and far more likely to return to abusive relationships, thus compounding the devastating effects that violence has on their lives. Ironically, for a government focused on cutting costs, this will, in the longer term, result in greater costs to statutory services including police, health departments and social services.

For the sake of women and their children who are desperate to break free from abuse, Women’s House urges the Queensland government not to follow the course taken by NSW. It is essential that the Queensland government funds refuges that have a specialised focus on women and children and a diversity of services which meet the variety of needs required by those affected by violence.

Womens House is a cooperative that runs Women’s Shelters in and around Woollongabba in Brisbane’s inner South.

Environment

    

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My New Scientist

Enjoy the pause in global warming while it lasts, because it’s probably the last one we will get this century. Once temperatures start rising again, it looks like they will keep going up without a break for the rest of the century, unless we cut our greenhouse gas emissions.

The slowdown in global warming since 1997 seems to be driven by unusually powerful winds over the Pacific Ocean, which are burying heat in the water. But even if that happens again, or a volcanic eruption spews cooling particles into the air, we are unlikely to see a similar hiatus, according to two independent studies.

Masahiro Watanabe of the University of Tokyo in Japan and his colleagues have found that, over the past three decades, the natural ups and downs in temperature have had less influence on the planet’s overall warmth. In the 1980s, natural variability accounted for almost half of the temperature changes seen. That fell to 38 per cent in the 1990s and just 27 per cent in the 2000s.

Instead, human-induced warming is accounting for more and more of the changes from year to year, says Watanabe. With ever-faster warming, small natural variations have less impact and are unlikely to override the human-induced warming.

“The implication is that we will get fewer hiatus periods, or hiatus periods that last for a shorter period,” says Wenju Cai at the CSIRO in Melbourne, Australia, who wasn’t involved in the work.

Stop it

According to another recent study, the current hiatus may be our last for a while. Matthew England and his colleagues at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, tried to quantify the chance of another pause. “It’s looking to us that it’s probably going to be the last one that we’ll see in the foreseeable future,” says England.

Using 31 climate models, they showed that if emissions keep rising, the chance of a hiatus – a 10-year period with no significant warming – drops to virtually zero after 2030. The current hiatus will probably be followed by rapid warming as the heat trapped in the ocean escapes back into the atmosphere, so we are unlikely to get another decade of no warming before 2030. England believes it could be another century or more before the next hiatus.

But that could change if we slow greenhouse gas emissions now. If we can reach peak global emissions by 2040, the temperature rise will slow by the end of the century, and hiatus periods will become more likely.

Hiatuses can also be triggered by volcanic eruptions that spew particles into the air, reflecting sunlight away from Earth, as happened after the 1991 Mount Pinatubo eruption. But even if a volcano erupts it will make little difference. “After 2030, the rate of global warming is likely to be so fast that even large volcanic eruptions on the scale of Krakatoa are unlikely to drive a hiatus decade,” says team member Nicola Maher.

Journal references: Watanabe: Nature Climate Change, DOI: 10.1038/nclimate2355; Maher: Geophysical Research Letters, DOI: 10.1002/2014GL060527

The Westender has received another quirky media release from the Urban Utilities team tunneling their way underneath Mollison Street, outside the Coles supermarket. Here it is. This week sees our tunnel borer machine spring back into action as we come out of hibernation and recommence our tunnelling from the ‘garden bed’ in front of 26 & 30 Mollison Street towards Monty’s Spare Parts. We also expect new shoots to sprout up from our shopping centre shaft as we expand our budding network and drill our way towards the Boundary Street intersection. Now blossoms, this part is going to be a bit hayfevery as when we have to work in the intersection (possibly as early as this Monday, 8 September 2014) we will have to work at night due to the high traffic volumes in the daytime . It will be unseasonably noisy and we will have to close one lane of Melbourne Street for safety reasons. To help you cope with our new spring growth, we are offering you a free ‘poo-motional’ item (see pic left) to help you with your spring cleaning. Please email me at dylan.olliver@urbanutilities.com.au if you’d like some for your home or office, as this limited spring edition is a ‘collectors’ item. Finally, a huge thank you to you all for your amazing understanding throughout our winter of discontent, we greatly appreciate your ongoing support. Have a blooming marvellous week Yours Springcerely Dylan Olliver Communications Consultant Marketing and Communications