There’s No Place Like Home Episode Eight: Carly

INTRO: This series comes with a content note for anyone who has been through abuse or knows someone who has. Statistically, that is a lot of us. Some of what you’ll hear in this podcast is distressing. Although we know it’s important to hear directly from victim-survivors about what they’ve been through, this content may be confronting and won’t be suitable for everyone.

Please check the show notes for phone numbers you can contact to receive confidential support.

There’s No Place Like Home is a Future Women podcast supported by our proud partner, Commonwealth Bank; supporting long-term financial independence for victim-survivors through CommBank Next Chapter.

We acknowledge that we produced this series on what always has been, and always will be, Aboriginal land.

CARLY STANLEY: He wasn’t the person that I’d fallen in love with. He wasn’t the person that I wanted to be with. He wasn’t the father of my children. He’s being punished, he’s in jail. That’s not what I want. But it’s the only thing that I have at my disposal at the moment.

TARANG CHAWLA:  My name is Tarang Chawla, and I’m a writer, lawyer and anti-violence advocate. I’m also the host of There’s No Place Like Home, a podcast about family violence that puts the voices of survivors at the centre of the story.

Throughout this series you’ve heard survivors and experts reflect on Australia’s criminal justice system. And for most of them? It’s a system that hasn’t necessarily brought them comfort or satisfaction.

Thea Deakin Greenwood is one expert who thinks we need a different approach.

THEA DEAKIN-GREENWOOD:  So my name is Thea Deakin-Greenwood. I’m a community based lawyer, and founder of Transforming Justice Australia. Part of our view is that, that system only meets some of the survivors needs, and it might not meet many or all of them.

TARANG CHAWLA: Thea sees value in a restorative justice approach that runs parallel to the criminal justice system – an additional option for the victim-survivors who want a chance to engage with their perpetrator. It’s a model that sees violence as more than just breaking the law. Restorative justice focuses less on punishment and more on repairing the harm caused and allowing the victims of a crime to be part of the resolution

THEA DEAKIN-GREENWOOD: Restorative justice is any mechanism that responds to harm and creates a framework for providing a response to harm. The working definition that we use is provided by the United Nations, which sees it as an opportunity for communication between somebody harmed, who might we call the victim or survivor, and the person who’s responsible. So in practice, restorative opportunities are often realised through direct conferencing between the victim and the person responsible.

TARANG CHAWLA: But could its principles be extended even further?

CARLY STANLEY: Instead of restorative justice, we’d like to take it a step further and call it transformative justice. And that is sort of an extra layer on restorative justice. So we still want people to be accountable, we still want harms to be repaired. But we also want to understand what’s driving that behavior that cause people to harm. And we want to be able to put the supports in place so that the harm doesn’t have to keep occurring, everybody can be supported.

TARANG CHAWLA: It’s my privilege to introduce you to Carly. She’s a proud Wiradjuri woman, a survivor of family violence, CEO and co-founder of Deadly Connections.

Deadly Connections is a not-for-profit organisation that breaks the cycle of disadvantage and trauma for First Nations people through transformative justice.

CARLY STANLEY: So the idea is that Deadly Connections was partly because there was nowhere for us to go, there was no way that we felt safe to get the support that we needed with what we were going through. There was nowhere that I could send him, there was no way that I could go. And that’s when we thought we need to build an organization that can provide this support to people

 

TARANG
In her work, Carly taps into wisdom borne of her own lived experience as a domestic abuse survivor. And she does that work alongside the man who once perpetrated violence against her, Keenan Mundine.

Together, Carly and Keenan use their experience and expertise to help other First Nations people transform their lives for the better.

KEENAN MUNDINE: The violence that I’ve seen and perpetrated is something that I’m very uncomfortable with, knowing that I’ve been in such a vulnerable state, and I did those things. And I never thought I was capable of doing those violent acts.

TARANG
Keenan Mundine is a proud Biripi and Wakka Wakka man and the co-founder of Deadly Connections. He’s passionate about helping other men find practical ways to process their trauma and reduce family violence.

Until now, this podcast has not given a voice to people who have perpetrated abuse.

But this episode will be different.

Today we’re going to explore the process of restorative justice, which can only work if both the offender and victim are willing to be involved. In this episode, you’ll hear from Keenan, with Carly’s blessing…

KEENAN MUNDINE: My own childhood was one that I’d rather forget. But what I do remember was, I hate talking about it in this way because I was around family and there were good times, but majority of the time, man it was struggle…struggling.

So there was a lot of like heroin use, there’s a lot of drug dealing around me, there’s a lot of police around me. There was like a hell of a lot of violence, not just like family and domestic violence. There was a lot of violence in the street. Every day, and every night, there was like teenagers fighting. There was cousins fighting. People getting stabbed, people overdosing in my back lane. We couldn’t walk around my community without shoes on because there was dirty syringes and broken alcohol bottles everywhere.

So my mom and dad actually passed away when I was a child. So my mom overdosed and my father committed suicide across the road from my school. And I had two older brothers at that time in my family separated all three siblings and there was no plan in place, psychology counseling, anything about what I’ve been through. You know, even my early years before my mom and dad passed away, I don’t remember much about because my childhood wasn’t a pleasant childhood.

CARLY STANLEY: The time when his mum was alive, he doesn’t remember because those traumatic memories have suppressed all of the positive memories for him. So all he remembers is that stuff, as I’m sure when his mom was alive, and she was providing for him and that he just doesn’t have a recollection of that because of the way that the trauma has overtaken his brain. He’s got photos of himself in his fifth birthday when his mom would have been alive and he had a Ninja Turtle party. That’s one of the positive memories that he has and he’s got photos of it but they’re few and far between because of the significant trauma he’s experienced.

TARANG CHAWLA: Keenan has struggled with substance abuse to cope with the trauma of witnessing domestic violence in his childhood and then being incarcerated, on and off, since he was just 14 years old.

There is never an excuse for abuse. If we want to prevent violence, then we first have to understand the underlying factors that allow violent attitudes to flourish.

Research shows, for example, that high levels of violence observed in Aboriginal communities are driven, in part, by the ongoing impacts of colonisation and intergenerational trauma.

CHRISTINE ROBINSON: There’s not enough weight given to trauma, there’s not enough weight given to cultural experiences and cultural differences. And so a number of our clients may be incarcerated, some will have mental health issues, some will have medical issues as a result of what the violence has created. So there’s not enough priority given to dealing with clients that have really complex needs and understanding the complex needs of Aboriginal people, particularly when you are looking at trauma.

TARANG CHAWLA: That was Christine Robinson. She’s the co-ordinator of the Wirringa Baiya Aboriginal Women’s Legal Centre in Sydney – Australia’s first Aboriginal community controlled legal centre. Christine is a Bundjalong woman who has worked in the family violence sector for more than 25 years.

CHRISTINE ROBINSON: This trauma, as Keenan has mentioned, has not just happened. It’s been a lifelong journey of trauma from a really young, young age. And so it’s been an experience for a lot of people have just been the norm, and having that trauma and how people are able to deal with that.

TARANG CHAWLA: Carly and Keenan met in 2012. Carly wasn’t looking for a relationship, but nonetheless says something about Keenan attracted her. Keenan had just gotten out of prison when they met, and he’d be back in jail, less than two months later.

CARLY STANLEY: He was involved in criminal activity, but he was respected in the community. So I think most people knew that the position that he was in was because of his upbringing. And he wasn’t considered a bad person. He was considered somebody who did what he did to survive. Somebody who was battling addiction but people sort of said, the attack on him wasn’t about his personality. It was about his entrenchment in the criminal justice system.

 

KEENAN MUNDINE: ​​I sort of accepted my life at that time as an Aboriginal man who dropped out of school, who entered the criminal justice system at 14, who has never had a job, who didn’t have a tax file number, who’s never had a resume, who’s never written an email. And I was basically like, “Well, this is my life”, and I just have to deal with it and sort of medicate myself and try not to succumb to my demons.

 

TARANG CHAWLA: Not long after meeting Carly, Keenan entered an intensive drug and alcohol therapy program run from within the prison system. With Carly’s help, he worked hard to get clean. When Keenan was released, the couple moved in together and Carly fell pregnant.

Keenan’s criminal history made it tough to find and keep work. He started to say and do things that made Carly uncomfortable. Carly said his personality changed. What she didn’t realise was that around the time she fell pregnant with their second child Keenan relapsed into using drugs again. That’s when the physical abuse began.

 

CARLY STANLEY: ​​He was just doing things to sabotage the relationship. Part of the reason I hadn’t called the police was that, I felt bad because he worked so hard, we both worked so hard to get him to where he was.

KEENAN MUNDINE: And that’s where, you know, my battle really began because I started resenting the fact that I wasn’t secure and stable enough, but I chose to bring these two kids into the world, and now I’m responsible for them. But I can’t take care of them the way I need to, the system has told me, this is what I need to do to stay out of prison, and I’ve done everything they told me to, but they’ve thrown it back in my face. You know, is jail the only place for me? Will the kids be better off without me?

 

CARLY STANLEY: ​​If I called the police, he’s gonna lose his “working with children” check. DOCS might get involved. The police might come, they might kill him. He’s a black man. He might go to jail, he might die in jail. Like that’s the sort of stuff that Aboriginal women have to think about when reporting domestic violence.

 

TARANG CHAWLA: More than 30 percent of Aboriginal men come before corrective services in their lifetimes.  In 2016, Indigenous Australians made up 27 percent of the national prison population, despite being just 3 percent of the Australian population. They are, quite literally, the most incarcerated people on earth.

 

Christine Robinson says chronically underfunded family violence services can fall short when it comes to meeting culturally specific needs. And that for a man like Keenan, accessing the right supports would have been very difficult. 

CHRISTINE ROBINSON: ​​I do think that programmes in prison need to be a lot better, they need to be culturally appropriate. They need to get people like Keenan and other perpetrators of violence, being the ones that talk to some of the ones developing those programmes and, working with identifying the strengths and the needs of what Aboriginal men need. Because it’s not necessarily up to Aboriginal women or Aboriginal community.

 

TARANG CHAWLA: Eventually, the police did get involved. On Christmas Eve, the couple got into an argument. Keenan wouldn’t come downstairs to see the family on Christmas Day, and when Carly asked him to leave their home, he became violent. That violence escalated again on Boxing Day.

 

CARLY STANLEY: I could hear him slamming the cupboards upstairs and just thought, “On my God, it’s gonna start again”. So I rang my mom, “You need to come over. I’m really scared”. I’ve gone upstairs and he’s just looked at me with that look in his eye again, where his eyes are just black, just absolutely black. And by this stage, he hasn’t left the house for two days either. So I don’t know what’s going on for him. I had a shower, and I took my clothes into the bathroom. I remember I had a towel on my head and I came out. And he looked at me and he just he went for me. He just attacked me. I grabbed kids, I grabbed my bag. I had my phone hidden because I’m worried that he’s gonna smash it. And so I had my phone sort of stashed, and I grabbed my phone, grabbed the keys. As I opened the door, the police were coming in.

TARANG CHAWLA: After receiving panicked messages from her daughter, Carly’s mum had arrived downstairs. She had been listening to the sounds of violence coming from the upstairs bedroom and called the police.  

 

CARLY STANLEY: I was so worried that they were going to put the sirens on. And I was worried that he was going to get hurt. I was worried that if he heard that the police were there, he was going to grab a knife or he was going to do something to try and protect himself, which would make them hurt him, or that they were just going to hurt him because he was a black man with a criminal history.

 

TARANG CHAWLA: Carly’s response is a complex and nuanced one. Despite the harm she experienced at Keenan’s hands, Carly thought about that violence in the context of Keenan’s childhood and intergenerational trauma. Carly demonstrates both remarkable empathy and distance from her own situation. Cases like hers reveal the limits of our judicial system’s response for some victim-survivors, who don’t want their perpetrator to be punished through traditional channels.

 

A restorative justice framework is an opportunity to give those victim-survivors back their autonomy and power.

I’m going to bring in John Braithwaite now. He’s an emeritus professor at the Australian National University where – 27 years ago – he and another colleague established a centre for restorative justice.

PROFESSOR EMERITUS JOHN BRAITHWAITE: We first introduced restorative justice in Canberra, in 1994. And at that time we set up the first randomised control trial in the world for restorative justice.

TARANG CHAWLA: For the first 25 years, gendered crimes were excluded from the ACT’s restorative justice trials and – from 2005 – its restorative justice unit.

PROFESSOR EMERITUS JOHN BRAITHWAITE: The women’s movement in Canberra had a lot of concerns about whether it was appropriate to divert gendered violence cases, be they domestic violence cases or rape cases, away from the criminal justice process.

TARANG CHAWLA: But that changed in 2018. And John says, while more research is needed…

PROFESSOR EMERITUS JOHN BRAITHWAITE: So far, the results are encouraging. It’s only early days, we’ve not done a randomised control trial. It’s just been in cases that are regarded non-randomly as particularly appropriate for restorative justice and not all cases regarded as appropriate. But the outcomes in terms of survivor satisfaction are so far a bit higher for cases that domestic violence and gender violence cases.

TARANG CHAWLA: In fact, from 2018 to 2020, the ACT recorded a 98 percent satisfaction rate, confirming that the process is delivering fair and meaningful outcomes for victims.

In family violence agreement cases there was an 87 percent compliance rate, with offenders proving more likely to stick with an arrangement they’d be involved in creating.

THEA DEAKIN-GREENWOOD: ​​Our approach is based on the idea that survivors know what they need, and that they are experts in their own lives. And however they choose to share their story and whatever mechanism they choose to have their needs met. Our role is to support them and to privilege them and see them as experts for themselves. As a lawyer, for me coming into working in a restorative framework is really just a continuation of working in a trauma responsive way. And recognizing this is the same for many disciplines that recognize our clients and survivors as experts for themselves, and that they have rights for meaningful justice.

TARANG CHAWLA:Restorative justice can include a mediated discussion between the offender and the victim. A professional third party helps to keep the conversation on track and ensure the mediation is a useful exercise.

According to Thea Deakin-Greenwood this process often begins with a victim-survivor trying to understand the practicalities of what preceded the violence. Sort of a, how did it get to this point, line of questioning.

THEA DEAKIN-GREENWOOD: They might have specific questions that they want to ask. So in that way, restorative responses can be looking at the past and looking what happened, so that the survivor has an opportunity to ask those questions and to understand the circumstances, what led up to the harm what might have been happening for the person who’s responsible to explore what the events were, that led that person to be at that point in their life? Sometimes those things are really important for people to understand, and to also understand answers to questions that survivors often have such as, “Why did this happen to me?” And those are legitimate questions, which the criminal legal system often doesn’t provide any useful answers to.

TARANG CHAWLA: A restorative justice response might also interrogate the present. It gives the parties an opportunity to talk about what happens next and how the victim is going to be reassured of their safety moving forward.


THEA DEAKIN-GREENWOOD: Sometimes people need safety and they need support for where they’ve got to at this moment in time now. They might want to ask things of the person responsible or say things to them about the impact of the harm, and where it’s safe to do so, a restorative opportunity can help realise that as well.

In practice, sometimes that means that they don’t want to have a relationship with that person anymore. Or if they do have a relationship with them, it needs to be on certain negotiated terms or set terms by the survivor.

 

And sometimes part of that is also a visibility or an accountability before their family and their community about what happened and acknowledgement about what happened. And a recognition that that person has got needs into the future that needs to be met as well.

 

 

TARANG 

Restorative justice options exist in some form in several Australian states. Outside of the ACT and Victoria, however, restorative justice is only available in very specific situations and not for family violence or sexual assault cases.

 

Through Transforming Justice Australia, Thea Deakin-Greenwood and others are fighting for new funding for specific restorative justice services and standardised training for practitioners.

 

THEA DEAKIN-GREENWOOD: We could work with survivors wherever they at in their, in their journey. And that’s really just a recognition that we don’t have one, we shouldn’t have one response to violence, we should have many, and we should be able to provide survivors with choices, and, and honor and respect their choices, whatever they are.

TARANG 

And Christine Robinson. from Wirringa Baiya, says restorative justice practices also need to be culturally aware and inclusive.

 

CHRISTINE ROBINSON: I must say, a lot of Aboriginal women don’t like to have counselling, they don’t like to do that kind of Western sort of method of working out what the issues are, and talking it through that process. It’s more about like, sometimes it’s..the healing comes from these yarning circles that are really informal, and they’re just talking with your own mob most of the time just about expressing what’s going on for you and talking about it.

 

And I think that all these justice systems need to start looking at that too, because it’s just not the here and now, it’s not just that. It’s looking at the big picture impact of everything and what’s happened and how you can support that person for their process and for their journey.

 

TARANG CHAWLA: Christine is passionate about tempering intergenerational and colonial trauma. She says that can be done by encouraging individual accountability. Christine says it’s about balance. She doesn’t want the interests of survivors forgotten when their perpetrators’ circumstances are complex and traumatic.

CHRISTINE ROBINSON: Some people have been brought up with a lot of violence around them. And that’s all they know. And that’s how they feel like that’s the behaviour that they’ve got to continue with. But they’re also some of the stereotypes, because I also see a lot of Aboriginal men growing up in that space, that don’t perpetuate the violence as well.

 

So I do feel like that there are contributing factors and, and that it does sort of increase probably the potential for that violence. But equally, I must say that I know of many men that have lived in those kind of environments and do not continue to perpetuate violence, just because of the fact they know how damaging it was to them, and how damaging it was, it can be for their children.

TARANG CHAWLA: You may be wondering whether sitting down with a perpetrator would be more upsetting than healing. And Professor Emeritus Braithwaite says that is a risk – especially without adequate preparation and due diligence.

PROFESSOR EMERITUS JOHN BRAITHWAITE:  In any restorative justice case, there is that risk of retraumatization, and that’s particularly acute when it’s any kind of crime of domination or threatened domination. And so we need to tread carefully and learn from the mistakes that we make. That said, overall, what we know is that  survivors who go into restorative justice process are twice as likely to feel safer after the conference than survivors who goes through a court process.

 

TARANG CHAWLA: Carly wasn’t afforded any of the opportunities canvassed by Thea or Christine. Her matter went to court and Keenan ended up back in jail. The police advised Carly to take an AVO out to protect herself. What wasn’t explained to Carly at the time was that this would mean Keenan couldn’t have any contact with his family for at least two years. 

 

CARLY STANLEY: It just became a nightmare, because he wanted to speak to the kids, I wanted him to speak to the kids, I wanted to keep in touch with him to make sure that he was okay. But yeah, I was prevented to because of the orders that have been made.

 

TARANG CHAWLA: Carly felt totally disempowered by the hard and fast rules of our legal system. She says her own desires weren’t respected and there was no trust that she knew what was best for her family.

 

Of course, there are many survivors who don’t want the perpetrator of violence against them to have any access to their children. You have met several survivors who feel this way throughout this podcast.

 

But we need to recognise – and respect – the fact that some survivors feel differently. 

 

CARLY STANLEY: And that was one of the biggest problems that I had with, with my process. He’s being punished, he’s in jail. That’s not what I want. But it’s the only thing that I have at my disposal at the moment.

 

TARANG CHAWLA: There’s another compounding, and disempowering factor here that is specific to First Nations families. The removal of children from an Aboriginal household brings with it an avalanche of intergenerational trauma and distress. 

 

The data paints a worrying picture, too. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children are 6 percent of all Australian children – but 37 percent of all children removed from their families. They are 9.7 times more likely to be living away from their families than non-Indigenous children.

We cannot separate what happens today from what has happened in the past…

 

KEENAN MUNDINE: Through that whole time, she was a single mum, with the two boys doing daycare drop off every morning, there’s an income now that’s been removed from that household. She was fighting behind the scenes to have the DVO order changed, so I could ring my children or she could bring them to visit me. And at every chance the cops would remove her voice and basically render her invisible and silent, that we’re not two consenting adults, and they know what’s best for us.

 

TARANG CHAWLA: Moo Baulch is the Director of Primary Prevention at the Women and Girls Emergency Centre. She also provides strategic advice on financial abuse for CommBank’s Next Chapter program. And she says this sentiment is not unusual, particularly within First Nations communities. 

 

MOO BAULCH: …And it connects to that broader piece around, why would you go to police, because police are just going to take action that I have no control over. It’s really fine line between accountability for your actions. But then also, who else does that impact on? You know, the people around you.

 

The shorter term impacts on people financially and in other senses can be really, really difficult to manage. And of course, there are all sorts of other impacts as well, it might not just be a loss of income, it might be things like, loss of a social housing, property or community housing property, it might be support from family or broader community.

TARANG CHAWLA: Eight months later, Keenan got out of jail and the AVO was overturned at Carly’s request. While Keenan was behind bars, Carly had continued to raise their family alone and run Deadly Connections. 

 

The work of Deadly Connections was, and continues to be, deeply informed by what this couple have been through. 

 

CARLY STANLEY: So we want to be able to have community responses to community matters, basically, because we understand within our community that when police respond first, that’s often really detrimental to the family in the community. And at the moment, the responses that we have for DV all involve disrupting the family. And sometimes that’s not what women want. They want the violence to stop. And most of the times, they still love their partners, but they either need a break, or the partner needs to get help to stop the behavior from happening. So we want to be able to resource the community enough to be able to deal with these things within the community. Rather than having them dealt with by a system, a colonial system that doesn’t understand our needs, doesn’t understand the context of what we need.

 

TARANG 

A few months after our initial interviews, we checked back in with Carly and Keenan. We had some more questions about why and how Carly decided she was ready to reconcile. We also wanted to know if Keenan was apprehensive.

CARLY STANLEY: I needed to see a commitment from him. I was going to be in his life regardless, because he’s the father of my children. And I loved him. But in terms of a reconciliation, I drafted a parenting plan. And within that parenting plan, it had a number of specific requests, that he engage with the psychologist, the way that we settle differences of opinion in our parenting or other things in our lives. It was really a roadmap to keep us all on the same page, and to make sure that we’re clear about our expectations and what we want, what we will tolerate, what we won’t tolerate, and all of those things.

 

TARANG CHAWLA: Here, Carly demonstrated something John Braithwaite calls reintegrative shame. 

 

PROFESSOR EMERITUS JOHN BRAITHWAITE: So what’s the difference between reintegrated shaming and stigmatisation? Stigmatisation is giving the message that you are a bad person, you are an evil person. Reintegrative shaming is giving the message, you are an essentially good person who’s done a very bad thing. You are a good person who’s committed an evil deed. So it’s focusing on the shamefulness of your act, rather than shaming you as a person. And it’s also opening a door to the possibility of you being reintegrated back into the society accepted as a full member of society at the end of the criminal process.

 

TARANG

So… after all this… what is their relationship like now?

 

KEENAN MUNDINE: It’s a lot more, I guess, mature and responsible. A lot more patience, a lot more time for ourselves. Not taking on other people’s *bleep*, while we’ve got our own *bleep* to deal with. Just more took more time for ourselves. I just feel a bit more grounded, bit more a bit more slow.

 

So it’s really growing up and unlearning all of the things that I was exposed to that they’re not, that’s not love. That’s not a relationship, that’s not a positive functioning relationship. That’s not what kids should see. So I have to be in a space and remind myself everyday that even though that was normal to me, it fucked me up.

 

CARLY STANLEY: We didn’t just wake up one day and go, “Oh yeah, we’re getting back together”. It’s sort of happened over a period of time and over a process when he and I both committed to different parts of our healing journeys. Coming from a place that we were both hurting in different ways. And that’s really the foundation of transformative justice.

TARANG CHAWLA: Keenan has done a number of courses to deal with his anger and receives ongoing psychological support, as does Carly. They both know – and accept – that for Keenan, processing his childhood trauma, will be a lifelong journey. And through Deadly Connections they’re committed to helping other people to do the same. 

KEENAN MUNDINE: Most of the background of the referrals that we’re getting, are similar to myself, you know, out of home care, juvenile justice, homelessness, addiction, adult agreement, no structured family support, no pathway to employment, or housing. And they just get paroled back to an aunty’s house and they continue the cycle. So we’re trying to break that cycle and pivot from custodial sentences to be able to treat them and give them the love and care that they need to be able to be a pro-social individual.

 

CARLY STANLEY: We’ve pivoted our services somewhat towards the end of last year, to a more healing focused model. So we have created two healing houses, one for men, one for women, we’ve only got four spots in each. So they’re very, very intimate and intensive. And we provide a level of case management within the houses, but the focus is on healing and therapeutic interventions.

 

KEENAN MUNDINE: ​​One of the biggest questions that I ask the Aboriginal men that come to the group is, “What do you think life would be like, if we didn’t get colonised, and there’s no alcohol in our community? You know, and there’s no drugs in our communities? What would our community look like? What would our families look like? What would our relationships look like?” And from that’s where I get the buy in for them, because they’re like, “Ah, maybe if I do slow down on drinking or smoking weed, you know, I won’t be that person anymore”.

 

TARANG CHAWLA: Carly and Keenan are dedicated to their mission – both for their community, and for themselves.

 

CARLY STANLEY: It’s really making sure that we’re prioritising our self care, and having really firm boundaries with each other, but also with, with family and other people in our lives and making sure that we’re prioritising ourselves and our children.

 

TARANG

In the next episode of There’s No Place Like Home, we will meet Amani Haydar. Amani’s mother Salwa was stabbed to death by Amani’s father in 2015. Amani joins us to celebrate her mother’s life and to explore her own difficult journey to healing.

AMANI HAYDAR: I have a lot of my mum’s things that she passed on to me around the house. I have, you know, clothing, and jewelry and accessories and things like that. And that’s been a really nice way of passing things on to my children, you know, we can play dress ups with some of her old hijabs or we can look at photos or examine some of her little treasures together.

TARANG
See you next time.

OUTRO: There’s No Place Like Home is a Future Women podcast supported by our proud partner, Commonwealth Bank; supporting long-term financial independence for victim-survivors through CommBank Next Chapter.

For help or advice, please check the shownotes for phone numbers for confidential support.

If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate and review. It will help these important stories to reach more people’s ears.

For more information about There’s No Place Like Home, or to join the movement, please head to futurewomen.com.

This episode was produced by Jamila Rizvi, Sally Spicer, Tarang Chawla, Fleur Bitcon, Ella Jackson, Ruby Leahy-Gatfield, India Bailey and Kate Leaver. Editing by Bad Producer Productions. Artwork by Patti Andrews.