UNPRECEDENTED numbers of women are seeking legal aid to escape family violence, the Peninsula Community Legal Centre says.
The number of arrests for family incidents rose by more than 17 per cent in the Frankston municipality last year. The Peninsula Community Legal Centre, which offers free legal services in Frankston and on the Mornington Peninsula, says there has been a “dramatic increase” in the number of women seeking legal help on family law matters.
Around 60 per cent of the legal centre’s clients have experienced family violence. PCLC CEO Jackie Galloway said “the alarming spike in the number of women being killed around the country has led to a national conversation about family and gender-based violence. This has brought into sharp focus the intersecting nature of the national family violence, housing and cost of living crises.”
The free legal centre recently helped a woman who came to Victoria to escape violence keep her children by working with lawyers interstate. “PCLC’s family law team recently assisted a woman and her two young daughters who fled across the country to live with the women’s parents in Victoria,” Galloway said. “The perpetrator made a court application for the children to be returned to him, despite his long history of family violence and the fact that the eldest daughter was not his biological child. This led to extremely complex legal proceedings in different states. PCLC’s family lawyer worked with a community legal centre in the other state to successfully have the violent ex-partner’s application quashed, and also initiated family law proceedings for the mother to keep her children and remain safely in Victoria”.
Galloway said there are tens of thousands of women in similar situations who seek legal help every year. She said that without more funding, free legal centres will not be able to keep up with the number of women needing assistance. “Due to limited funding, the number of women who receive help from community legal centres like PCLC and legal aid services is a tiny fraction of those who need it. We need a massive injection of funding and longer-term funding agreements. The government response to family violence needs to build on the knowledge acquired over several decades of experience and provide reliable and adequate funding to all of the intersecting front-line services that assist victim-survivors,” Galloway said.
To contact the PCLC call 9783 3600 or email pclc@pclc.org.au.
First published in the Frankston Times – 4th June 2024