The fight to abolish domestic violence
With concerns family violence will spike in the wake of COVID-19, the CEO of Women’s Community Shelters, Annabelle Daniel, takes us inside her mission to build an Australia free from domestic violence.
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Stuck at home and feeling bored? As Annabelle Daniel sees it, that’s actually a blessing. Because as CEO of the charity and non-profit organisation Women’s Community Shelters (WCS), she knows all too well that for many women and children, home is not a place they should be at all.
Across the shelters that WCS operates, approximately three-quarters of those seeking refuge inside are there owing to domestic and family violence.
During disasters and particularly at times like this, when people are being forced to stay inside due to the COVID-19 pandemic, that rate climbs.
But Daniel remains undaunted. “This may be an odd response,” she tells Stellar, “but it doesn’t scare me, because I know it’s happening. What it does do is [make me] think about how I respond. Feeling helpless is not my preferred space to be.”
Daniel has always been a doer and, as a girl growing up in Sydney, her idol was Luke Skywalker.
“I wanted to be the one with the lightsabre, who was fighting for justice and the right thing,” says the 49-year-old, who reveals when she saw female characters taking pride of place as the heroes in the more recent instalments of Star Wars, she ended up sobbing in the loo at the cinema. But like her screen hero, the path Daniel took to fulfil her destiny has been anything but straightforward.
Inspired by a close friend, she started her career with a coveted role as a lawyer at a big commercial law firm. But it wasn’t the dream job she’d hoped for. “I quickly realised the clients’ strict instructions and money was more important than anything else.”
So she quit, and went to work for a car dealership to make ends meet. At the same time, she became a stepmother to her then-partner’s daughters and started noticing the pull to work more closely with children and families.
Feeling a strong urge to change course, Daniel spun her wheels at the car dealership as she tried to map out what would come next. “I sort of spent a couple of years in the wilderness,” she explains.
She would eventually join the Australian Federal Government’s child support agency, where she began to climb the corporate ladder. It was her time on the welfare frontline in 2011, as shelter manager at Elsie Women’s Refuge (one of the oldest of its kind in Australia), that proved a real turning point.
“When I stepped into that job, I knew it was absolutely the work I was meant to do,” she says. “It was everything I had learnt. It was the combination of understanding those legal systems, the departments and agencies and how they intersect... but more importantly, how women and children can be right at the centre of multiple and intersecting disadvantages.”
With the need for crisis accommodation overwhelming, and the shelter only able to house up to six women and their families, it was up to Daniel to decide who was let in.
“We’d often get three equally desperate requests for a bed and you had to make the most difficult choice in the world: to decide who was most at risk,” she explains.
One particularly poignant day found her forced to choose between protecting a young Indigenous mother who was being held at the police station after being discharged from emergency, a woman who’d given birth to premature twins, and another mother with teenage children who was living out of her car.
Rather than collapse under the weight of the situation, Daniel allowed it to motivate her. “I was like, ‘We’ve got to fix this! This is ridiculous,’” she says. “Having to make that choice is not something that should happen in modern Australia. It was really that initial experience that enlivened in me this intense desire to provide more crisis accommodation to women and kids.”
And so she joined and now heads WCS, which does exactly that across the seven facilities it operates throughout New South Wales. Her high school friend Jackie Charles, who inspired Daniel to become a lawyer, tells Stellar she’s now the one being inspired.
“We always knew Annabelle would do something exceptional; we just didn’t know what,” she says. “Her work isn’t without cost, and it’s hard at times, but what a contribution she’s making to the world.”
Thanks to advocates such as Rosie Batty, Daniel believes society is making positive inroads when it comes to addressing domestic violence. “I’m an optimist on this,” she says. “When I first started, it was incredibly rare to see any articles in the newspaper that actually called out domestic and family violence. Now we see it almost every day.”
This was tragically highlighted in February, when Brisbane mum Hannah Clarke and her three children were murdered by her estranged husband. As Daniel points out, “The stories quickly shifted away from him and towards her. And that’s our biggest challenge.
“We have to change the view that women and children are accessories in men’s lives. [Hannah] had a story of her own, dreams of her own, hopes of her own, and was looking forward to a life on her own before somebody took that from her. Her life was not his to take.”
Another encouraging sign for Daniel is how quickly the issue of a likely increase in family violence incidents was raised in relation to COVID-19.
“We’ve seen a spike in calls. And these women don’t necessarily want to access the shelter right this minute, but really need to know the option is there... because the restrictions to stay at home can make it difficult for somebody to get away at the moment.”
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While the global pandemic also affects Daniel’s work on a financial level, she won’t be discouraged and says every spare dollar or tinned good that can be spared will gladly be taken by her shelters.
“Small donations make a difference,” she says. “Twenty dollars provides a woman with a phone card that enables her to make appointments to see rental properties, or with Centrelink or go to the doctor. All of those little things are incredibly important.”
If work is demanding, seeing a counsellor and indulging in frivolous activities such as Pokémon Go keep her balanced, while being a single parent to her two daughters Romilly, 13, and Willow, 11, keeps her motivated.
“What I see myself doing is actually building, with many others, the Australia that I want them to live in, an Australia that is free of domestic and family violence and where respect for women is one of our core values,” she says, adding that she remains close to her former stepdaughters.
And in light of what she has seen and heard in her career, she considers her biggest goal is ensuring that her children learn to be independent. “Being in charge of the decision-making, being financially independent, having a career from which you derive joy, or at least outside interests which give you meaning, is the ultimate thing for me,” she explains.
After all, meaning is what she has found in her own work. It’s why, no matter how big the hurdle, she’ll keep fighting (with her imaginary lightsabre) to protect the lives of women and children.
“At the end of every day, I put my head on the pillow and I think about the fact that there are 100 women sleeping safe tonight because of the work that I do with my organisation,” she says. “No matter what else has happened, that’s a truth.”