Why Rosie Batty deserves 2015 Australian of the Year award
THIS is for the people questioning whether Rosie Batty is a worthy Australian of the Year. Let’s stop judging her, and get on with changing the system.
Opinion
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THIS is for the people who are questioning whether Rosie Batty is truly worthy of being Australian of the Year.
This is for those who think she would have been more worthy of the award if she had managed to “save that innocent boy”.
It’s for the people who think Ms Batty, as much as everyone else, “let Luke down”, as someone on my News with Suse Facebook page said.
Top honour is bittersweet, says Rosie Batty
And it’s for those who are wondering why she didn’t do more before Luke died to campaign publicly about family violence.
For a start, anyone with any knowledge about this case would know Ms Batty did everything in her power to protect herself and her son from Luke’s father Greg Anderson. She could hardly have done more.
She took out numerous intervention orders, she repeatedly went to court, she involved child protection workers and she called the police.
Ms Batty has talked about how hard it was to get police interested in her concerns about her ex, to juggle up to five different agencies, and to navigate complex court procedures.
As she has explained time and again, all the onus was on her personally to keep her and Luke safe. And she was doing this without all the facts.
For instance, the police have admitted there were numerous failures in their systems — eg Mr Anderson had threatened to kill his flatmate a few weeks earlier, but no one told Ms Batty.
Police were also unaware there were outstanding arrest warrants when they visited Mr Anderson to serve the intervention order. If the system had worked properly, he would have been in jail.
Ms Batty was also treading a very fine line in balancing Luke’s desire to have a relationship with his father, and her own need to keep herself and her son safe.
She didn’t think Luke was directly at risk on that day in the cricket field- and nor did the police as they had allowed Mr Anderson to have contact with his son at public sporting events.
In any case, she thought it was her that Mr Anderson would harm, not Luke.
In the end, Ms Batty — often alone and very isolated — made the best decisions she could. I think it’s gutless and cruel for those who are not involved to suggest she could have done more to keep Luke safe.
Presumably, it didn’t ever occur to Ms Batty to speak publicly about family violence before Luke died. She had enough on her plate, for a start. She was flat out just trying to manage and monitor the dangerous movements of Luke’s dad.
She probably knew no one would have listened, and she had too much to lose.
As she’s said a few times now, she is free to speak out now because she has “nothing left to lose”.
Just hours after Luke’s death, Ms Batty started talking, and has barely stopped since. At a time of unimaginable grief she delivered a damning and accurate assessment of, not only her own experience of fatal family violence, but the problems with the system as a whole.
She didn’t blame, she didn’t judge, she didn’t rant. She just told it as she saw it.
It’s this unique perspective that makes her an excellent Australian of the Year. Yes, there are other worthy contenders, such as Braveheart’s Hetty Johnson and London bombing survivor Gill Hicks. But this year it was Rosie Batty who captured out attention and got us all thinking in new ways about an old issue.
Critically, Ms Batty has reminded us that when family violence leads to tragedy, people often blame the woman.
Instead of asking why the man killed or hurt those he was supposed to love, they focus on the victim. They ask: Why didn’t she do more? Why did she stay with a violent man? Why didn’t she just leave? But they don’t ask why the man killed someone.
This is a key point. Rosie didn’t kill Luke by her inaction, his father killed Luke by his actions. Let’s stop judging her, and get on with changing the system so there are no more senseless deaths and violence.
See the discussion at Facebook.com/NewswithSuse
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