The Australian’s Australian of the Year: Nina Funnell giving a voice for others to tell their stories

Sex abuse survivor advocate Nina Funnell has fought long and hard for justice and reform.

Nina Funnell. Picture: Richard Dobson

Sex abuse survivor advocate Nina Funnell has fought long and hard for justice and reform, starting nearly 15 years ago after she was assaulted.

Ms Funnell said one in five Australian women would experience sexual violence from the age of 15, but the nation was moving in the right direction.

“It wasn’t that long ago in this country that rape within marriage was not a crime,” she said.

Most recently she worked on the #LetHerSpeak campaign with News Corp that saw 18 victims and their families win the right to tell their stories, the most prominent being current Australian of the Year, Grace Tame.

Behind Ms Tame and the ­others are decades of hard work by advocates such as Ms Funnell, years of research by academics and the bravery of generations of survivors who told their stories before the world was ready to listen.

“As a society, when we put all the onus and responsibility on a couple of survivors’ shoulders to come up with all the answers we’re doing those survivors a disservice and we’re placing far too much pressure on them,” she said.

“If we genuinely want reform on sexual assault in this country, we need to draw on the knowledge of survivors combined with the work of experts in the sexual assault sector and get all those groups pulling in the same direction.”

For her work to give survivors of abuse a voice, Ms Funnell has been nominated for The Australian’s Australian of the Year.

Ms Funnell spent most of last year in hospital after being diagnosed with an auto-immune illness. She also gave birth to a boy, now 10 months old.

Her next campaign will focus on reforming Australia’s defamation laws, which have stopped survivors from telling their stories or dragged the ones that did into court. The campaign has already raised about a quarter of a million dollars to help fund legal costs but Ms Funnell said the laws themselves needed to change to ensure survivors could tell their stories without fear.

“There’s a whole number of reasons why Australia’s #MeToo movement really failed to launch properly but defamation law was one of them,” she said.

Readers are encouraged to submit a nomination for The Australian’s Australian of the Year. Prominent Australians can be nominated by filling out the form above, or emailing to [e-mail]. Nominations close on Friday, January 21.