Forster a hotspot but no funding

Story must be told 

Court worker speaks out 

THE need for Tuncurry and Forster to have its own shelter for people escaping domestic violence was summed up in its statistics, Women’s Community Shelters (WCS) CEO Annabelle Daniel told a community meeting at Club Forster on Thursday. 

The Bureau of Crime Statistics shows the NSW average for incidents of domestic violence is 398 per 100,000 people. But not in the Great Lakes. Forster’s average is 598 per 100,000. 

When people try to flee from violence, the options are limited: leave town for shelters elsewhere or live in crisis accommodation, sometimes in a hotel.

Ms Daniel attended the meeting to put forward a model for a shelter that could be built in the Great Lakes. The Sydney-based organisation has set up two shelters to provide crisis accommodation for women in the Manly and Hornsby Kuring-gai areas and is keen to set up more in rural NSW. 

Ms Daniel said the shelter would focus on connecting and working with local support services and all levels of government, but would not depend on government funding for its launch. 

The WCS aims to provide seed funding for communities to launch their own services, which would be able to be tailored to the Great Lakes’ most urgent needs.

In Manly and Hornsby, the need was for single women to have a refuge, but Ms Daniel said it could be found that other needs are greater in the Great Lakes. 

In addition to seed funding, the organisation would be able to provide intellectual property, including policies, paperwork and computer systems to streamline the set-up process. 

Substantial funds would need to be raised for the shelter to be launched and run. The start-up cost would be about $40,000 (to outfit a rental home as a shelter), with running costs (based on the other two centres) between $350,000 and $400,000 a year for a 10-bed facility. WCS would share in the start-up and running costs, aiming to reduce its input as it became established. 

“My belief is, once we get it running and demonstrate its need, there would be one powerful argument to go to governments and say, you need to support this,” Ms Daniel said. 

ISSUES of security and anonymity would need to be addressed in setting up a refuge for domestic violence victims in the Great Lakes. 

While shelters in large centres like Sydney were able to be anonymous, members of the community at Thursday’s meeting were quick to point out that secrets were difficult to keep in rural towns. 

Women’s Community Shelters (WCS) CEO Annabelle Daniel said, while a shelter would be equipped with all the appropriate physical security measures on doors and windows, there would also need to be a strong relationship with the local police. 

Ms Daniels said engaging early with the police would be vital, to ensure the refuge became part of the police’s regular rounds. 

“There would need to be an arrangement, that if a call came from the shelter, the police would know it was serious,” she said.