The joy that pets bring into our lives is a feeling familiar to many. At the end of that difficult day at work, when nothing seems to go right, returning to our families, our kids and our pets, can be a shining light.
For Monique Dam, chief executive of Lucy’s Project, that shining light is a dog named Putty. “If I’ve had an especially hard day at work, I’ll go to my dog Putty, play with him, cuddle him, and it really grounds me in the reason why we do this work,” she says.
For many people experiencing domestic and family violence, that same bond is precisely why they cannot leave – because the service that might help them won’t take their animal too.
Closing the gap between those two facts is the work of Lucy’s Project, a small national charity founded 13 years ago by Anna Ludvik.
Dam cites research finding that 73 per cent of Australian households live with animals, a figure that is higher still for families with children. And the pet is seldom a side issue: Lucy’s Project points to a 2020 Domestic Violence NSW report in which 86 per cent of frontline domestic violence and community workers reported clients raising concerns about their animals or disclosing that they had been harmed, and 48 per cent said a client had delayed leaving a perpetrator by more than a year for fear the animal would be hurt. “It’s very likely the clients people are working with will have animals as members of their family,” Dam says.
Source: Beyond property: domestic violence, animal cruelty, and the law – Law Society Journal