Bekkie-Rae Curren-Trinca was chased down the street and beaten to death by her abusive boyfriend. Her sister believes she would still be alive had she known her abuser was about to be set free.
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Some women purchase these lifelike therapy dolls, known as “reborn babies” or “reborn dolls”, as a fun hobby. For others, like Patrizia, these dolls are a means of therapy or comfort, whether related to mental health, child loss, miscarriage or loneliness.
It’s been 22 years since Patrizia has seen or heard from her sons. She still grieves the estrangement every day. But the day Patrizia first held a reborn doll in her arms, which weighs the same as a newborn, a nurturing feeling took over her. It was a once-familiar feeling she had missed.
Originally from Western Australia, Patrizia moved to Europe, fell in love and married a local man. Very soon into the relationship he became seriously abusive towards her – physically, sexually and psychologically.
“We had three sons together. By the time I had to leave, their father had brainwashed them. They respected him, not as much me.”
When Patrizia told her sons why she was leaving, they assured her they would stay in contact. She then never heard from them again.
Upon returning to Western Australia, Patrizia was finally free from the abuse. But there was an immeasurable sacrifice that came with escaping – a loss that took a toll on Patrizia’s mental and physical health.
For the past few years, Patrizia has been running a support group called My Therapy Reborn Group, which has just under 1000 members.
[Ed: society is actively encouraging individuals to resort to a fantasy world to escape intolerable reality. Soon we will all be taking soma – ‘a gramme is better than a damn.”]
Source: Reborn dolls and ‘doll mums’. Why women collect them.
Athletes who sustain concussions are usually quickly pulled from play and have teams of medical professionals overseeing their recoveries. Why aren’t victims of domestic violence with brain injuries getting the same care and attention?
Because the evidence is pointing to a massive, pernicious problem. Brain injury in women — and especially domestic violence victims — is disturbingly understudied, with the majority of concussion research focused on young male athletes.
And in Australia, a 2018 study found 40 per cent of family violence victims attending Victorian hospitals over a decade had sustained a brain injury — likely just the tip of the iceberg given how few victims seek medical care. For First Nations women, the statistics are even more startling: Aboriginal women experience head injury due to assault at 69 times the rate of non-Indigenous women and face unique barriers to accessing health services.
Domestic violence victims are particularly vulnerable, experts say, not just because of the sheer number of injuries they sustain — or the fact many also suffer hypoxic brain injury from strangulation — but because concussions affect patients’ ability to think clearly, limiting their ability to defend themselves or escape dangerous situations.
Crusading lawyer Debbie Kilroy from Sisters Inside says it’s “horrific” a woman on bail had to ask a Queensland court to send her back to jail, after she couldn’t find suitable housing.
The housing crisis was laid bare in Toowoomba when 34-year-old mother Debbie Jane Richards asked the Supreme Court last week to revoke her bail and send her to prison as she could not find suitable housing.
Ms Richards had been on bail while the charge of being an accessory after the fact to murder went through the courts.
“Prison has become the default response for homelessness and that’s the reality,” lawyer and Sisters Inside chief executive Debbie Kilroy said.
Professor Dennison said she suspected the issue was greater for women going through the criminal justice system than men.
“About a third of women coming into prison have been homeless in the year prior to going into prison and about a third expect those conditions to continue when they’re released from prison.
“They will also be more likely to have experienced domestic and family violence, have mental health problems and have a whole range … of needs that they need to address when they come back out into the community.”
- Leaders in family and domestic violence prevention have held a “crisis” meeting
- It comes after two women died in recent incidents linked to alleged domestic violence
- There are calls for more action from the state government
Figures from WA Police show an upward trend in violent incidents in households.
The federal government aims to reduce the number of women killed by their intimate partners by 25 per cent each year, under a five-year plan launched by Social Services Minister Amanda Rishworth today.
The government will also establish a national peak body for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander family safety, under what it described as the first dedicated action plan for Indigenous Australians — a three-year plan also released today.
The government has also set a target to increase the understanding of violence against women across the community, saying ending violence means changing community attitudes.
The plan also highlights actions to improve police responses and the justice system to support victim-survivors, and to improve access to housing for women and children facing violence, as well as supporting women to stay in their own homes when they choose to.
The plans say that corporate Australia has a role to play in recognising when customers are experiencing violence, and that specific companies — including financial services, utility providers, social media companies and online dating apps — need to prevent abuse through their products.
Supportive, respectful responses from a consistent team of detectives, legal professionals and support workers are key to ensuring victims don’t have a negative and traumatising experience seeking justice, according to a new report being handed to NSW authorities on Monday.
Source: How do we make the justice system better for victims? This report offers some solutions – ABC News
A neurodegenerative disease attributed to the cumulative harm of repetitive head injuries, CTE has been found posthumously in male boxers, footballers and other contact sports players around the world, including in Australia, where last month it was diagnosed for the first time in a female athlete, former AFL player Heather Anderson.
But the sports brain banks that study CTE collect many more male brains than female ones, which has limited research on the condition in women. And coroners are legally restricted in directing autopsy procedures for the broader community — and aren’t always privy to domestic violence victims’ histories of abuse — meaning screening for CTE, in most cases, isn’t even considered.
“We should be screening for CTE in the brains of everyone who dies unexpectedly, regardless of homicide, suicide, accident, whatever,” said Michael Buckland, head of the Department of Neuropathology at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in Sydney and founder of the Australian Sports Brain Bank.
“We know CTE can start off very insidiously – it can affect judgement, insight, mood; it can also lead to drug and alcohol abuse. So I think … there will be a subset of mostly women that will end up having CTE as a result of domestic violence — I’m as sure as I can be given it has already been reported in the literature.”
In Australia, however, there may be legal and ethical challenges standing in the way. One, in New South Wales, is the Coroner’s Act, which requires that cause of death be determined in the least invasive way possible.
It can also be difficult to gather crucial information without distressing families and, in cases of domestic violence, the next-of-kin who can consent to an autopsy might be the perpetrator.
For the first time in Victoria’s history, the volume of violence and abuse against women by former partners has outweighed that by current partners. Shocking state data reveal that in the year to March ex-partners committed offences at the rate of 82 a day.
Alarmingly, the rate of family violence by former partners has surged by almost 50 per cent in the past five years and now dwarfs violence by current partners who in the past year were responsible for 27,349 acts of family violence.
Fifty-two women and 13 children have been killed by family violence perpetrators in Victoria in the past five years.
Three-quarters of those women were killed by a current or former partner.
It comes as experts say women who flee violent relationships, are finding it harder, sometimes impossible, to fully escape, with easy-to-access technology such as stalking devices, spyware and social media fuelling the dangerous shift.
Assistant Commissioner for Family Violence Lauren Callaway said women were being monitored by covert technology at levels never seen before.
Ms Callaway said family violence was the leading cause of homicides of women.
Of the 52 women killed in Victoria in the past five years, 30 were in a relationship with their killer at the time of death.
Eight were killed after leaving the relationship.
Experts say escaping an abusive relationship can be a time of enormous risk, with the volume of violence committed by vengeful ex-partners reaching a point where they are now considered the state’s primary family violence perpetrators.
There have been many cases in Victoria where a child is killed as the ultimate act of violence toward a partner or ex-partner.
Source: EXTREME ANGER – Herald Sun
A former cop who was jailed for murdering her husband has slammed California’s woke incarceration laws for housing her with a transgender triple murderer accused of harassing female prisoners.
Tomiekia Johnson, who shot her husband Marcus Lemons in February 2009, told DailyMail.com she has been ogled and tormented by several transgender inmates in her years behind bars, including recently by Dana Rivers – a former transgender activist who killed a lesbian couple and their adopted son in a hate crime in 2016.
‘I feel betrayed’, Johnson told DailyMail.com. ‘I was very vocal about not being housed in the same unit (as Rivers) – they did it anyway.’
She claims that since California passed a controversial law in 2021 allowing convicts to choose their prison based on their gender identity, female inmates in Central California Women’s Facility are ‘afraid to speak out’. She said prison officials systemically punish those who question the ‘progressive’ move.
After filing a report about Rivers in June, she claims not only was she fired from her job as an educator in the prison, but that she was directly punished by prison officials who locked her in solitary confinement for eight hours after she made the complaint.
Rivers has reportedly been wreaking havoc in the California prison, which houses over half of the state’s female prison population, after she was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole in June.
At her sentencing, judge Scott Patton said the killings were ‘the most depraved crime I ever handled in the criminal justice system in 33 years’.
Johnson’s crime captured headlines in 2009, when the California Highway Patrol officer shot her husband after the couple went drinking at a TGI Fridays.
Johnson claims she fired by accident after Lemons tried to grab the gun, but her claims of domestic abuse were not enough to avoid a guilty verdict for murder in 2012.
