Jenan Taylor
8 March 2024
Churches and family violence advocates will be encouraged to discuss the faith sector’s efforts to tackle violence against women at an International Women’s Day event.
Participants at the Faith Communities Preventing Violence Against Women round table will hear about the work various religious communities are doing to address family violence.
Organisers from the PVAW program said the aim was to bring together people from various churches, faith communities and domestic violence sector agencies to discuss what worked.
Program manager Kerryn Lewis said PVAW hoped participants would form connections through which they could share their knowledge, because they needed to make faith settings safe.
Read more: Call for churches to keep stepping up to prevent violence against women
Ms Lewis said the diocese’s program was leading the way in faith settings in Melbourne, after running for more than a decade.
She said the diocese wanted to share and build on its knowledge with other actors, and hear their expertise too.
“We need to bring all this together in a conversation, and we need their help. We can build capacity. We can share our resources and our learnings and support and encourage each other. It is important we work together, and it is important we get this information to more churches and other faith groups so we can make our churches safer,” Ms Lewis said.
She said churches could contribute to wider PVAW discourse because they were uniquely positioned to prevent it, as well as respond to and heal its effects.
It was their Christian mandate to get on board and contribute to the wider conversation and body of work, Ms Lewis said.
Read more: ‘Hidden and invisible’ family violence victims remembered at walk
Roundtable speaker Melbourne University public health expert Professor Cathy Vaughan said she planned to highlight the challenges faith leaders faced, and their best practise strategies for preventing and responding to family violence.
She will also discuss the good work being done by the Salvation Army, and in complex settings such as in the Buddhist community, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Professor Vaughan will present her PVAW program evaluation findings.
Ms Lewis said a presentation from Forman Christian College Lahore political science expert Ayra Indrias Patras would deepen participants’ understanding about diverse responses to PVAW.
She said Professor Indrias Patras would describe how the church in Pakistan was tackling it.
Ms Lewis said participants would also hear about the work the PVAW program was doing among CALD communities in the Melbourne Church.
She said they were part of the diocese’s efforts to focus on better meeting the needs of its multicultural members.
Ms Lewis said the roundtable would give participants plenty of time to discuss the presentations, and she hoped they would leave with a willingness to work together.
The round table will include insights from an evaluation of the Melbourne diocese Preventing Violence Against Women program.
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