NOT NOW, NOT EVER
In Toowoomba Police Station, Darling Downs District Superintendent Mark Kelly and a nervous Sergeant Louise Aikas, the station’s Domestic Violence Unit co-ordinator, are facing Quentin Bryce in an intimate meeting. She is questioning both officers about the area’s victims of domestic violence (DV) and the implementation of the key recommendations from the Domestic and Family Violence Implementation Council’s Not Now, Not
Ever report, presented by Quentin, the council chair, in 2015. Sergeant Aikas monitors DV reports and, today, there are 18 in the system, she tells Quentin. One breach she says has been dealt with over a 14-day period. “That sounds like a long time to me,” Quentin queries.
This is the work of the council – serious work, not for the faint-hearted. Yet Quentin is passionate, determined to make a difference and find solutions that ensure people don’t just “tick boxes”, but really engage.
Quentin’s taskforce has put together a blueprint for action by government and the community to eliminate domestic violence in Queensland. “The strength of the report is that every one of those recommendations is directed to a person and an office,” she explains. “We are all seeing women who are being killed by partners. Some of these killings are now in public – they’re not just a domestic. It’s decades since we first broke the silence on domestic violence. After all that work, across all that time, all these services, and it’s getting worse. [And] there’s the horrific situation for Indigenous women, where the incidence is 35 times higher.”
So what can we do? “A young woman anaesthetist came to see me to say, ‘I’m in a surgical team in a public hospital, where two days a week we’re putting back together one victim of domestic violence after another and nobody really talks about it.’ I said start with a meeting.”
The power of Quentin’s logic, coupled with her fervent belief in community action, is infectious. One thing’s certain, with Quentin at the helm, we have the best chance to beat this scourge.