Women’s Health West says more funding is needed to help the 600 abused women who seek emergency assistance from its crisis response services every month.
WHW chief executive Robyn Gregory last month called for extra funding to bolster case management and cut waiting lists for counselling for women and children.
But she was “stunned” by the lack of money allocated in this month’s state budget, considering the “overwhelming demand” for family violence services in the west.
“It seems our work, like women’s experience of family violence, is completely invisible to government,” Ms Gregory said.
Incidents of family violence in the western metropolitan region increased 71 per cent over the past three years, from 5224 in 2009-10 to 8946 in 2012-13.
WHW family violence services manager Jacky Tucker said the organisation was being forced to keep moving money from its case management services to support its crisis response services for women who had recently experienced family violence.
“What this means is we have fewer resources to support women who have recently left an abusive relationship,” she said.
Demand for WHW’s family violence services has increased 150 per cent since 2009-10, to 2990 police referrals in 2013-14.
“The demand has been predominantly due to the increase in reported attendance of police at family violence incidents and the subsequent increase in police referrals of women and their children to WHW and
the flow-on effect to other programs,” Ms Tucker said.
“We have also experienced an increase in the number of calls from women, especially over the past six months. We believe this increase is due to media attention on family violence and recent deaths of women and children.”
Ms Gregory said the government’s allocation of an extra $1.1 million a year over four years to expand high-risk pilot strategies was welcome.
Community Services Minister Mary Wooldridge said the government was investing more than $95 million a year to change community attitudes and expand prevention initiatives to support women and children and to hold offenders to account.
“The state budget included $22.7 million over four years to respond to violence against women and children,’’ she said.
‘‘The process for allocation of additional funding will be advised in due course and will help deal with the issues Women’s
Health West has raised.”
