New laws that will result in prison time for anyone who fails to report child abuse need to be judged on a case-by-case basis.
Victim support groups are right to express concerns that people, mostly women, would be afraid to report a violent partner for harming their child.
Assuming that a woman can take her children and walk away from a violent partner and report him is both simplistic and naive and fails to recognise that she, too, is a victim.
It also assumes that she will be believed or that friends, family and even the justice system, won’t take the perpetrator’s side “because he’s a good sport who was probably provoked”.
There needs to be community-wide zero-tolerance of domestic violence and an end to the mindset that its victims can make it disappear just by calling time out.
