Faculty of Law

My research focuses on domestic and family violence and legal responses to domestic and family violence. So I primarily look at civil protection orders called AVOs in New South Wales, criminal law and family law. What I'm most interested in in my work is not the law as it's written, although clearly that is important. I'm much more interested in how it's practised and experienced by people. So victim survivors, offenders, legal professionals and other professionals who work within the legal system.

I've been working around the debates around the criminalisation of coercive control in Australia. There's been lots of concern around how engaging with the criminal law might have negative impacts on some marginalised groups of women. So particularly Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women, but also women from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds, women with disability, women who don't fit sort of the stereotypical idea of who a genuine victim is.

I've been involved in a very large scale project funded by ANROWS, so Australia's National Research Organisation for Women's Safety. So we were looking at self-representation in family law proceedings around family violence. At the moment, I'm looking at Aboriginal women's experience of family violence in an urban setting. So I've been working very closely with Mudgin-Gal, an Aboriginal women's organisation here in Redfern. I couldn't do my research without the generosity of victim survivors speaking to me and sharing their stories. And they often do it with the hope that no one else will have to experience what they've experienced.

Ultimately, I hope that the benefit of my research is that it not only works to ensure the safety of victim survivors, but that it also does work around making the court process or the legal process more generally less traumatic and less arduous than it currently is.