The national conversation around men's violence against women has steadily grown in volume over the past few years, but we are yet to adequately address some of the biggest victims of this gendered crime – the children of the women who are victimised and sometimes killed by men. The impact of family violence on children cannot be underestimated.
Even in circumstances where these children are not directly targeted by violence, emotional and psychological trauma are inevitable because "children living with domestic violence suffer emotional and psychological trauma from the impact of living in a household that is dominated by tension and fear." These are huge burdens for anyone to carry, let alone the people whose resources are significantly limited by their young age.
All of this is what makes the actions of four Brisbane children who intervened to save their mother's life from her estranged husband all the more remarkable. In 2014, Daryl Fields forced his way into the home of Rachael Moore and pointed a shotgun at her chest. As Moore later recounted, "I knew I was going to be shot, I could tell. So I just told them [her five children] to get away from me and moved as far away from them as I could and thankfully the big boys kept the little ones away."
Her children – Jayden, who was 14 at the time, Cameron, 12, Kaylea, 9, Zane, 4, and Samantha, 2, – watched from a bed in the corner of the room as Fields shot their mother, shattering her shoulder. But as Fields moved to reload the gun, 12-year-old Cameron managed to wrestle it away from him and run outside to hide it. He and Jayden then worked together to restrain Fields (who had tried to gouge out Moore's eye) from further assaults. Little Zane took his two-year-old sister, Samantha, out from under the bed where he had hidden her earlier and escaped with her outside while Kaylea summoned extraordinary physical strength to move her immobile mother outside and begin administering first aid.
Related Content
During the terrifying assault (which was clearly life threatening for all of them), Fields was heard to yell at Moore, "Why don't you just die?!" In 2016, he was charged with numerous crimes including attempted murder, common assault and – infuriatingly, as anyone working to prevent men's violence against women will attest to – contravention of a domestic violence order issued earlier that month. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 12 years in prison.
He will eligible for parole when 80 per cent of that sentence has been served.
But this isn't necessarily about the shortcomings of the Australian legal system or the almost laughable inability of police to enforce domestic violence orders, although those things are certainly in need of more attention and definite robust overhaul. (And speaking of structural support for this behaviour, isn't it great that Pauline Hanson's One Nation has defined itself among other things as the party that not only wants to return guns to the hands of Australians but also as the party representing the aggrieved, deranged men's rights lobbyists who believe the law acts against men's interests.)
This is about the actions of four children to protect their mother and baby sister against a man who not only threatened the life of their caregiver but who was also father to two of them. One of the major traumas caused by family violence is the way it causes children to not only become witnesses to the degradation of one of their parents (and it is usually their mother) but to force them in some situations to become saviours.
Jayden, Cameron, Kaylea and Zane are set to each receive an Australian award in recognition of the bravery and courage they showed that night. Jayden and Cameron are two of just six individuals who will be awarded the Star of Courage, the only siblings to have ever been chosen and the youngest recipients overall. And while these awards are undoubtedly a huge honour, there can be no question that the far better option would be for these wonderful, brave children to have not been put in such a terrifying situation in the first place.
No child should be charged with the responsibility of preventing the murder of their mother, especially not at the hands of her intimate partner (who may or may not also be their father). As this astonishing, visceral piece from Andie Fox illustrated, these actions of rescue performed by children stay with them forever. A four-year-old child, hardly more than a baby himself, shouldn't know how to hide his two-year-old sister underneath a bed to keep her safe from the scary man trying to hurt his mummy.
When I read about these kids, I wanted to weep. Even writing this, the tears kept threatening to spill. Because Rachael Moore is like any other mother who wants to ensure both she and her children are free from violence, particularly the jealous, spiteful and homicidal violence that is more likely than any other to target women and children in this country. She did everything that was available to her and everything that women like her are chided about doing. She went to the police and Magistrates Court to seek an intervention order against him. I am guessing here, but she appears to have briefed her children on what she wanted them to do if Fields violated that order which was to keep themselves hidden and away from her and him.
And most importantly of all, considering it's the directive that gets intoned at and about women victimised by men in intimate partner relationships, she left him. But what people who repeat this ad infinitum either don't know or don't want to know is that it is in the period immediately after women leaving that men are most likely to kill the victims of their abuse. Were it not for the actions of her children that night, Moore would have become yet another statistic of intimate partner homicide. Another woman killed by a man exacting his ultimate revenge because her having the power to leave him was something he just couldn't let her get away with.
A four-year-old child shouldn't know how to hide his two-year-old sister underneath a bed to keep her safe from the scary man trying to hurt his mummy.
Moore and her children will live with the trauma of that night forever. She faces the ongoing challenge of multiple shoulder surgeries, with the fear of arm amputation hanging over her. Her children want to become advocates against domestic violence, and they shall undoubtedly do very well at this. They are deserving recipients of their awards, after all. But far better would be for us to commit, as a community, to the eradication of men's violence against women in its entirety so that children like Jayden, Cameron, Kaylea, Zane and Samantha never have to put themselves between their mother and a gun ever again.
0 comments
New User? Sign up