Throughout 2026, the Centre, NTV, SASVic and Safe and Equal are collaborating to deliver a suite of live events, as part of the Family Violence Sexual Violence Project.
In this first session, you are warmly invited to the launch of the new online ‘Spotlight’ on children impacted by fatal family violence. We will also launch the children’s storybook What Ally Needs Now, which has been co-designed with people with lived experience.
The loss of a parent due to fatal family violence has a profound and lifelong impact on the children and young people left behind. All aspects of their life are disrupted, with long-term consequences for mental and physical health, learning and social connection. Australia’s response to the challenges faced by these children and young people is currently inadequate.
Across Australia, children and young people impacted by fatal family violence are often unheard and fall through the service gaps. Until now, there has been no single place that collates credible, child-centred tools and resources to drive practice.
The University of Melbourne’s Homicide at Home Research Group has led action research dedicated to understanding and improving outcomes for children and young people impacted by fatal family violence. They bring together researchers, people with lived-experience, practitioners and advocates to create evidence, resources and call for policy change and improved service delivery. In partnership with this research team, the Centre’s OPEN Team are launching a new Spotlight Page, an online hub that brings this work together in one accessible place, combining evidence, lived experience insight and practical tools so practitioners can respond with confidence and services can push for system change.
Book reading: What Ally Needs Now
What Ally Needs Now is a warmly illustrated story for ages 8 to 10 and upwards. It follows Ally as they navigate grief after fatal family violence and the silence and stigma that often surround it. Co‑created with people with lived experience and practitioners, the book supports family, therapeutic and classroom use. The event includes a reading by representatives of the Family Homicide Peer Network.
Event Format:
First session
Second Session
Ms Hannah Morrice (she/her) is a Research Fellow at the Melbourne School of Population and Global Health, University of Melbourne. She is a multidisciplinary public health researcher with over 11 years’ experience working across sectors to translate evidence into real-world policy and practice.
Hannah leads knowledge translation for the Homicide at Home project: supporting children and young people bereaved by domestic homicide, working closely with people with lived experience to inform reform in the legal and child protection systems. She holds a Master of Environmental Law and is known as a boundary spanner between research, government, and community. Her expertise includes participatory methods, qualitative research, policy advocacy and project management, with a focus on children’s rights, climate and health policy, disaster recovery and resilience.
Kathryn Joy (they/them) is a grassroots activist and advocate in social movement spaces, with particular engagement in children’s rights, LGBTQIA+ justice, grief work, and climate justice, as well as support for transformative justice approaches outside of the carceral system.
For the past 20 years, Kathryn has prioritised work that at its core seeks to radically shift the world we live in, and re-imagine a future that centres liberation, justice and care for all living beings and this planet. Their own lived experience as a child bereaved by domestic homicide informs their role as a family homicide researcher at The University of Melbourne. Their aim is to co-create a peer network of victim-survivors who can support each other, as well as advocate for more specialist services. In 2024, ‘KillJoy’, a documentary about their childhood and life as a victim-survivor of domestic homicide, was released on Stan.
Dr Katitza Marinkovic Chavez (she/they) is a psychologist and Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne. Her work focuses on collaborating with children, adolescents and adults to share their stories on their own terms and develop caring and resilient communities in the face of trauma and adversity.
As part of this work, Kati collaborates with people who have been bereaved by family violence homicide, practitioners and researchers to develop storybooks and other resources to support children and families. Kati also works with students and teachers in developing Climate Superpowers, a strengths-based online resource to promote climate wellbeing and action.
Ashton Kline, together with his brother Grant, suffered an horrendous childhood at the hands of their violent and controlling father, which culminated in the death of their mother at his hands. Then only 15, Ashton and six-year-old Grant were placed in foster care, Today, Ashton is an ambassador for the Alannah Madeline foundation, a Nursing Academic and advocate for domestic homicide survivors.
Beverley Attard (she/her) was 11 years old when she witnessed her father murder her mother at their family home. Beverley is a social worker at Western Health, and an advocate for domestic homicide survivors. Her aim is to allow those who have lived this experience a place to be heard and visible, when often their experiences are silenced.
Rebecca Burdon’s (she/her) mother, Marilyn, was killed by her partner on 21 August 2017 in her own home, before he took his own life. Their relationship was ending, a familiar and tragic context for many families. As a criminal lawyer and former social worker, Rebecca’s personal experience as a victim highlighted the failures in support for families affected by familial homicide.
Despite her professional background, she and her siblings faced significant challenges navigating the Coroner’s Court, exacerbating their trauma. The system’s reluctance to provide information and the need to fight for a coronial inquest drained them emotionally and financially. Determined to change this, Rebecca advocates for a dedicated service offering specialised support for victims, especially children. Seeking peer connections, she teamed up with some of the University of Melbourne’s Homicide at Home Researchers, working to develop a support network for those on their journey of recovery, recognising that trauma has no fixed endpoint.
Paige Gammon-ParsonsAt just four years old, Paige’s mother took the life of her father, Paul. That traumatic loss shaped her early life, but it did not define her. Today, Paige uses her voice and lived experience to advocate for healing and to support others navigating their own paths.
Paige strives every day to honour her father’s memory by putting his kindness into the world. Deeply committed to breaking cycles of generational trauma, Paige works to ensure that future children grow up feeling safe, seen, and never alone.
Tania Reis is a lived experience survivor and advocate for domestic violence, domestic homicide, and mental health. Following the homicide of her father in 2002, Tania offers a deeply personal portrait of the intersection between childhood trauma, family violence, and schizophrenia in the childhood home.
Tania draws on her lived experience to advocate for children affected by domestic homicide within the NSW system, and is committed to amplifying the voices of those often left unheard in policy and practice spaces. Tania has completed studies in psychology and is currently pursuing her post-graduate training in Clinical Psychology. Her focus seeks to blend personal narrative with academic insight, aiming to influence meaningful change in how we respond to children impacted by violence.
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The Family Violence and Sexual Violence Project is a collaborative partnership between the Centre, NTV, SASVic and Safe and Equal, and is funded by Family Safety Victoria. For more information about this project, please jump to the page on the FVSV Knowledge Hub.
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