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.
This first session marked the launch of two significant resources focused on children impacted by fatal family violence: a new online Spotlight page and the children’s picture book What Ally Needs Now. The OPEN Team hosted this hybrid event, with over 500 registrations from around the country, and brought together researchers, practitioners, advocates and people with lived experience to strengthen understanding and drive improved responses for children and young people.
The Child-centred practice after fatal family violence event marked an important step in a growing body of work led by the University of Melbourne Homicide at Home Research Group and the Family Homicide Peer Network.
Hosted by the Centre’s OPEN team, the event brought together over 500 participants from across Australia – spanning practice, research, policy and lived experience – to launch two significant resources: a new online Spotlight page and the children’s book What Ally Needs Now. It is also the first in a series of events delivered through the Family Violence Sexual Violence (FVSV) cross-peaks partnership with SASVic, No to Violence and Safe and Equal. Together, this partnership is building a shared evidence base through the FVSV Knowledge Hub.
The Homicide at Home project has centred lived and living experience in building a deeper understanding of children and young people impacted by fatal family violence.
Presentations from the research team highlighted critical gaps in Australia’s current response – including the absence of data on number of children affected, limited tailored supports, and a lack of child-centred approaches across systems.
Key insights reinforced that children experience:
A defining strength of this work is the role of the lived experience co-researcher. Their contributions grounded the research in real experience, strengthened its relevance, and powerfully shaped both the findings and the resources developed.
The event launched the new Spotlight on children impacted by fatal family violence which addresses a long-standing gap – the absence of a single, accessible place for practitioners to find knowledge and child-centred guidance to better understand and support this group of children.
The Spotlight brings together:
Designed for real-world use, the Spotlight pages aim to support practitioner confidence while also strengthening advocacy for more coordinated and effective system responses.
“The death of a parent doesn’t just mean the death of your mother or my mother in this instance. What it meant for us was a whole change of identity. We had to learn how to fit in with foster parents, for example. We had to navigate the court system. We had to attend the trial and give evidence against our father through that period. So really challenging to navigate when you experience foster care for the first time, you’ve lost your family home. And you’re also managing or grappling with the trauma and grief of the loss of our mum at the time. And there wasn’t a great deal of support services available for us. We were immediately taken into foster care.” – Peer Network Member
🔦Explore the Spotlight page – Check it out!
A recording of this event will also be available in coming days. Make sure you are signed up to the Family Violence Sexual Violence Updates newsletter.
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The event also marked the introduction of the Family Homicide Peer Network – a new lived experience advocacy group bringing together victim-survivors and caregivers impacted by fatal family violence.
Recognising that many people have never had the opportunity to connect with others who share this experience, the Peer Network aims to build connection, support and collective voice, and is now reaching out to others who may benefit from being part of this community.
One of the things that’s really become…apparent to me over the years is the enormous sense of shame that you feel for not being able to rescue the person that was killed, for not being able to be there or from stop the incident from occurring. And one of the things that the peer network does as well as this research is it really shines a light on that shame that forces you to take ownership of it. And I think it’s only through that shared experience of shame, of coming together and sharing our stories with that lived experience that we’ve learnt to kind of begin to heal from that shame and to carry that shame with us.” Peer Network Member
View the Spotlight page for Advocacy and support.
A key highlight of the event was the launch and reading of What Ally Needs Now.
Co-designed with people with lived experience and practitioners, the storybook was strongly received by participants as a valuable and practical tool.
While grounded in the experience of fatal family violence, the book has broader relevance.
Practitioners noted its potential to support children experiencing a range of family trauma – providing a gentle, accessible way to:
Designed for younger to middle years children, the storybook offers a practical way to open conversations that are often difficult to start.
📖 Download your free copy – here.
I suffered [from] family violence … I just realised me and my children didn’t have a niche. Thank you for making this space for the children, because I feel like we’ve got preventative, we’ve got homicide, but where is that middle where we fit in? So I think conversations like this and coming together will hopefully recognise it as a whole. Thank you.”Peer Network Member
This event is part of a broader, ongoing effort to strengthen how the sector understands and responds to children impacted by family violence. OPEN will continue to support the translation of research into practical resources, support shared learning, and strengthen uptake in practice.
What can you do to help?:
Share the Family Homicide Peer Network contact details with anyone impacted by fatal family violence as a child, or supporting a child or an adult in this situation. They welcome the opportunity to connect and support others. Contact details are listed here.
To stay connected with upcoming events and new resources, make sure you’re subscribed to the A recording of this event will be available in coming days. Make sure you are signed up to the Family Violence Sexual Violence Updates newsletter!
What the audience said:
(Click on the speaker to view full bio)
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.
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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