Hi, my family and I are hoping to make a difference in the lives of victims of child abuse, especially stemming from domestic and family violence.

we all know how much damage domestic violence can do to an adult relationship, but how does that same violence affect young children witnessing that violence? Or those that actually experience that violence themselves?

As an adult survivor of child abuse, I can tell you that living in these sorts of circumstances hurts children in many and varied ways.

Imagine, if you can, that you grow up in a ‘world’ where the people raising you fight every single day.

There’s yelling at first and then the threats begin.

Then some one gets so angry and out of control that they start hitting. As a child you are terrified. Frozen to the spot!

It escalates and you try to step in and help somehow anyway you can.

But now there’s bottles being thrown at your head from across the room and you are shaking and terrified of what could happen next! You’re just a little kid and this person is big and really scary! All of a sudden, that out of control adult is coming at you!! You turn to run away and hide somewhere!! Anywhere!! Sometimes, you can outrun them, and hide at the neighbours house.

But other times you cant!

Those times you are hit and belted, beaten and punched.

You have your head slammed into a wall or the floor multiple times, but it doesn’t stop, it won’t stop!! Blow by blow, it keeps coming until that adult has finished their rage filled episode!

When it’s finally over, you feel bruised and battered, both physically and mentally.

Sometimes you cry, sometimes you hide in your bedroom shaking.

How do you go to sleep now?

They’ve threatened to kill you so many times… and as a child, you believe it!! You believe every thing they say to you and everything they say about you! And you stay silent.

And as the years go by, the violence escalates!! But that’s your home! It’s supposed to be our ‘safe space’ right? But it’s not! It’s nothing but hell, day in and day out!

So you grow up scared of the monster at home and scared to trust people. Because if you can’t trust the people closest to you, your family, then who can you trust?

You are full of shame as a child because you think everything that happens to you is your fault and so you don’t say anything! Because, who would believe a ‘bad kid’ right? And yes you believe you’re the bad kid!! Why? Because they tell you every single day, in one way or another.

So you say nothing, you stay in that household and you learn to listen very carefully to every single noise especially at night.

Meanwhile, you are utterly terrified that if you stay there much longer then you will be killed! But there’s no where to go.

…. Now think about going through that sort of horror…every-single-day-of-your-life!!

If you can imagine that… then you may have a small idea of what child abuse, stemming from domestic violence is like!!

It’s a complete disassembling of the child’s self esteem, self respect and self worth.

It is the scourge of our society today! And while we focus mainly on criminal proceedings for justice, I believe that we need to address this scourge with a multi faceted approach.

How do we as a society, start making a difference? How do healthy people grow from homes like these- I can tell you they don’t! Not without a lot of help!

There are many ways to help victims of child abuse, they need support to heal from what has happened so that they don’t ‘leak’ their pain onto another generation.

Luckily, we have many great organisations that can help with mental health care on a short term basis. However, to make real progress in healing these victims, we need life long support services; or very intensive care services, in order for them to heal themselves from the hell they never deserved as vulnerable children.

This is a societal issue, these people were failed by systems that were supposed to protect them and it’s now our responsibility to fix these problems.

This will cost lots of money but we need to start now!

What I want to propose, is that in order to pay for these services, we should be supporting victims of child abuse (both adult child abuse victims and juvenile child abuse victims ) to legally hold their abusers accountable in a civil court case for the damages done to them throughout the years.

I want to start a not for profit organisation to assist these victims to pursue the justice they so deserve, one case at a time, if we have to… but it must be done!

Just imagine a society where justice prevails for our most vulnerable of victims- our children!!

Please help me start this organisation and support this go fund me campaign.

All funds will go towards (firstly) starting the organisation and maintaining it, and the rest will go towards helping build a support system that allows for victims to get legal assistance to sue their abusers and get the justice they need and deserve!

Justice must prevail!