A MESSAGE of respect will be beamed to thousands of punters across Australia from Maryborough in October when the town’s Rotary Club uses a harness racing meet to say no to family violence.
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Rotary Club of Maryborough membership director Garry Higgins announced the plan during his appearance at a hearing for Victoria’s Royal Commission into Family Violence on Monday.
Mr Higgins said the “innovative” plan would involve each race on the card receiving official names such as the “Respect Your Partner Handicap”.
The favourite in each race will wear silks emblazoned with #sayNO2familyviolence.
Mr Higgins appeared at the royal commission to provide evidence about the success of the club’s family violence prevention initiative SAFE, which it began in 2013.
He said Rotary was moving away from its perception as “monument builders and sausage flippers”, to a group which was effecting real change in the community.
Mr Higgins said the family violence initiative wasn’t warmly received by all members of the club at first.
Most of the club’s members were older people, a demographic which Mr Higgins said held “traditional views of family violence – that it has nothing to do with anyone else bar the people involved”.
A moment of self-reflection was the turning point for change.
A representative from Loddon Mallee Women’s Health addressed a function of about 200 Rotarians and their partners, and asked the room how many women believed they had true equality with their partners within their relationship.
Not a single woman raised her hand.
“That was the defining point in the project,” Mr Higgins said.
“Each member of our group had to go home and speak to their partners about why we haven’t got equality in our relationships.”
Since that moment, the project has morphed into something far more complex than was initially envisioned.
Partnerships with local schools, other community groups and the police gave the project a broad reach, a community-led “holistic approach” which Mr Higgins said was the key to its success.
“I think it really revolves around the community really taking a stance and saying ‘we’ve been resilient for too long. It’s time to take an aspirational step and start turning things around’,” he said.
