Rosie Batty’s emotive letter and invitation two years on

Yesterday two years ago was the day that Rosie Batty’s son was taken from her and two years on from his death she is pleading with all Australians to step up and fight against the way family violence services are funded and the way family violence is managed by police and the courts.  We share her emotive letter with you today.  She invites all people to stand beside her in this battle by joining the campaign at www.neveralone.com.au.

Have you ever battled family violence? 

“Today is the day my beautiful boy Luke should have turned thirteen. If life had worked out as it ought to have, I would have woken him this morning with his favourite breakfast.

He would have dragged his surly teenage self out of bed and while I made a fuss and gave him his present, I would have marvelled at how my boy was so quickly morphing into a man.

But instead, all I have is memories and a constant, aching emptiness. Memories of my Luke, forever frozen in the body of an eleven-year-old. Never to graduate from high school, never to don a backpack and set off to explore the world, never to fall in love or have his heart broken.

Today is a day that will be unique to me, for no other mother had a son like my Luke. Yet sadly, it is also a day that will bring a pain tragically familiar to many other mothers: the birthday of a loved one lost to family violence.

Since Luke was killed, I have faced a fundamental choice: rage against the senselessness of his death, or channel that energy and try to make it count for something. Luke was too special not to leave a legacy, and I am determined to forge one for him….

I want us all to have uncomfortable conversations about the way family violence services are funded, and about the way the police and judicial systems deal with both the perpetrators and victims of this most pernicious crime.

I want to drag this issue out from the shadows so that no other mother has to experience the pain I will go through today. That I go through every day.” – Rosie Batty