Suicide and Family Violence are among the most devastating issues of our times; simultaneously representing an affront to our collective humanity and potential as a species, while reflecting a society under significant structural and systemic duress. Both issues are often approached and understood through a gendered lens. Both compete for tragically limited public resources and attention, fighting to remain at the forefront of a fractured public consciousness. And both are seldom uttered in the same breath, nor mentioned in the same sentence. However, studies continue to indicate that Suicide and Family Violence are deeply interconnected problems - and those who seek to create meaningful change may profit enormously from developing equally interconnected approaches to addressing them.
According to MacIsaac, Michael & Bugeja et. al. (2017), victims of interpersonal violence are at an increased risk of suicidal ideation and attempts, with 42% of women who died by suicide having had a history of exposure. It was also found that 48.9% of men who died from suicide had been exposed to violence as perpetrators, while 27.3% had been victims and 23.8% had experiences as both a victim and perpetrator. According to the Ombudsman of Western Australia’s investigation into family and domestic violence and suicide (2022), 56 per cent of the women who died by suicide in 2017 in Western Australia had been recorded as a victim of family and domestic violence by a State government department or authority prior to their death.
This presentation seeks to re-examine and reconnect the continuum between violence against self and violence against others - presenting a new community approach that has sought to make a difference in the prevention of violence against women along with self-harm and suicide. The Unbroken Project, supported by Country Arts South Australia and the Regional Arts Fund, has been working with women with a lived experience of domestic violence for two years through a series of collaborative arts workshops. Designed to explore metaphors and internal narratives, the workshops also promoted help-seeking behaviors and the development of support networks, sought to remove shame and validate lived experience, and even facilitated public education through two local art exhibitions. Now in our third year, Unbroken is beginning to challenge gender norms, men’s violence against other men, and attempting to understand and interrupt the behavior of perpetrators that continue to impact so many lives.