“Epidemic”: Geelong rally demands end to violence

HUNDREDS marched through the streets of Geelong at the weekend to honour the more than 100 women lost to gendered violence since January last year and to demand action to “Australia’s ongoing femicide epidemic”.

Armed with handwritten signs, demonstrators gathered at Market Square Mall on Saturday to hear from a wide-ranging line-up of speakers, many who shared their lived experience of violence, before marching around the precinct together.

Lee Little, the mother of Alicia Little, who was murdered by her partner in 2017, addressed the crowd, reducing many to tears as she spoke of the last phone call she shared with her daughter, just 15 minutes before Alicia was killed.

“The day that Alicia died, when she spoke to me, the last words I’ve got to live with for the rest of life is ‘Mum, I’ve got this, I’ve got this, I’ve packed my bags, they’re at the door’.”

The Little family has since been calling for a domestic violence disclosure scheme to be established across the country, similar to the register already in operation in South Australia, to make it more difficult for perpetrators of violence to continue harming women.

Their petition, launched in 2019, has since garnered more than 50,000 signatures.

“There needs to be change to domestic violence laws and it needs to be changed now. Not tomorrow, not next week, not in six months, there needs to be change now and we are the only people that can stand up and fight for it,” Alicia’s brother Bronson said.

Rally organisers say more than 117 Australian women have been killed, most by men they know, since January 2024. A total of 14 women have been lost this year alone.

Their names and faces adorned the walls of Market Square Mall last weekend as part of a memorial aimed at highlighting the humans behind the statistics.

“The word victim often feels as though it carries an undertone of weakness, but make no mistake, these women were anything but weak,” local rally organiser Rachel Bishop said.

“The reason we really wanted to have this wall… is that it’s really easy to hear names and not really humanise them, especially when the list is that long.

“These women are no blur. They were human, they were loved, they were loving, and they’re lost, and it is not good enough.”

A nationwide demonstration, Geelong was one of at least 14 cities and towns to take part in last Saturday’s rallies, each calling for meaningful policy changes and better funding for frontline services to protect women from all forms of violence.

The events were organised by Australian Femicide Watch, an initiative of award-winning journalist Sherele Moody, that tracks every known Australian woman and child killed as a result of murder, manslaughter or neglect.