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Anyone reading this has no doubt seen that a certain de-invitation has gone viral. Insanely viral. And to all those who have it clogging up their news feeds, I am sorry!

One thing I would like to start out saying is that never before have I appreciated my fellow students – all aspiring journalists – general disgust for the Australian mainstream media. A few days after the first radio station dug the de-invitation out of the woodworks, I got my first message requesting comments from the media. The first requests I received were from the Huffington Post (US) and from the Daily Mail (UK). They contacted me via Reddit, where I had initially posted the de-invitation, and politely asked for information. The Daily Mail in Australia also approached me with similar levels of professionalism. In each of the articles published the writer covered the backstory (the abuse), presented the de-invitation, and followed up with a brief section of ‘where are they now’. The Daily Mail in Australia has even stepped up and instead of focusing on the ‘sick burn’ of the de-invitation, they are asking about a previously little-known social issue – that of narcissistic family members. If you want to know why this is an issue, just take a walk over to the Raised By Narcissists sub-reddit and read some of the stories.

Then Murdoch media joined the bandwagon and my faith in humanity plummeted. I woke up one morning to a phone call from my university, who informed me that they had been contacted by the Advertiser and asked to release my personal details – they naturally refused. The fact that someone even TRIED to get an educational institution to release a student’s information is disturbing. Then not long after, I got a message from my wedding photographer and guess what? She had also been contacted and asked to release my personal information and she also refused. A few hours later I was towelling my hair dry after a shower and I heard a knock at the door. Thinking it was family, I tightened my towel and answered the door to find a journalist from the Advertiser on my front porch. I was told that a story would be running with or without my input – it had in fact, already been run – but would I like to say anything? My first reaction was to feel pretty bloody creeped out. Strangers had contacted my educational institution, contacted one of my friends, and then tracked me down to my house – all over a de-invitation. Come on now, it can’t even be classified as news. I nicely mouthed the same information that I had already given other journalists and shut the door. I then went and looked up articles that Murdoch-related press had released. Every one of them seemed designed to deliberately inflame indignation and create outrage. No context or backstory was given, no mention of the years of abuse nor the months of pre-marital pressure. The one thing that they did seem happy to report were personal details that they had somehow obtained such as my last name, the city that I lived in and the name of the educational institution I attend. None of which I had given out.

Journalism students that I studied with? I get you now.

All of this took a few hours for Alex to become aware of, as he is currently doing an international student exchange through uni. His response to it was simply perfect:

“Corporate welfare
Corporate tax evasion
Resource theft
Discrimination against the poor
The fact there are 10 times the unemployed than there are available jobs.
Domestic Violence
Comprimising our privacy and rights for no benefit
Perpetuating the othering of muslims, pushing more and more people to puritanism
Discrimination against Aboriginal peoples
Marriage inequality
Wage inequality
Growing wealth disparity between the rich and the poor.
Homelessness
Climate change

All these things in Australia are more interesting and important news stories than a funny wedding un-invite. Perhaps it can be used as a vehicle to discuss domestic violence, but the narrative is focused on the letter being a ‘sick burn’. I understand the reality of iT, news media are there to generate views, ad revenue, profit and this is seemingly what people what this week and I guess they can’t report on more than one thing at a time.”

And I decided to take his advice, because he was spot-on right.

So, let’s talk about something much more meaningful than a ‘stuff you’ written on fancy paper.

An article was published by the ABC, I believe sometime last year, reporting that the leading cause of death and injury in Australian women under 45 is due to domestic violence. Golden Australia, considered to be a first-world country and a desirable place to live – for half of the population, anyway. But this alarming article disappeared into obscurity rather quickly.

There is also a disturbing trend when victims of domestic abuse do speak up. Comments often trend along lines such as ‘don’t air dirty laundry in public’ and ‘bet she’s making it up for the attention’. Don’t air dirty laundry? That’s something that abusers say to keep victims quiet – after all it’s THEIR laundry, their secrets that they don’t want others to know about, not the victim’s. Victim blaming as a phenomenon is sadly still quite prevalent. As for accusations of attention seeking, well yes, yes victims often are after attention because they want something done. They have been hurt and want someone to help, to step in and change things. You don’t tell a kid with a grazed knee that asking for a bandaid is attention seeking, so why are you doing so in such a degrading manner to an abuse victim? Burden of proof is also turned back on the victim, but in a manner that is often un-winnable. If you claim that you were abused and don’t support it with evidence, then it’s not because it was something personal and traumatic, it’s because you were lying. On the other hand if you do go into detail, well people didn’t believe you when you first claimed abuse, what’s the likelihood that they’ll believe whatever else you say? Not only that, but there appear to be different levels of abuse, some of which are more acceptable than others. If your audience believes that your abuse falls into the socially acceptable category then your plane is shot and going down.

Now I don’t have a degree in Law, or Psychology, or even Sociology, so what are my credentials? Who am I to start trying to talk about these things? Well I’m a human being, for starters. For the silliest of reasons, I am now in the spotlight of social and mainstream media. As Uncle Ben once said, “With great power becomes great responsibility.” I am not an authority on narcissistic family members nor on the toxic psychological affects they can have. Despite being a victim myself, I am not an expert on domestic violence. But I am calling out for these issues to be bought forward, to be discussed and analysed rather than being hidden away.

The leading cause of death and injury amongst Australian women is domestic violence. Isn’t it time we did something?

EDIT: I did a journalism and published without double-checking facts. Domestic violence is the leading cause of death and injury for Australian women under 45. I have edited this blog post accordingly.
Link to the ABC article: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-05-05/domestic-violence-reaches-epidemic-proportions/5426214