Brand and Butter

From Silence to Story: Sherele Moody on Femicide, Media Failure, and Real Accountability

• Tara Ladd • Episode 87

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TW: This episode discusses gender-based violence, femicide, child deaths, and systemic failures surrounding these issues.

A map of red hearts shouldn’t have to exist, yet Sherele Moody has spent a decade making sure every woman and child lost to violence in Australia is named, counted, and remembered. In this episode I sit down with Sherele to unpack what it takes to build a living memorial that families can search and trust, how patterns emerge when you track every case, and why “awareness” without “accountability” keeps the toll rising.

We speak about the uncomfortable truths: media narratives that decentre victims, headlines that blame and sensationalise, and the quiet ways misogyny shows up in language and decision-making. Sherele shares how her Red Heart campaign and Australian Femicide Watch document cases from first report to closure, capturing red flags, systemic failures, and context that helps other women see risks earlier.

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SPEAKER_00:

Before we begin, a content warning. This episode discusses gender-based violence, femicide, child deaths, and systemic failures surrounding these issues. So please take care while listening and step away if you need to. Today I'm joined by someone whose work forces Australia to look directly at what so many try to look away from. Sherelle Moody is an award-winning journalist, anti-violence activist, femicide and child death researcher, and the creator of Australia's only memorial to women and children lost to violence. She leads the Australian Femicide Watch, the Red Heart campaign, the She Matters podcast, and the Australian Femicide and Child Death Matter. Since 2015, Sherelle has documented every known killing of women and children in this country. This is a conversation about truth and systems and the human causes of what we call violence, and then people fighting every day to prevent it. Let's get into it. For those who want to understand the influence and power of branding and how pairing associations, consumer behavior, and design thinking can impact what people see, think and feel. I'm your host, RLA, sometimes funny, sometimes vulnerable, and often unapologetically one founder and creative director of Brandon Design Agency Your One and only Hey everyone, welcome to this week's episode of Brandon Butter. I have someone very special on today. I am a big fan of her work, and her name is Sherelle Moody. I'm going to let her introduce herself, but what I will say is that if there is someone that is of importance that should be on this podcast, it is her. And after this episode, I think you will realize why. So, Sherelle, why don't you introduce yourself and all about the work that you're currently doing at the moment?

SPEAKER_01:

Uh yes. Okay, so as background, I'm a journalist. I have been for it'll be 29 years next year. And I worked across mainstream media for most of that, with um most, well, with many of Australia's big media outlets, and I spent a lot of time covering crime and courts and social justice. I left the industry in April of last year, and for the last um bit over 12 months, I've been working full-time on my projects, The Red Heart Campaign and Australian Femicide Watch. Uh, but both of those um were born 10 years ago in a direct response to um violence against women and girls, violence against children, and how the media keeps turning away from stories of women who've experienced violence. And at that time there was a lot of disinterest in talking about domestic violence and other forms of violence against women. So yeah, that's those campaigns kind of grew out of that, I guess.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, and I think that it's it's a conversation that's really started to ramp up at the moment and one that I'm really glad that you're having, but it doesn't come without vitrol, does it? I've noticed that when you do put yourself out there, there is a lot of comments that you do receive, and yeah, it's not an easy conversation to have. And I think that that's what stops a lot of people advocating for things, isn't it? Because they will be on that receiving end. So, you know, credit to you for being strong for that.

SPEAKER_01:

A hundred percent. Look, in the 10 years since I started Red Heart, I've seen a lot of people come and go. Uh, they start out really enthusiastic, and you can see the enthusiasm uh wane very fast. And and there's two reasons for that. The first is uh this is not a pretty topic. Uh, it doesn't get a lot of likes, it doesn't get a lot of views. Um, often there's not a lot of uh engagement with what we do and what we talk about, and so that can be really disheartening if you're not seeing um, you know, the conversation being reflected when you post. But the other thing is definitely the um the level of uh misogyny that's directed, especially towards women in this space. Um, you know, we hear it all, what about men? Um, women cause men to suicide, women do it too, and you know, just all of the things. And often that comes with a lot of hate about how you look, about how you sound, about how you dress, about the message that you're giving, given. So you can get everything from uh death threats and rape threats to just criticism about the colour of your glasses. So yeah, it is, it is, it's a lot. And if you're if you haven't got resilience, it's very hard to stay in this space.

SPEAKER_00:

And I think that's why it's super important to have people around you, you specifically, uh, when you can be on the receiving end of that stuff, because it's all good, and you see this all the time of people pushing other people to stand on platforms and advocate for things. But when you are the one advocating, you're the one that's receiving that uh, you know, all of those hateful comments versus uh, you know, just sitting on a couch and telling someone else to do the job. Do you know what I mean? I think that you know, I see these things come into your feed uh often and I get really defensive over on how someone can stoop that low as a human being to say things to people, even if it's just an emotional response, but even like you just said, the emotional response to some of these things that you're getting is a direct correlation to the very thing that you're fighting against.

SPEAKER_01:

100%. When you when, for instance, you criticize how a woman looks, um, you're basically part of the problem. When you deflect with, but what about men or women do it too, you are part of the problem. No one's saying that um men don't get hurt or that women don't um commit violent crime or or you know coercive control. Absolutely no one in the world is saying that. It's possible to be angry about both things and it's possible to talk about both things. Neither conversation should I ever take away from the other. I think really what interests me in those conversations though is the people who say that only ever say it to me when I'm talking about male violence against women. Now, I also talk about female violence against women and children. I have done for the entire time that I've I've run these campaigns. And for about two years there, I was actually documenting every man murdered in Australia, and it was a lot of men, four times the rate that women are killed. Most of those, about 95% of those men, were being killed by men. None of the men who said what about the men to me uh when I talked about femicide ever came in and said what about the women, or you know, ever had anything to say when I made those posts. And I ended up having to stop doing that because I was uh basically documenting more than 300 deaths a year, and as you can imagine, that's a lot of fucking um mental load for one person to take. I just couldn't do it. It wasn't because of what men were saying or not saying or any other thing, just simply too big a job for one single person. And I decided to focus on women and children because it's an area that I know very well. I'm very expertise in that, you know, it's it's what I do best, and I'd rather just give a hundred percent to something, to the one thing, than only give 20% to all of the things. It's it's of no benefit to the families of those men killed. Um, you know, and I've always said if someone wants to start their own movement around violence against men that encapsulates all men killed, I am a hundred percent available to provide guidance and support and help in any way I can because yes, we absolutely need to be having that conversation.

SPEAKER_00:

I yeah, I couldn't agree more with you that it it it's always the whataboutism and everyone wanting someone else to do the job, you know. And I think yeah, I think I've noticed that as well a lot with the things that you post that's you you are quite balanced. And there's a whole there was a whole study done on a fitness magazine where they had men and women on the front of each monthly cover, and they had men writing in to say that they why did they keep featuring women on the front cover of the of the you know of the magazine? And they were like, Well, we release one of each every month. It's just that you're choosing to look at the one that, and I think that that is our biases come into play quite a lot when we're looking at at news and receiving stories, and then on top of that is our own personal experience, isn't it? And how we see the world. So it's almost like a reflection on you know how they're they're actually thinking, and I think that it exposes a lot about a person when they you know when they do say things to you.

SPEAKER_01:

I think it's it's definitely a gender blindness, and it's a really weird gender blindness because they notice when women are prominent, but they don't notice when men are prominent. And so it's like it's like a yeah, it is it's a sexism-based gender blindness or um, you know, a gender sexism-based gender focus. It's really surprising that, you know, in the the conversation around men and suicide, we know statistics show us that young men, young men and teenagers are more teenage males are more likely to suicide than men in that kind of fatherhood age group. And we also know that men um older than around 60 are more likely to suicide than men in that fatherhood age group. The other thing is that we don't always know if a man who is suicided is a father or if he is going through a separation process, you know. So there are these things that we don't know about. This is in relation to the 21 Fathers movement. We actually can't say that the that 21 fathers are being killed every week as a result of suicide and that they're all going through the family court or relationship breakdowns. We actually don't have data that shows us that. But um, very clever marketing, a very clever social media strategy has built up this um, you know, swell of support for that movement. And in fact, it just totally erases and takes out of view men who are too young to be fathers or men who were too old to be fathering at this point. Do you know what I mean? It's like they've just zoned in on this one little thing because one guy decided that he was just gonna publish a statistic that is fake and doesn't exist. 21 fathers suicide every week. Very catchy. Everyone latched onto it, and here we are. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

The rise of disinformation, isn't it? I think this is this is okay. Let's go right back, right? So you've built your life's work essentially, it's a lot of work, and I I often it's the first thing that I think of is how are you? Because you know, I know what it feels like in my life to have multiple things stack up on each other, different to yours, but you know, problematic all in one, and how that can weigh you down mentally. And I think that that's such an important thing. You have you have documented this for a really long time, something most people can barely look at, as we've discussed. So, let alone dedicate a whole chunk of their career to. So, what moment made you decide I have to do this?

SPEAKER_01:

I look, I was doing a campaign for um a group of regional newspapers up in Queensland, um, and the campaign was a domestic violence campaign, and that was about 10 years ago in September. I was told to write articles about domestic violence for all of these regional newspapers. We want to hear about victim stories, we want to hear everything, you know, analysis, statistics, the experts, everything. And I went ahead and I did all the legwork and I and I did all of the statistics and you know the analysis and the experts. Central to this campaign to me was stories of women and children lost to domestic violence, but also um people who'd survived domestic violence. Anyway, turns out the editors didn't want to hear more than one story of this. They actually said to me, We don't have room, people are not interested, you know, it's nobody else's business, you've done your job, stop. And so I just went home after a particularly grueling conversation with a set of editors about um getting these stories that I'd I'd written into their papers. And frustrated, I just went home, I started a Facebook page and I said to everybody, hey, draw a heart, a red heart on your skin and um send me your story of domestic violence survival. And that's how it started. I think in that first 24 hours, I had a couple of hundred stories come through and red hearts, and so that's that's what I did. I'd post a red heart and a victim story, and um, that's how it started, and then not long after that, I started documenting the killing of women and children, very specifically, and the reason that I started that was because I've I had a lot of anger and um sadness at the time, and I still do, but I needed to find an outlet, and the reason I had that was because my stepfather had killed two little girls, Sandra Bacon and Stacy Ann Tracy, and that sat heavy on me for a very long time, for decades. For me, it was about finding a way of navigating that and finding a way of remembering their lives and making sure that their names and stories were never forgotten. And so I started a temporary online memorial, and Stacy Ann and Sandra were the first two people on that project, and I just every night I would add uh more women and children as I found them as they were being killed. And yeah, so it started as a Facebook project, and then I created the Australian Femicide and Child Death Map, which was basically I took all of those stories, put them in to an Excel document, uploaded them onto a Google map, and added a red heart pin. And so the the red heart pin, if you tap on it, you can open up and read a person's story, and the pin is pinned at the location they were murdered or the location of where their body was found. And that was going along for I think I launched that in around 2015, and in 2018 I made a sister version of that. So the problem with the map is it's really great to look at, it's it's very impactful because there's more than 2,500 women and children killed on there, so it's just a map of hearts of murdered women and children. Not very searchable, not really useful in a lot of ways. So I had a bespoke website built, and it was built around the idea of a memorial. And I said to the website developers, I want to put mark each death with a red heart, big for women, little for children. And when a person taps on that heart, that person's story comes up, and it must be broken down by year, and they went and specifically coded this website for me. It's actually quite complex down the back end, and it's a really beautiful thing, I think. So every time a woman or child is killed, or I find about a new victim, I add them to the website, and their heart appears and it appears under the year of their death. If you go to 2025, for example, the first heart you click is Ms. Molta. She is an Aboriginal woman, uh, lost to violence up in the Northern Territory at the start of the year. She was actually a world-famous artist. And um, if the last heart, as we record today under 2025, is Lisa Ward. She's a former police officer who was murdered in Almara in New South Wales on Tuesday. Uh, it's alleged that the man who killed her deliberately drove over her as she was photographing his number plate because he she had seen him uh driving recklessly just moments beforehand. So, yeah, so every heart has a story. Tap a heart, you read a person's story. The reason that um the hearts are there is because I also have to take into account that um I I don't want to traumatize families if they go to the website and just see their person's face sitting there. So the heart is like a little um, I guess a little little just a little protector for them. And uh, you know, it's up to them to to tap the hearts or to search a person's name. Uh that that project is fully searchable, so you can put in a person's name and that will come up, the location of their death, even the street, uh domestic violence, like using a term, domestic violence, associate violence vehicle, as in that's the weapon that was used. So yeah, it's quite searchable. Um, and that's been up for for a few years now, and it's um the website itself has grown around that. So that was the the landing page, that page, the femicide map, and the about page were the only pages on that. And over the last few years I've added quite a few more pages. Uh, the She Matters project is there. There's a blog um that I'm updating a couple of times a week. There's also a shop if you want to help support my work, a donation page, you know, there's everything, and there's a podcast page there too. Yeah, there's a lot. It's it's a very good, good, a comprehensive website, I think.

SPEAKER_00:

It's kind of one of those things that evolves unintentionally, but it it's been good, which is, you know, I think um something that needs to happen. But I guess most people think or talk about raising awareness all the time that you 100% go beyond that. I I know this now, and you track and you name and you humanize. I guess what's the difference between what you think awareness is and accountability?

SPEAKER_01:

I think the thing is you have to keep in in mind, um, well, for me, every time I share a story, I share failures, I share things that happen, so red flags, failures, all that sort of stuff. So my my motto is we can't change her story, but her story can change the story for other women and girls. And if you read, oh, for instance, uh, I guess the easiest way to do this is to listen to the podcast. If you listen episode after episode after episode, you start to see the patterns. You can very clearly see the patterns. So you see the red flag patterns, you see um the disadvantaged patterns, you see the uh um the patterns of failures. So whether that's in policing, whether the failures are before a person's death, uh you know, immediately um after the death or in the justice system. You see all of these patterns. Um, so that's I guess in a way, it in fact that is the best way to raise awareness. It's not a case of in a way it's raising awareness, it does raise awareness. It raises awareness of how vulnerable women can be, especially in relationships with men they know. And that doesn't have to be an intimate partner relationship. So it might be a parenting, it might be a um, you know, a cousin or an uncle kind of relationship. It might be someone they work with, it might be their neighbor, it might be a friend. We see the vulnerabilities there in the stranger violence deaths. What we see is we see patterns of uh toxic masculinity and misogyny. Um, and we we see those patterns in stranger deaths, and if you look with the same eye or hear with the same ear, you find those patterns exist in the other deaths. There's the patterns are all there, they're they're laid out for everyone to see. Uh, if you're not hearing them, if you're not seeing them, then you're not actually absorbing the work or listening to the story properly so it is actually a key to raising awareness. Um, it's not just about commemorating uh women and children lost, it's actually about you know changing the story for other women. And I know it works because I'm told almost every day by a woman I listened to that podcast, or I read that story, or I saw your post, and it made me see a danger flag, and I left and you saved my life. You know, that is the best kind of awareness that you can have. Um, yeah, so that's basically the awareness sides. So accountability is in isn't a whole different thing. So accountability is about taking responsibility for your actions, um, whether you are the person who's perpetrating the violence, or if you're a policymaker, if you're a support worker, if at some point along the line you found a woman, did you take accountability for that? So, for example, if a woman comes to your police station and gets you the constable at the desk and says, I'm scared for my life, he's gonna kill me, and you turn her away and he does in fact kill her, do you take accountability for that? Do you go, I am partially like I had a role to play in this, I'm not responsible for his violence, but there was a point where I could have saved her, where I could have made a difference, and I didn't. I am accountable, and this is how I'm gonna change. So if you're the person who's laughing at that stupid rape joke, are you going to be accountable down the line for allowing misogyny and toxic masculinity to thrive, the things that actually underpin violence against women? Accountability doesn't just have to be the perpetrator at all. It's it's it's right across everything we do. If you're a women, woman and you slut shame someone, you need to be accountable for that. You because you're contributing to the problem to normalizing um, you know, demeaning of women. So yeah, there's accountability in so many ways, and and it's very different to raising awareness. But I would hope that um the work that I do helps people be accountable for the decisions they make.

SPEAKER_00:

I think it absolutely does. And you know, it was really interesting that you said that because I was out somewhere recently and uh one of the acquaintances that I know said something about one of my friends and said, or what's been happening with her because she had some shorts on and had a bruise on her leg. Um, well, where's her husband been? And I said, and I just didn't connect that.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

And then I said, What do you mean? And then she said, because of all the bruises on her leg. And I I must I, you know, when it takes a moment to click. My whole cogs in my head just started to, I didn't even have time to respond before she'd realized what she'd said.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

And then she was like, oh, and I'm like, do we realize how normalized this has become? And even these, like I call it out all the time when I notice it. And I I've realized personally, just from the stories that I read for, you know, when every day when you're reading it, you understand like just how many people around you are actually affected by this. And I'm even to the point where I can hear people yelling, you know, on a Saturday night around, because you know, everyone lives on top of each other these days, where I turn the volume down just to make sure that it's not you know what I mean. And I'm like, I'm like, that's sketchy now, where I'm like, but it's it, but it is those things I believe that you should be taking note of because the bystanders effect is real, right? We just expect someone else to do the thing. Like it could be you could you could genuinely help people. And I think that and I think if we're coming to the relationship that we both have. So uh if you're not aware, I'm working with Sherelle at the moment to try and really help her rebrand, or not necessarily rebrand, but just give essence to what it is that she's doing because I can't do her work. I think her work is phenomenal, it is absolutely her, you know, specialty. But what I can do with the job that I have is help her to amplify the work that she's doing and helping her with what I can do to make that bigger so more people know about it. And even then, just the process of what's involved in this, I've learned so much. And I'm telling everyone, have you heard of Sherelle? You need to go to Sherelle's page. And then this is where I'm finding it starting to spread, is that women are sharing based on, you know, oh, that's happened to me or this has happened to me. And what we're seeing is from what I found, especially is our post-me too movement, which we saw, I think, grow during 2020. And I think this is all correlated. I think that, you know, in terms of when I talk about a brand, I talk about how consumers have changed because of the way that the cultural narratives have have started to change. Yeah. And a lot of it happened during COVID or just before. So I think that there has been some big cultural moments that have happened. The Me Too movement was one of them. And I believe the George Floyd murder was one of them. And then obviously we had COVID. So we had these huge, big things that kind of happened very close together. And then everyone was notoriously online. And so we started to see these narratives, which were all somehow interconnected in one way or another, um, start to come out. And so you saw COVID, which would have exacerbated what you do, um, you know, that staying, you know, the the financial stress and lockdowns and uh all of that compared with the Me Too movement, kind of merge into one. And we I personally saw that that gender uh narrative start to shift a little bit. So one of them specifically was when um one of the Jonas or Joe Jonas broke up with Sophie Turner or you know, when they and what I saw from that, I mean, for the first time in a long time, I saw a big chunk of women come to the defense of his PR slur, where he tried to basically paint her as a bad mother. And I saw for the first time, and I was like, this is insane. A whole bunch of women come to her defense to actually counteract the media narrative. And I was like, this is interesting, and this is what I'm actually noticing now, whereas before you'd see a lot of slurring online, and there was kind of not really much of a defense where now women I think are just uh a little bit more perceptive of these little traits that are happening across the board that they're calling it out. And I think that this has caused some kind of uh gender war, right? It's the fact that this just wasn't called out before, but now it is, and so when and we see this happen with influencers like Abby Chatfield get slammed for things like this all the time, and you know, anyone that's kind of talking about women's rights in one way or another, there is just this vitral that comes, you know, towards it. So I guess from your point, have you noticed any kind, and like you said, have you noticed any kind of change in, I guess, the way that the media is reporting or you know, any kind of interest in, you know, has there been any nudge in a more positive direction?

SPEAKER_01:

Look, I've uh I mean, I've consumed media for so long, and I've consumed media from 50 years ago and a hundred years ago as part of my femicide research, and I gotta say, it hasn't really fucking changed. It really hasn't. There's always been um a very small element of ethical reporting of violence against women, very rare, very small. Um, but to be honest, most of it is not even above par. It's not even above par. We're still seeing women blamed for their own deaths, we're still seeing women erased in headlines and in um, you know, kickers on stories, even in photos. We're still seeing women called objects associated with their murders. Uh, we are still seeing women slut shamed, we're still seeing media going through uh dead women's um social media profiles and publishing their photos even before family are aware that their person is dead. We're seeing still seeing media publish um body bags, bodies with faces blurred. Really, the shift hasn't been there. The media every now and then gives itself a big pat on the back because they did a um fucking series or they, you know, did a podcast or they they they ran a couple of features. They give themselves a pack on the back and um you know tell us that they're all amazing, or they come up with stupid campaigns like calling a domestic violence perpetrator a coward in headlines, which just is not even remotely an adequate discussion. Calling a domestic violence perpetrator a coward is really stupid. It it's just stupid. There's there's nothing, I I mean, I don't even know what that campaign is about, the Daily Telegraph. Um, but you know what I mean? It hasn't really shifted, that dial hasn't really shifted, and we can see this all the time. We can see it all the time, we can see it because we saw it. In the case of Erin Patterson, almost every story written about her over the last couple of years has de-centered the victims. And even when it came to the point in her sentencing where the family members of the three people they kill she killed were giving statements, even in that point, that their loved ones were decentered. I had someone say to me recently, another podcaster saying to me, Oh, but Sherelle, the media have done a great job around Erin Patterson and the murders. There's been such a big focus on it. And I said to her, Do you know what the names of the victims are? And she could not name them. And then I said to her, Do you know why you can't name them? It's because they were decentered. In some articles, they weren't even named. Do you know what I mean? They were a very like a tenth. They were, they was, they were of no interest to the media. What was of interest was the fact that a woman killed three people with a fucking recipe. That's it. That is, they turned her into a pop icon. That kind of reportage shows how fucking far we are from really ethical reporting of violence against women. We're still seeing women. We saw Isla Bell repeatedly slut-shamed after her murder. When the committal hearing was held a couple of months ago, we saw her again reduced to being a body in a freezer. That's um, you know, and that's that's really horrifying for her family. Her mum should not have to see those headlines. Her mum should see her daughter's name in those articles, centered on her existence. Um, you know, we we just see this all the time. We every now and then we get a glimmer of hope, but then it goes away. So yeah, it's it's not changing.

SPEAKER_00:

It's and we realize that it's so deep too when you realize who owns the media outlets and the stories that run through that. And I 100%.

SPEAKER_01:

I mean, I know how it works. I worked for Rupert Murdoch for most of my career. I, you know, I was a journalist for nearly 30 years, and I would say I spent 20 years in the Murdoch um press. I sat in editorial meetings when editors were making those big decisions about our victim's worthiness. I sat in editorial meetings where disadvantaged women were called cunts and sluts, you know, by edits by male editors. You I've sat in those, I've I sat in editorial meetings where women with disability who did something amazing were called gutsy freaks. So yeah, and that is not very fucking long ago. Um yeah, I I mean I I I made an income from this, and I don't make an income from mass media anymore because I just cannot sit back and watch an industry punch down on murdered women and children. I cannot see an industry that erasers and others and victim blames killed women. I cannot be part of an industry that absolutely punches down on people with disadvantage, whether they're dead or not. I just cannot do that anymore, and I will not do that anymore.

SPEAKER_00:

I think we're seeing a big shift with this actually. Um without, I mean, obviously there are good dudes out there, but I feel this really coming from women. I feel uh, you know, women are just like over it, they're kind of coming through. And that's not saying that there aren't men doing this stuff. I can see men doing the the work, but there's not enough of them. That's the problem. There's not enough of them to create the change. There needs to be a shit ton more of them, otherwise, we're going to go around in circles again.

SPEAKER_01:

The thing is that we we also need men to just realize that they don't have to put themselves on a pedestal to do it. So men are the the key to ending male violence is men. Women are not going to do that because we're not men, we don't live as men, we don't exist in their brain space or their bodies. We just can't fucking do that, right? And we don't have influence on their male mates. We don't have uh men have influence in this country, they have much more influence than women, right? So, for example, male power brokers in parliament, they have the ability to change laws and to lobby to change laws, and yet they don't. Men are the key to ending male violence, and they're the key to providing the appropriate support networks that we need, and not just support networks for women in crisis, for perpetrators. Now, I know that in every state the perpetrator programs are overwhelmed with demand and unable to serve us. So we have men who want to change, who acknowledge I've got a fucking problem, I need to do something about this. They're knocking on the door of the programs, and the programs are saying there's a six-month wait, there's a 12-month wait. We can't fit you in. That's not good enough. You know, we're asking men to change, we're asking men to have these conversations, we're asking men to do all of these things, and there are men, and they are going, they are acknowledging their problem, and when they go to get that fucking help, it's not there. Why would they keep persisting? They're not gonna persist. For a moment, they have that mind frame, for a little moment. Possibly that mind frame is gonna change, and you know, they're not gonna change. And if we can't even provide bare minimum resources for perpetrator programs, there's no way we're gonna fix this fucking mess. And by we, I mean men. Women are just here talking about it, advocating, picking up the pieces, sharing the stories, begging for funding, opening fucking refuges where they can. We've been doing this for you know as long as women have existed. But yeah, men aren't having those conversations and yeah, just and they're not they're not doing the little things.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, and it and then when they are doing the little things, the little things aren't supported.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_00:

So, how do you hold the tension between needing to amplify, I guess, the message but not wanting to commercialize trauma?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, look, it's a this is a really hard space to work in because I I think that a lot of people don't understand the importance of the work I do. So they don't understand the amount of hours it actually takes to document each death. So a death is not just documented when I put a post up. That person's um case is going to be followed through until we get a closure, until I can write entry finalized on my database. Currently, I've got 2,500 women and children on the database and it grows every day with historical deaths and current deaths. Um and around 75% of those cases are not closed yet. So it's an ongoing, it has to be followed through, right? So that takes time, a lot of time. So I don't get paid for that. I provide a range of advocacy and support services for family impacted by um femicide and child murders. So that might be something as simple as teaching them how to run their own justice campaign, teaching them how to respond to media requests for interviews, teaching them how to use Canva, teaching them how to navigate the court system. What do you do when you go into a courtroom? This is what you do, what can you do, what can't you do? Teaching them how to apply for um documents from the coroner's court. Uh, you know, there's all of this fucking stuff, all right? And so that's that's being done. There's also, you know, the the murals, the two murals that I've got going, um, the podcast, the story writing, the liaison with media, the liaison with families, um, Stacy's Sanctuary. All of this is done on crowdfunding. Uh, t-shirt sales and crowdfunding. That's how it's all paid for. I don't get any government grants. I'm really lucky I got a very small sponsor for um the podcast, which will pay for around 15 episodes. So, you know, it's not like there's this giant pool of money here. So it's really hard to balance um writing about the killing of women and children and amplifying their deaths and making people aware of them, and trying to say to people, in order to do all of this work, I gotta bring in some money. Yeah, I gotta, I've got to cover the costs associated with it. I've got to somehow eke out a living, um, you know, to do what I do. It's such a fucking push-ball. And it's really hard, and I hate it. I don't like asking for money, and I don't like asking people to buy t-shirts, but it's the only fucking way that I can do it. And so, yeah, it's really hard, and and I haven't found the balance yet. I don't know if there's ever going to be a perfect balance. One thing I have found is that when I find uh misogynistic posts, for example, that um restaurant that, you know, posted a reel of a man smashing a woman's face with a hamburger, you know, I can put my t-shirts on the end of that and hopefully someone will buy a t-shirt, you know, and that that might cover, you know, that I might get 20 bucks out of that post if I'm lucky. So that's really, yeah, it's just really hard. I'm not a business person, I'm not an e-commerce person. It's a fucking struggle and it sits heavy on my shoulders all the time. I don't know. I wish there was a magic fairy who could just come and do all of this shit for me. Don't get don't get me wrong. I've I've had a lot of really great support and um, you know, I've I've had a lot of great support. I've I've got the you know the rebranding by you, I've got um a team here in Melbourne who've decided to get some models together, put them in a studio, and um shoot some some photos and some reels uh of my product, which is really great. You know, all of that's being done pro bono, which is amazing. Um, you know, I I get people holding fundraisers and they donate the money to me where possible. And and you know, uh the people buy my t-shirts. But like everything, you know, you just gotta you gotta be always thinking with the e-commerce brain and the advocacy brain and the activism brain and just trying to do what you do. But I would say last night, and and I I'm pretty sure she won't mind me talking about this, so I'm not gonna name her. But I've been working with the mum of a woman allegedly murdered um for about a year and a half now. Um I'm sorry, for a bit over a year now, and I've been helping them campaign uh to get justice and stuff like that. And look, last night she called me and she was in a really bad way. She's really struggling with losing her daughter, really struggling, and like almost every mum who has walked in her shoes, you know, she she was at the point of ending her own life. And um, you know, she's she's booked into a place where she can um get some mental health support. And she called me to tell me she was really angry about that post about um, you know, the the restaurant that's using uh violence against women to promote their product, and she wanted to call me because she called that restaurant and she said to them, This is not acceptable. My daughter died as a result of domestic and family violence. What's the joke? You know, she was really and she wanted to tell me that she'd done this, and then she told me, you know, what was going on in her life, and I got off the phone, and these are the people that I do the work for, these are my boss, she's my boss. Every family I work with is my boss, and I'm really lucky and humbled to be able to do that, and so the headache with the e-commerce and trying to navigate that balance is really offset by the fact that I know that the work I do has made a difference to her and her family, and the work I do will make a difference to a lot of other families, and so you know, you just suck up it, suck it up and get on with it, and um always think about you know these situations and the fact that what I do will never be as hard as the um path that this mum has to walk every fucking day.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, and I think it's it really just does come down to I think what you're what you're providing with your platform is the storytelling attribute. We all know that when something happens, which isn't happening in the media currently, is that the story element that's attached creates empathy and the drive to want to to create change and do something. And when they're not being named and they're not having, we all know this whenever there's a big disaster. There is selected people that they choose and they follow their story and they give you the emotional alignment so that people can empathize with whatever has happened. And if they're not doing that to the victims on the news, people simply can't empathize with the subject. So I think that you're doing that, right? I think that that's uh really important. And one thing I think about this is that um, I guess from a branding point of view, is most people think branding is logos and you know, a tagline or some colours or whatever, but your work is a brand in itself. And I think that when we see it's a movement built on trust and truth and discomfort, how do you see your brand through the lens of activism?

SPEAKER_01:

Look, I I've never given much thought to the brand idea. A lot of people have said to me that I need to, you know, work on the brand and all of that sort of stuff. And I guess, I guess because I'm just so incredibly grassroots and I'm just so focused on what I do, that that that has been maybe, you know, the 50th thing on my list of things to organize. Um it's really, you know, look, it's just it's I like I said, I'm just not a I'm not a business person. I'm a journalist who just doesn't want women and kids to be murdered anymore. Um, and so that is my sole focus. And and yeah, I've when I think about branding, I think about, you know, I don't want it to be commercial, but I also want it to be professional, but I don't want it to be too polished because I'm really grassroots and really, you know, I swear and and I want it to reflect my personality. Um, I have no idea how that is supposed to look, but also it has to be respectful and it has to, you know, be kind and gentle because the people I work with, the they need kind and they need gentle as well as advocacy and empowerment and strength. So yeah, there's a lot there, and it it's just way beyond my my brain cell's um ability.

SPEAKER_00:

It was even funny, I think, when we were talking about the, you know, earlier in the year when we was we were starting the project, and I mentioned something about that we needed to handle it with sensitivity. And someone actually replied back to me, no, we don't need sensitivity, blah, blah, blah. And I was just like, look, I understand what you're thinking in that, but it does require sensitivity because I'm not saying to diminish rage, because we absolutely need rage. However, we're also talking about victims here.

SPEAKER_01:

We're talking about people's people 100%. Yeah, we're talking about people who are mourning people and will do, you know, the grief that comes with homicide is so incredibly different to other grief because they're the layers of complexity are much worse. There's the the belief that you could have saved a person's life, there's the failure before they were killed, the failures in the just the legal system, the failures by police, the failures by the services. There's all of these points where a woman's life could have been saved, right? There's um the guilt that a family carries, there's the constant reminders that their person has been taken. You know, there's all of this stuff. And I know from people I've known for 30, 35 years who have lost someone to violence, that level of grief is exactly the same today as it was 30 or 35 years ago. It doesn't fucking change. It doesn't, as people say, time heals all wounds. This wound never heals. And so when people come to my website or when they engage with my work, um, I want them to know that I give a fuck, that I care about the person, and that I'm not um, you know, that I'm trying to treat that person with as much respect as possible whilst maintaining the rage. I think we can do both things. I think we can um we can be sympathetic and kind and gentle and also angry. Rage doesn't always have to be a fist in the air.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, yeah, I agree with that completely. I really do. That's what I was and it's it's also you have to be able to have the wording to articulate that. And I think we found this, uh, we found this when we did our little bit of a research just by what people think of certain words and how they respond to certain words. And obviously, you need a big pool of data for that. But it's I think that a lot of the time people put their own perception on something, and until you've really lived in that world, you you couldn't, you can only see from the outside in, and you really, when you're talking about the actual the most important person or the people that uh the most important um, I guess, role for your brand are the ones that have been affected directly.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, as I said, the families are my boss. You know, they don't actually employ me, but I think of them as the person who employs me. They are my boss, I am answerable only to them. I everything else I'm answerable to me, but those families, that's my they, you know, they say something, then I, you know, if they say to me, Look, I really appreciate what you're doing, but can you take her name off? I will absolutely take her name off. And she becomes an unnamed woman, and I'll take her photo off, and she will be de-identified until the point when they're happy for me to identify her. So yeah, that I am answerable to them and them alone, and everything I do, I have to think with that cup, you know. I have to go write how's this. I I did a post the other day about um a judge's response to a woman killed, and it was an astounding response and one that we should see normalized. But also, when I was doing that post, I was like, there's a grieving mum and dad here. So if I go in and say, you know, why is he doing it for her, but not everyone else? It's basically saying she's not important enough, and that is hurtful, and so the phrasing on that has to be really careful, and so it was really like this is something we should normalize, you know. She deserves it, every woman deserves it. Let this let's make this normal practice, yeah. And so, yeah, so that's what what I'm thinking when I'm doing a post.

SPEAKER_00:

It's yeah, it's so nuanced, isn't it? I think when we look at it's language, and I think this is a thing where we I think when everyone's got a voice now online, their language has been diluted, or or it's just or people can say things and be taken out of translation. But I think I guess what in your experience, what role does storytelling play in breaking through the compassion fatigue?

SPEAKER_01:

Oh, look, I think a well-told story works really like it does work, but you you're not gonna break through compassion fatigue if people aren't open to it.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

Um, I guess at the end of the day, no matter the person's story, no matter how moving, no matter how well told, if a if another person has reached the limit, then you're not gonna break through that. And really, at that point, that person needs to step back and give themselves a break. Just step back to like, don't consume any of this for a month or six months or 12 months. It's not unusual for people to come into my DMs and say, Hey, look, I really love your work, but I've got to unfollow for a while. I can't deal. And that is perfectly okay. Because yeah, you are gonna get compassion fatigue, and when you get too fatigued, you don't care, and it's very easy to go, you know, right off path. So my stories, the stories I tell, no matter how brilliant they are, if you if you've hit the wall, it's not gonna make a difference. You just need to definitely switch off, dip out.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, there's a lot of things happening simultaneously in the world right now that can be. Oh my god, there's so much. I think that it's a lot of it kind of comes from, I guess, the uh that anxious state of you want to do something but you don't know how to do something. So I think that there's a difference between I guess empathy and action. From your perspective, what's the psychological shift that can actually get people to move?

SPEAKER_01:

You know what? I think that we need to there's the shift, whether it's psychological or not, um, I guess in a way it is, it's thinking about what shape does activism take. All right, so you see me, I'm in your face. I, you know, that's how my activism is, that's how it works, that's how I want it to be. But is it the right way of active activism? I would say to you that the best activists in the world, the best are the ones who do the little things. And those little things they're doing, we don't call them activism, but we fucking should. So, for example, you hear uh a woman screaming next door, and you pick up that phone and you call 000 and you report that you think she's in danger, and then you go next door and you might knock on the door to see if she's okay. That is activism. You know, you don't call it activism, but the fact that you reach out is activism. So when a woman says to you, um, or you see a woman who you know is your friend is being abused by a partner, you know she's being abused, but you're really frustrated because she won't do anything about it, she won't leave him. So your activism here is not um is what you do with that frustration. So instead of being frustrated and breaking the friendship, you activate by saying to her, sitting her down and saying, Hey, look, I feel like things are pretty tough for you at the moment. I'm not gonna make you talk to me about them, but I just want you to know that when you're ready to have that conversation, I'm here and I won't ever judge you. And if you ever need help to be in a safe space, please let me know. That is activism. So, yeah, so we need to really change our mind mind frame around what activism is because not everyone is going to have the capacity, the energy, the ego, I guess, or all of the things to be in your face. Your activism, the little activisms are the ones that save lives.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, it's the small behavior traits, yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

It's just it's it's not even like think of activism as the little things we do. So, you know, telling the guy next to you to stop um making rape jokes about the woman working behind the bar, that is activism, you know. Activism, don't let's not let's not just put it into this um very kind of limited definition. Let's think of it as bigger picture and let's encourage people to do the little activisms when they can and if it's safe.

SPEAKER_00:

And it's also like um I like showing up periodically in my stories of just talking about certain things that I'm thinking of, and then bit by bit you start to talk about just different ways of looking at circumstances where people can kind of have the ability to change their mind in their own time.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

And I think that that's really important because as we know and you would know, when we're angry, we can take blame, but people don't respond to getting, you know, demonized. But if you can come at them in a way of compassion, which also I guess when you're really angry about something, then you get the whole, why should we be nice to them? And it's like, I know, but it's like the the end goal is change, right? And what we're putting in between that is our emotion to it. Like we're pissed, right? I get it, I'm pissed too. Um, I wear shirts all the time that showcase my values in very prominent places specifically because I want to spark a reaction, but not everyone's like that either. Um, sometimes I have to change my shirt before I go to school because I'm like, oh, that's not socially appropriate. Yeah, you know, someone flipping the double fingers, or you know, my F Murdoch shirt that I have with Grace Tame that I wear quite a lot. I love that shirt. Um, and Charlotte sells that, by the way, you should go buy it. Um, and yeah, it is really just about um doing it in little ways or having conversations with friends around the table. I did this recently with um a group of friends bringing up a topic that no one really wanted to talk about and watching them squirm. And I said, Look, I'm not here to, I'm just questioning. You know, if you have the ability to switch off, you can. But my my question to you is if you can do a bit of reading on it in your own time, then maybe just look into it. And then that's where it kind of ended. And then since then, people have come and said something to me about I have had a chance and I do. And so it's letting them, I guess, read it in their own time. Um, and the one of the ads that came out that I spoke about straight away was the Gillette ad. I don't know if you've ever seen that one. The it was the best the man can get. Yeah, toxic masculinity, it was done in 2019.

SPEAKER_01:

Um I remember that.

SPEAKER_00:

Amazing ad. As soon as it came out, I was like, whoa, that was bravo. Uh, and a lot of, and this was a really interesting take on LinkedIn, where a lot of people obviously you get the stand and they were talking about we're gonna boycott and we're gonna do this, and you know, I don't agree with it. But and then I was thinking on the other side, I said, in what freaking mind does uh most men ever do the shopping? This ad was very clever in the way that it was shifting, having a very good cultural moment. They did have to take it off air or I'll have, you know, but it was it it has stuck with me ever since that ad came out. Really interesting point. And I've had discussions with uh people that I know around this ad. And I remember specifically having a discussion with a guy. Um and I said, What do you he goes, oh something, something the Gillette ad. And I said, Can I ask you a question? What makes you angry about that ad? And he said, Well, they're painting all men as bad. And I said, What are they though? I said, Because if you actually watch the ad from end to end, there are a group of men that stand by and there are a group of men that step in.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

I said, What I find really interesting is that you said that they're painting men all bad, which means that you've then taken the side of the of the men that's standing by because you see yourself more as that guy. And there was dead silence.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

Then I'm not judging you on anything. I'm just saying and highlighting the point that you know, you wouldn't have taken offense if you saw yourself as that guy. That ad would not have been in any way offending to you because you would have been like, yeah, for those guys stepping in, except you didn't. And that I think sat with him for a really long time because I brought this up again in the conversation was around, I think that society has changed. And I said, No, you've changed.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

And that's a good thing, right? So and I think that it is we see these like I think it just wasn't ready at that time. I said it wasn't ready at that time for where society was at that time. I said, but that means as a collective, we're moving. And I said, and it's bloody slow, change is slow, right? To get something like this, like, and we've discussed this that what we're what we're doing right now is more about the awareness stage, right? The action stage comes, it's these are generational things.

SPEAKER_01:

This is Yeah, but but the thing is we've been women have been doing this for centuries, like yeah, as I said, since women started having to do it, which is many grandmothers ago. The action stage was a long time ago. It just, you know, the male action stage has been there all this time. They just refuse to do it. Yeah, and they refuse to acknowledge it and they refuse to change, and obviously not all fucking men. Um, but yeah, like how many more women have to die before the action stage kicks in?

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

Um yeah, I don't it's not gonna happen in my lifetime, it won't happen in your children's lifetime. Yeah, and do you know what? The same thing as the thing is that the men, the men saying not all men right now are saying it to their kids, and their kids are going to be saying it to their kids, and so on. And yeah, I I mean we are past the action stage. We are just fucking past it.

SPEAKER_00:

I'm just hoping that as a mother of two boys here, uh what I'm pushing into my kids can help to counteract, I guess, the kids of those guys. Do you know what I mean?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I hope so, and I'm sure it will.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, I mean there is a different breed coming through. I think that and I also think uh women need to understand the role that they have in this as well. I think that a lot of the times we and and and obviously it is it's a men's issue, but women play a huge role. There is so much internalized misogyny that I see across the board. And I I sit with women who and you can tell they will like you one thing, for instance, is um, you know, someone will say to me, You're really lucky that your husband helps. And I'm like, What do you mean helps? Fuck off. And and I don't realize the people don't realize that they're saying he's going shit, right? And I'm not congratulations, husband.

SPEAKER_01:

You get a cookie.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, and like we've had these discussions, both him and I, and I understand completely that not it is not all men. I'm fully aware of that.

SPEAKER_01:

The fact that we have to say not all men at the end of most things. Like, you know, the fact that we have to say it shows that clearly it is far too many men. My saying, in fact, if I use that, I will often say not all men, but almost always a man.

SPEAKER_00:

Yes.

SPEAKER_01:

You know what I mean? It just needs that little uh because I am sick of fucking saying that shit.

SPEAKER_00:

Thanks for talking with us today, Sherelle. But I have one question that I would like to ask you. What does belonging mean to you in a world where safety isn't guaranteed?

SPEAKER_01:

Oh, that's kind of a a hard one. Um, belonging is a really hard one because for most of my life I haven't belonged. I've always felt um disenfranchised from everything. So um look at me, I've got white skin, but my mum is Aboriginal, and so I have this incredibly white skin, and my parents decided to raise us more white than black, and so I never felt quite right in the black world and never felt quite right in the in the white world, and that that had a lot of things came up um during my younger years that related to that. Um, going to school, I never fit in. Uh just even being a journalist, you know, I I never fit in. I always had imposter syndrome, I always felt like I was never good enough, you know, wasn't um good enough to be with the cool kids or anything like that. Um that said, in the the space that I've made online, I feel a sense of belonging, and that that helps me feel safer in getting my message out. Do you know what I mean? Because I know that when I put the message out, that most of the people are gonna support what I'm saying, most of them are gonna get what I'm saying, right? And if someone shitty comes in and decides to make me feel unsafe, they're gonna have my back.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

So yeah, so definitely having on in the online world, in the social media world, um feeling like I belong has made a huge difference to the advocacy I do. Um, yeah, and I yeah, I guess that that kind of is where I see that intersection, but it's it is a hard question for me to answer.

SPEAKER_00:

It is, it is. I guess lastly, what do you do for you to make sure that you're getting the right, I guess, balance of mental health and advocacy to make sure that you're doing your job and having a safe life for you?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, so look, I have some rules around that. One of the rules is I make sure that my partner is not identified online, um, so that because I've had uh threats against partners in the past, so for me, making sure that her safety is a priority is very important, not just her physical safety, but her emotional safety. Um, I kind of, you know, everyone, anyone can reach me on the mobile or on the, you know, via internet, which is fine. But I, you know, am fairly cagey about where I live with people. I just won't tell that to strangers, so I'm very protective of that sort of stuff. Um, I guess other things that I do mental health-wise and safety right, well, definitely mental health-wise, is I give myself permission to dip out. So if it becomes too much, uh, I will take a day off and just kind of disengage the best that I can. Having that permission to dip out is really important because you can't stay in this for a long time if you don't prioritize your own mental health. Uh, some of the things I do is I I walk very early every morning. I um ride my motorbike on beautiful sunny days like today. And yeah, I just, you know, just I chill and and and do my thing and watch stupid TV, not crap TV, just stupid TV. But yeah, I think at the end of the day, it's about just um being aware of when a mental health, when the mental health is being impacted, and you know, actually giving my permission myself permission to tune out. I mean, right now I I probably need a month off, so it's very hard to find that month. Um, and I'm trying to work out a way that I can do that, and as soon as I can, I will take it because I know that the the past three or four weeks have been particularly heavy, and it's because it's been a very heavy two years, and always at the end of the year it is it gets much harder for me because we see a a rise in deaths and and just the whole year of of femicide and child deaths kind of just weigh very heavy on you in that these last this last quarter. So, yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

I'm glad that you are looking at doing that because it's very much needed. So you we don't want you to burn out and we Yes.

SPEAKER_01:

I'm I'm kind of wondering if I if I can just go to Alaska. I want to go to Alaska. I haven't said anything to my partner, she would probably die.

SPEAKER_00:

Like, what are you doing? But you just honestly, like Alaska, like with no phone and no nothing.

SPEAKER_01:

Completely 100% for a month. Yeah, totally. And hopefully it's the dark night, the the dark days over there, because I could just I love the night. So I could just love being in the dark and the cold. So I don't know, I don't think it's gonna happen, but in my head it's happening.

SPEAKER_00:

Well, as always, I just want to say a big thank you for the work that you do. I think it's um it's undervalued by a lot of people, but hugely valued by me. And that's obviously why I wanted to work with you because I think that you're amazing. So um, as usual, I will sprout your name across the rooftops. But I think that um something that's really important is that I think that everyone needs to jump on and support the Red Heart campaign, whether that's buying a shirt or donating some money, because without uh the donations to Sherelle, she cannot do the work that she does. And what would be amazing is for her to get enough to you know bring in a team so that she's not doing this on her own and she has a life to live um as well as her uh hardcore advocacy um for a lot of women and children. So yeah, thanks uh for jumping on, Sherelle. I think it's um it's a really important topic and again appreciate all the work that you're doing today.

SPEAKER_01:

No worries, thank you for having me, and I look forward to listening to the end result.

SPEAKER_00:

Now, of course, if you would like to support Sherelle and her work, I will drop all of the links where you can access her in the show notes. But if Lisa has brought up any issues and you would love someone to chat with, please know that there are supports out there for you to reach out to. And I will also drop those in the show notes. But until then, I will chat to you and it's worth it. Did you like that episode? I hope so. Because if you did, why don't you head over to whatever platform you're listening on and write and review? It's much appreciated and helps others know what we're about. If you want to follow us, you can find us at you on a known life underscore AU on Instagram or head to www.ywananolike.com.au.

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Tara Ladd

Host