As Federal Circuit and Family Court director, Hayley Foster’s job is to make people “uncomfortable” as she helps the court respond to family violence cases.
NSW Police have received more than two dozen reports of coercive control in the first month since it became a criminal offence. One person has been charged, and it’s partly thanks to this woman.
The privacy is something Foster appreciates. She’s faced abuse and violence in her previous roles as the chief executive of Full Stop and Women’s Safety NSW, where she was an outspoken advocate and prolific on social media. Her new role is to enhance the court’s ability to respond to family violence. She says part of her job consists of “making people uncomfortable”. Foster asks difficult questions about whether court proceedings harm rather than help.
Her mum Pamela Foster worked for the NSW Women’s Refuge Resource Centre, helping get women out of dangerous situations in the 1980s and 1990s. “I remember being in the car and trying to get somebody out of the house while we knew the partner was out. So we’d go and help her get her and her stuff – we’d always have to park the car so we could get out quickly,” Foster says.
But toxicity has come also from others who are fighting to end gendered violence, as organisation leaders – carrying their histories of violence and trauma – fight for scraps of funding. It seems Foster never stops moving, but there was a time when she couldn’t sit up for longer than 10 minutes. Around 2009, while pregnant with her second child in Lismore and working in a range of community legal and safety roles, she suffered a mini-stroke.
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