Crisis response is only one part of supporting women

I have always felt deeply passionate about supporting women in crisis.

That moment when a woman finds the Herculean strength to leave an abusive partner. To escape with her children—sometimes in the middle of the night, sometimes without even a bag of possessions.

The organisations that support women in those moments have long held my deepest gratitude, respect and admiration. The shelters, emergency lines and crisis services that are there for a woman on the day she needs them most.

These organisations save lives. I am immensely proud to support them.

It is why, when we toured my play The Culture, we supported women’s crisis organisations in each city we visited. We wanted to tell an important story, but we also wanted to give audiences somewhere to direct the feelings and conversations the play brought up.

Together, through our own donations and contributions from our audiences, we raised $14,646 for Wellington Women’s Refuge and Te Whare Rokiroki Māori Women’s Refuge in Wellington; Western Adelaide Domestic Violence Service, part of Women’s Safety Services SA, in Adelaide; Hobart Women’s Shelter in Hobart; Guthrie House in Sydney; and Safe Steps in Melbourne.

These organisations save lives. I remain incredibly proud that our audiences helped us support their work.

But over the past few years—through my writing, my plays, my philanthropy and many conversations with people doing this work every day—I have come to understand that crisis response is one part of a much bigger picture.

I used to think about support almost entirely in terms of what happened at the point of crisis.

The more I have learned, the more I have understood how much vital work happens long before a woman asks for help—and how much is still needed long after the immediate danger has passed.

Support doesn’t begin with a crisis.

And it certainly doesn’t end there.

When my husband and I established the Robson Jackson Foundation, and I expressed a desire to support efforts addressing domestic and family violence, I quickly learned just how many points of intervention there are.

There is prevention: helping young people develop healthy relationships, educating communities and challenging harmful attitudes before violence occurs.

There is crisis response: providing emergency accommodation, legal assistance, counselling and safety planning for women and children when they need it most.

And there is recovery: walking beside survivors as they rebuild their confidence, independence, careers, financial security and safe, stable lives for themselves and their children.

Understanding this has changed the way I think about giving.

Yes, I want our philanthropy to respond to immediate and urgent need. But I also want to support work that may prevent some of that need from arising in the first place.

And yes, women need help on the extraordinarily difficult day they leave. But they also need support in the weeks, months and years that follow.

That is why I have supported organisations helping boys develop healthier ideas about masculinity and more respectful attitudes towards women and girls, including The Man Cave and Top Blokes.

It is also why I have backed organisations supporting women, mothers and families as they rebuild after violence, including Waminda, Jannawi and the Women’s Resilience Centre.

And it is one reason I continue to support female storytellers as another piece of this larger puzzle.

The more women’s experiences we see on our stages, screens and pages, the more opportunities we have to understand them, empathise with them and recognise what may be happening in our own lives or in the lives of people we love.

Stories cannot replace crisis accommodation, legal assistance, research or policy reform.

But gathering an audience around the right story at the right moment can unlock something that facts alone may not.

Through stories, we access feeling, empathy, insight and interiority. We walk in the shoes of women whose lives may look completely different from our own. Stories can help people recognise controlling behaviour before it escalates. They can give language to experiences someone has struggled to name. And they can begin conversations that might otherwise never happen.

Sometimes, those are exactly the conversations we need to move society’s needle.

The more I have explored these ideas through projects like The Culture, and through listening to writers, journalists, advocates and people working directly with women, the more I have realised that changing culture is rarely the work of one person or one organisation.

It takes researchers, teachers, social workers, journalists, police, lawyers, counsellors, volunteers, artists, community leaders and countless others whose work most of us will never see.

Each reaches people in a different way.

I do not pretend to be an expert in this space. I am still learning. But these conversations have taught me that supporting women is not one decision we make.

It is thousands of decisions made by people with different skills, experiences and perspectives.

There is no single right way to contribute.

It takes prevention, crisis response, recovery, education, research, advocacy, storytelling and countless acts of generosity. I am grateful to the people doing that work.
And I am grateful to contribute in the ways that I can.