Voices of change: Meet our VSAC members

Annie, VSAC co-chair (she/her)

Annie is a young survivor-advocate committed to driving systems change and improving primary prevention frameworks, crisis responses, and therapeutic healing for children and young people impacted by family and sexual violence.

She joined VSAC with a clear vision: to amplify the voices of children and young people and ensure they are seen, heard and included in critical conversations and decision-making processes.

Annie draws from lived-experience insights of family violence in childhood, intimate partner violence as a young person, and complex mental health challenges. She works to shed light on the severe and lasting physical, emotional, social, and spiritual impacts of violence and abuse. She brings a deep understanding of intersectionality and the ways in which overlapping forms of oppression shape victim-survivors’ experiences and the systemic barriers that they face.

Annie was awarded the Chisholm Institute’s Higher Education Student of the Year Award after completing the Graduate Certificate in Family Violence. In addition to lived expertise, she brings professional experience in education, mental health, homelessness, and is a Specialist Family Violence Practitioner for children and young people.

Katie, VSAC co-chair (she/her)

Katie is a writer, health professional, and lived experience leader whose work is grounded in human rights. Katie is passionate about social justice and creative growth. Her journey has been shaped by profound personal loss, including domestic abuse, disability, and financial hardship.

Inspired by the survivor stories of Rosie Batty and Anne O’Neill, Katie rebuilt her life with a focus on supporting others. Connecting with victim survivors continues to guide her recovery and underpin her leadership.

Today, Katie uses her lived expertise and background as a journalist and a health professional to help people find ways of overcoming systemic oppression. Through her work on advisory groups, governance roles, community organisations, business and philanthropy, Katie is dedicated to ending preventable deaths and harm to Australian women – a crisis she recognises as the nation’s most urgent law and order issue.

She believes the knowledge, wisdom and imagination of victim survivors are driving a paradigm shift: reshaping community understanding of sexual and family violence, and challenging institutions to re-humanise their bureaucracies.

Corey (he/him)

Corey is a survivor of childhood family violence and lives with a hidden disability. He has been an advocate for youth mental health and for people with disability, helping to increase awareness of issues surrounding availability of services. Corey’s work has included helping to design the Royal Children’s Hospital’s Hospital Outreach Post-Suicidal Engagement (HOPE) Program.

Corey is passionate about elevating the voices of those affected by family violence, including those who often feel like they don’t have a voice to speak out with. He recognises the often-intersectional nature of family violence and is focused on supporting members of the LGBTQIA+ community and people with disability.

Having experienced the challenges accessing family violence services first-hand, Corey is determined to increase the accessibility and visibility of services for everyone experiencing family violence. The last three generations of Corey’s family have been impacted by family violence, which is at the root of his commitment to help prevent others enduring the same pain.

Dawn (she/her)

Dawn is a parent and grandparent. She enjoys walking in nature, craft, reading widely and spending time with her cat. She believes in being honest and genuine and tries to always listen with openness to the views of others.

Dawn has a background in education and recently completed a Diploma of Community Service. She has a love of learning new things and sharing that knowledge with others.

Dawn has lived experience of family violence in one form or another, for most of her life resulting in a mental health disability. She has presented information sessions outlining both positive and negative experiences as a National Disability Insurance Scheme participant to National Disability Insurance Agency staff in person and in online forums.

Dawn has particular interests in the difficulties facing older people and those with mental health diagnoses when they try to leave unhealthy relationships. She would like to be involved in discussions around coercive control legislation.

Most of all, Dawn wants to turn her experiences into something positive that means others do not have to endure what she has.

Elizabeth (she/her)

Elizabeth is a lived experience advocate whose work is grounded in compassion, authenticity, and a deep belief in the power of survivor voices to create lasting change.

As a survivor of family and sexual violence, Elizabeth brings both personal insight and professional experience in youth and community work to her advocacy. She is passionate about improving systemic responses to coercive control, sexual violence, and the barriers faced by those in regional and rural areas.

Elizabeth believes that healing and recovery are possible when systems take a whole-person, trauma-informed, and survivor-led approach. Through her role on the Victim Survivors’ Advisory Council, she hopes to help shape more responsive, humane, and connected systems that empower people to rebuild their lives with dignity and hope.

Emily (they/them)

Emily is an award-winning mental health advocate, software engineer, and creative designer. They currently hold roles as a Board Director, consultant, project manager, facilitator, and ambassador.

Emily is informed by their intersectional lived and living experiences. This includes mental ill-health, disability, LGBTQIA+, multiculturalism, neurodivergence, homelessness, family violence, and more.

Emily is currently the Lived Experience Lead with the Royal Children’s Hospital, Metaverse Project Manager with Meta, Board Director with Scope Australia and Midsumma, and a Consultant with UNICEF, Headspace, Beyond Blue, and more. Emily also has founded initiatives to address system gaps, including Multicultural Minds, a multicultural mental health awareness platform.

For their work, Emily was recently awarded 25 Under 25 and 30 Under 30 Awards, Mental Health Advocate of the Year, Youth of the Year, the Disability Leadership Award, Innovation in Protecting Children Award, Children and Youth Empowerment Award, and inducted in the inaugural cohort of the Multicultural Honour Roll.

Helen (she/her)

Helen wishes to make a difference to the world and to give the next generation the power of respect everyone deserves by changing the collective perspectives of society, particularly towards older people. She believes in earlier interventions in family violence, rather than after the fact. She believes in Australia-wide safety on power of attorney and financial matters.

Helen is an older woman who has raised four children and has worked most of her adult life as a nurse and midwife, both in and out of the defence force. She was married for nearly 20 years to another defence force member and moved around a lot due, partly to defence force postings. She has been a single mother since her divorce.

Helen has been involved in include National Ageing Research Institute Ltd, Eastern Community Legal Centre (ECLC), The 4Cs charity and has worked with Scouts for over 30 years. She was also involved with the Monash University and Shored Projects, Architecture and Landscape joint project to create ‘A Design Guide for Older Women’s Housing’. She has been involved with addressing elder abuse through the ECLC’s Elder Abuse Response Services (ELSA) and Rights of Seniors in the East (ROSE) programs.

Helen believes that unless we have walked in another person’s shoes, we cannot fully understand their journey.

Julie-ann (she/her)

Julie-ann is a mother, a grandmother and a survivor of child abuse and family violence as an adult. Drawing on her lived experience, she brings deep insight into navigating the service system.

Julie-ann is a passionate and experienced advocate. She has been an active member of the Regional Family Violence Partnership Implementation Committee and the Margins to the Mainstream advocacy group. Both these groups focused on preventing violence against women with disability.

Known for her honesty, courage and integrity, Julie-ann is also regularly engaged by organisations to provide expert advice on how services can better respond to and support victim survivors.

Lauren (she/her)

As a survivor of family violence as both a child and adult, Lauren is vocal about the link between childhood experiences of abuse and experiences in adulthood. She is open about how trauma can impact the body and mind and shape the way a survivor interacts with the world around them.

Lauren describes advocacy as “alchemy; transformative in its ability to turn experiences into action, and a formative step in my lifelong healing.”

Lauren has a background in public health and works in the family violence sector. She is passionate about uplifting victim survivors, disrupting intergenerational family violence, and ensuring children bare seen as victim survivors in their own right. Lauren wants to see equitable change that addresses the drivers of family violence and the systems that uphold and perpetuate harm.

Beyond her advocacy work, Lauren is a gardener, astrology enthusiast, swimmer, and tea lover. She is a spiritual person and often comes back to the words of Ram Dass, guru of modern yoga, “either you do it like it’s a big weight on you, or you do it as part of the dance."

Lyanne (she/her)

Lyanne has a history that is complex, convoluted, and common across many women with experiences of the criminal justice system.

Her interest in the parentification of eldest daughters in migrant and refugee families and the burden of forced self-sacrifice stems from her own experience.

Lyanne is intrigued by the analysis of human behaviour, as she believes understanding the psychology behind family violence is integral to maintaining sustainable outcomes.

With fire in her eyes and a love for humanity, Lyanne passionately advocates for systemic reform. She aims for multi-sectoral collaboration and reform while highlighting the impacts of intersectionality.

Although Lyanne does advocate across the sectors of mental health, alcohol and other drugs, justice, Corrections, and family violence; there’s a long way to go and she’s just getting started.

Mystina (she/her)

As a proud Kamilaroi woman with six adult children and seven grandchildren, Mystina credits her resilience as a victim survivor to a philosophy of “turning a negative into a positive and learning from it.”

Having experienced Victoria’s family violence support system, Mystina is passionate about improving crisis services and police responses so that people get the help they need, when they need it most.

While Mystina acknowledges she cannot protect the whole world, she believes knowledge is power and educating Victorians about family and sexual violence, the red flags to avoid, and improving support services is critical for real change.

Nelly (she/her)

As an Afghan-born refugee and migrant, a mother to a child with complex health needs, and a victim survivor, Nelly has a deep understanding of the diverse and unique needs of victim survivors.

Drawing on her lived experience, Nelly is passionate about the importance of an intersectional approach to family violence support and promoting systemic change for the next generation.

Nelly is passionate about supporting migrant women who have experienced coercive control and forced marriage, intimate partner violence, sexual coercion and grooming.

Nelly also brings professional skills in cross-cultural safety and trauma-informed approaches as a family violence practitioner and lecturer in youth work, mental health, community services, gender equity and family violence.

Rebeckah (she/her)

Rebeckah is an open and proud transgender woman and lived experience survivor of intimate partner violence. She is the Lived Experience and LGBTIQA+ Practice Lead at FVREE (Free From Family Violence) where she provides best practice guidance for LGBTIQA+ victim survivors of family violence.

Rebeckah is an advisory member for the Zoe Belle Gender Collective’s ‘Transfemme’ project – a website and resources designed to promote healthy relationships between transgender women and cisgender men. Rebeckah joined VSAC to share her lived experience and professional expertise with the Victorian Government.

She wants to see the family violence service system provide better support to LGBTIQA+ people experiencing intimate partner or family violence.

Suze (she/her)

Suze is a Ngarrindjeri woman who grew up in rural Victoria. Her childhood was marred by family violence and the need to develop survival strategies. This experience has had long-term impacts on her health, linking internalised trauma to chronic and complex illnesses.

Suze says she is “hyper aware of the ripple effects caused by the brutality and violence of colonisation, which impacted her father's family and his behaviour toward my mother and siblings. It all contributes to the transgenerational trauma that exists in my life every day.”

Today, Suze is a social worker and family therapist with over 30 years' experience working in public mental health and tertiary education. She is currently a Specialist Family Violence Advisor to the mental health sector, has her own education and consultancy business, and is a member of the Bayside Peninsula Family Violence Partnership.

Suze is passionate about ensuring the voices of First Nations people are always represented in discussions regarding family violence reform. As a determined social justice and equity advocate, Suze is working towards a future where cultural sensitivity and safety is always embedded in mainstream family violence reform and practice – not just for specific First Nations programs.

Zaiba (she/her)

Zaiba joined VSAC in 2023 to bring the voices of women from culturally and linguistically diverse communities to the council. This involves acknowledging that intersectionality plays a significant role in shaping the experiences and challenges faced by individuals within multicultural communities. As a proud member of VSAC, she is driven to create a safer and more supportive world for individuals who have experienced trauma. Through her own lived experience, she wants to spread awareness about the dangers and consequences of coercive control, which can last a lifetime and lead to intergenerational trauma.

Coming from a medical background, Zaiba believes that the severity of coercive control, such as emotional and psychological abuse, have the same effects on the brain as physical abuse, and that many people are not aware of this link. With a strong commitment to empowerment, healing, and positive change, Zaiba is dedicated to leading with empathy, sensitivity and understanding, and mirroring her work to the wise words of Maya Angelou, who once said “my mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style.”