Shelter from the storm

In recent years, as a community, we’ve made a lot of noise about ending violence against women. But is it just that – noise? If we were truly determined to stop the violence, Anne Summers tells The Weekly, we would be much more serious about supporting those who risk everything to escape it.

- SAMANTHA TRENOWETH

Trailblazing feminist and author, and a founder of Australia’s first women’s refuge, Anne Summers has been battling to end violence against women for almost 50 years. “Soon after I moved to Sydney, in my early twenties,” Anne recalls, “I was startled by a loud knocking on the door of the house in Newtown that I shared with other students. We did not know the woman who pleaded with us to let her in so she could escape her violent boyfriend. Shortly afterwards, there was more loud knocking, this time from the boyfriend, demanding that the woman come out. We called the police.”

And that was just the beginning. A few months later, in a different share house, there was once again a desperate knocking. “We opened the door,” Anne tells The Weekly, “to a frantic young woman holding a baby. She had somehow scaled the brick wall between our houses to get away from her husband’s violence.”

These two incidents changed Anne’s life, powerfully bringing home to her both the prevalence of family violence and the desperate need of the women escaping it for shelter and support.

In 1974, she and a group of fellow activists squatted in a deserted house in Glebe, and there they founded Elsie, Australia’s first refuge for women and children fleeing abuse. A year later, Anne’s first article as a journalist for The National Times explored the challenges that continued to beset those women after their time at the refuge ended.