This article appears on 7NEWS.com.au – you can read the full article here.
Devon Cuimara readily offers up the fact that he was once a violent man.
He left an abusive home and started abusing his own partner until he found a way to break the cycle of family violence. It’s this lived experience that allows him to help others do the same.
“I am the son of a father, who is the son of a father – three generations – who all used violence,” he told 7NEWS.com.au.
“I wasn’t born violent. I grew up with violence, and if you grow up with violence it becomes the norm and I believed it to be the norm because everywhere I looked, it was.”
As Devon says, the problem is widespread.
A 2018 report by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare found Indigenous women are one of the most at-risk groups for family violence, being 32 times more likely to be hospitalised than non-Indigenous women.