My home has become a courtroom: unintended consequences of lockdown

My housemate is a family law barrister. I didn’t think about this much when we first met. Little did either of us realise that just a few weeks after moving in together we would also be sharing a workspace due to Victoria’s COVID-19 restrictions. Remote work means that family court proceedings are now taking place in our home.

In 1993, an Irish family court decision failed my mother, my siblings and I, leaving us homeless. I don’t directly hear or see any of my housemate’s work but knowing that family court matters are taking place in my home has had a palpable effect on me.

I wrote about my thoughts on what it means for family court sessions to be happening inside the home, from my perspective as both a person with lived experience and my work as an evaluator.

Read the article here.

We might not be in a position to talk

But we can listen, and we can act, wherever we are. Remember, it’s not just America.
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“The reason that black people are in the streets has to do with the lives they’re forced to lead in this country. And they’re forced to lead these lives by the indifference, and the apathy, and a certain kind of ignorance – a very willful ignorance – on the part of their co-citizens.”*
— James Baldwin explains the riots of 1968

“The great evil of American slavery wasn’t the involuntary servitude; it was the fiction that black people aren’t as good as white people, and aren’t the equals of white people, and are less evolved, less human, less capable, less worthy, less deserving than white people. That ideology of white supremacy was necessary to justify enslavement, and it is that legacy of slavery that we haven’t acknowledged. This is why I have argued that slavery didn’t end in 1865, it evolved.”
— Interview with Bryan Stevenson, Civil Rights Lawyer

“I don’t want to see stores looted or even buildings burn. But African Americans have been living in a burning building for many years, choking on the smoke as the flames burn closer and closer.”
— Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Don’t understand the protests? What you’re seeing is people pushed to the edge

“Just because you don’t have your knee on our throat, it doesn’t mean you’re not holding us down. I’m afraid that if we don’t use this momentum to think critically about our own situation and what we can do to make a better Australia for every Australian, then the next (inevitable) death will pass and we’ll have no justice and no answers.”
— Brooke Boney, So tell me again how ‘all lives matter’

Also: it’s long past time to pay the rent.