A seven-year-old girl can read her father’s mood the second he walks in the door. She is on her feet — distracting, calming, cajoling. She is masterful. Sometimes it works. When it doesn’t and she knows what’s coming next she takes her little sister to their room and closes the door. She puts her arms around her sister and her hands over her ears. She speaks softly, with fast and insistent words to reassure them both, over and over, “Mum will be okay”. Loading This little girl is way more than “exposed to violence”. She lives with it, is on constant alert and she does her creative and courageous best to manage it. In the morning her well-practised eye takes a quick inventory of the hurt. The fear has not left her and this is surely no "incident". It is all she has ever known, and she cannot see an end. And when she worries about whether her mum will be able to get up out of bed to take her to school, it sure as hell is not because of violence “between” anyone. We are getting better at saying who did what to whom. We are getting better at calling out differences in power and we are using plain language to describe awful things. We are coming out from behind words that kept us safe and distant from the children we are here to serve. Next we are asking less about feelings and more about actions. Wherever there is oppression there is resistance. It is powerful knowledge in skillful hands.

We uphold that little girl’s dignity by asking what she did. We see her courage and we help her see it too. We understand she just wants her dad to stop hurting her mum and we hear all the ways she has used her smarts and her kindness to protect and nurture. We see her as innately capable. And at the same time we stop blaming her mum "for not leaving" because we have a better understanding of the fear and threats. We see how much her daughters need her; we see her strengths and we know that she too is doing her best. And then we work hard to keep them together in safety. There was a five-year-old boy who hid under his bed when his mother’s ex-partner broke through the front door and the AVO that was meant to keep him out. His mother suffered a horrific attack in the lounge room; he kept quiet in the bedroom. Later he drew it all in a picture. The face of the offender looms large on the page; the fear he created is obvious. It is in stark contrast to the brightly coloured bedding and the tiny stick figure under the bed, drawn in pale pink pencil. You have to look hard to see there is a boy there at all. Loading The drawing told us he had been frightened. The question of how he felt had been answered. "How did you know how to make yourself so small?" led to a different conversation. "Because I didn't want him to know I was there," said the boy. He made himself invisible – an act of resistance that may well have saved his life. It certainly made his mother proud. Her first worry was his safety. She could survive anything if she knew he was safe. Women hurt by violence demand our attention and respect for all the ways they are protecting and surviving. Their children demand our urgency, curiosity and skill.