Amani Haydar: Amani is a multi-award winning author, visual artist and advocate for women’s health and safety

Peak bodies working to end violence against women in Australia recognise that violence is preventable but condoned and trivialised societally, emboldening perpetrators, and compromising systems of accountability. Amani lost her mother to domestic violence in 2015 and her grandmother was killed in Israeli violence in 2006. Drawing on lived expertise and contemporary conversations around coercive control and primary prevention, Amani will speak about the parallels between interpersonal abuse and state-sanctioned violence. She will examine the way tactics of victim-blaming, gaslighting and DARVO occur at the macro and micro levels and the ways in which survivors engage in creative resistance against these strategies. What are the impacts of these strategies on women and other vulnerable groups? How can feminists engage in more deliberate and meaningful critiques of state-sanctioned abuse in a time of genocide? If both pro-Palestine activists and activists against domestic violence believe that violence can be prevented, what knowledge can be shared across movements to give us a clearer understanding of how power and control is exercised over vulnerable individuals and populations?

Amani’s ground-breaking feminist memoir The Mother Wound, published in 2021, explores the effects of domestic abuse and state-sanctioned violence. As an appointee to the DFSV Commission’s Lived Experience Advisory Council, Amani is one of the country’s leading voices on how gender-based violence can be addressed through improved law, policy, and services. Amani has received the 2021 UTS Faculty of Law Alumni Award and a Parliamentary Community Recognition Statement for her advocacy and was named Local Woman of the Year for Bankstown at the 2020 NSW Women of The Year Awards. Drawing on her legal background, Amani has also served on the boards of Bankstown Women’s Health Centre and the Australian Muslim Women’s Centre for Human Rights and consults with various government and non-government institutions on improving access and outcomes for victim-survivors. As an active visual artist and former Archibald Prize Finalist, Amani collaborates with various organisations to facilitate visual arts and storytelling workshops for victim-survivors from diverse communities.​​