A man has been charged with murder after his wife was stabbed to death in her home in the Melbourne suburb of Sandhurst on Saturday. She is the 42nd woman to be killed violently this year in Australia.
Nelomie Perera, 44, and her husband Dinush Kurera, 45, had recently separated when the alleged attack took place, according to 9 News.
Chilling CCTV video shared by 7 News captured horrifying footage of Perera’s 16-year-old daughter banging on her neighbour’s door late at night.
“Please, please, please, please, please, please, please!”, the teenager can be heard begging for help in the video.
“We’re coming, we’re coming, we’re coming,” a neighbour can be heard yelling in response.
After a woman answered the door, the teenager could be heard saying: “He’s cutting her with a knife, he’s like full-on bashing her with a knife.”
“She was just saying, ‘My mum’s dead, my mum’s dead’,” neighbour Paul Vaviti, who tried to help Perera, told 9News.
Kurera also allegedly attacked the couple’s teenage son. The boy escaped with a non-life-threatening head injury and is being treated in hospital.
In Australia, an average of one woman a week is killed by a current or former partner. Perera is the 42nd woman to be killed violently in Australia this year, according to gender equality activist account Counting Dead Women. To put that into perspective, we’re 49 weeks into the year.
Just earlier this month, pregnant Noongar woman Dianne Miller was killed after she was hit in the head with a chunk of concrete while sitting in her car. The ABC found Indigenous women are murdered at up to 12 times the national average.
In October, a 74-year-old man confessed to killing his wife in their Bronte home in Sydney. That same month, a 19-year-old man was charged with murder after his ex-girlfriend’s body was found in Queensland bushland.
In August, five Australian women were killed by violence allegedly perpetrated by men in one week.
In July, a NSW man was charged with murder after a woman went missing from her Dural home. Her body was found in local bushland later that week. She was a mother, too.
May was Domestic and Family Violence Prevention Month, in which we saw two women killed in one weekend. It was only the fifth month of the year, and 22 women had already lost their lives to violence from men.
Sadly, there are so many more cases that I won’t mention here. According to domestic violence prevention organisation Our Watch, almost 10 women a day are hospitalised for assault injuries perpetrated by a spouse or domestic partner. And those are the women we have statistics for — how many fall through the cracks?
The point is: violence against women, especially family and intimate partner violence, is endemic in this country and it’s not getting better.
While we like to think we’ve all come a long way in the way our society treats women, the high-profile Bruce Lehrmann trial and the fact it was recently dropped because of the vitriol Brittany Higgins faced for reporting her alleged rapist is a clear example that we haven’t.
Woman are still ridiculed when they come forward with allegations of abuse or sexual assault, they are still disbelieved — either by those around them or misogynistic police officers — and they still remain unprotected by court processes that re-traumatise them, often with no justice delivered in the end anyway.
Men still murder women, often women who they claim to have once loved.
And we still mourn them.
When does the cycle end?
Help is available.
If you require immediate assistance, please call 000.
If you’d like to speak to someone about domestic violence, please call the 1800 Respect hotline on 1800 737 732 or chat online.
Under 25? You can reach Kids Helpline at 1800 55 1800 or chat online.
