One of the Northern Territory’s top-ranking cops will lead the government’s frontline domestic and family violence operations.
Jeanette Kerr has been named acting deputy chief executive officer for Territory families, a new role that will manage domestic violence, child protection and youth justice under one umbrella.
Kerr has served in the police force for almost 30 years and last year became the NT’s first female assistant police commissioner.
“We are delighted to have someone of Jeanette’s calibre taking the lead on one of the biggest issues facing the Territory – domestic violence,” the Northern Territory families minister, Dale Wakefield, said.
Kerr has outstanding academic qualifications to manage the government’s approach to family violence strategy and reform, Wakefield said.
“She also has years of experience working on the ground across the Territory,” she said.
In 2013 Kerr was awarded a Wakefield scholarship to attend Cambridge University where she completed a masters in criminology and executive management, writing her thesis on Aboriginal partner violence in the NT.
Her work was cited by the NT coroner, Greg Cavanagh, after he called Kerr as an expert witness in a case involving the death of two Aboriginal women in Alice Springs as a result of domestic violence.
Cavanagh’s widely publicised report found domestic and family violence in remote Aboriginal communities was “out of control”.
The rate of family and domestic violence related assaults in the NT is about four times that of any other Australian state or territory. The NT’s population is about 244,000.
The NT police commissioner, Reece Kershaw, recently revealed his officers had responded to 74,811 reports of domestic and family violence in the past three years.
“One child every day in the territory is subject to domestic violence, and three children per day witness domestic violence in the home or on land,” Kershaw said.
The ministry of territory families was newly created by the NT Labor government amid its post-election bureaucratic shakeup, which saw a number of department heads sacked.
The chief minister, Michael Gunner, at the time said the new ministry would better focus the government on child safety, and bring together issues linked by the royal commission into the protection and detention of children.
Youth justice had previously sat under the corrections portfolio, which children’s commissioner this week told the royal commission ran the risk of “blurring the lines” between two very different areas.
Earlier this month Wakefield announced the government would be establishing a trial domestic violence court in Alice Springs, which has seen about 40% of the territory’s domestic violence incidents in the past three years.
With Australian Associated Press
