Jenni Tarrant is the owner of Canberra-based salon Bond Hair Religion and a survivor of childhood sexual abuse. When she learned about Hair-3Rs she signed up her staff for training.Tarrant told The Feed “We’re not expected to be social workers; we have a list of referrals for people who are trained for that. That said, you just have to hope that if you're referring someone to a social worker or a women’s refuge that those services actually exist. We need to make sure there’s funding out there.”
Nikki, a HaiR-3Rs participant, says, “I now know that when a client is evasive to touch or wants to split their payment between cards, that those may be signs of family violence
To that end, Renee Carr, executive director of the women’s advocacy organisation Fair Agenda says, “The amount of funding proposed [for women’s safety in last week’s federal budget] does not match up with the impact gender-based violence has on our lives and our communities.
“The Treasurer committed just $207.4 million of additional funding for women’s safety next financial year. Even with previous budget commitments, this is a long way off the $1 billion a year that the sector has been calling for.“We are in the midst of a national crisis: the pandemic has worsened the already horrific levels of gender-based violence across the country.”
HaiR-3Rs’ small travelling team of educators have trained just over 1,000 hairdressers. But with more than 70,000 hairdressers across Australia, they have their work cut out for them.
Hudson’s hope is that family violence awareness training will one day soon be a nationally-mandated component of hairdresser apprenticeships and TAFE courses.“We could work with anyone to fashion a program that would take into account the work they do and the connections they might have with family violence. We’ve worked with dentists. We’ve worked with real estate agents. We’ve worked with people who work with animals. We could go anywhere.”*Name changed for privacy.Family violence support services:
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1800 737 732
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1800 811 811
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1300 766 491