Australian of the Year Rosie Batty recently visited the Saints to speak with players and staff as part of her mission to give victims of family violence a voice.

On average, two Australian women a week are murdered and every three hours a woman is hospitalised.  Ms Batty’s vision is to build a groundswell of support for victims of family violence to lead change community-wide.

She spoke to St Kilda’s playing group to tell of her experience after losing her son, Luke, in 2014 when his father killed him at cricket practice.

“Young men are part of the change. They hold huge responsibility because of the influence they have over younger boys, and they are important to the solution,” Ms Batty said.

“(It’s about) taking their role really seriously. Not just how good they are on the football field but how they represent themselves off the football field.”

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“That whole culture of what you expect from a football player has changed.  They are people who really respect being healthy and work in a really constructive way within the local community to engage with children and show them that the football community can be an important part of their development.”

The family violence awareness campaigner launched Never Alone last month, an online petition to encourage the community to standby and support those suffering from domestic violence.

“I’m really excited because ever since Luke died I wanted to do something important to harness every body’s goodwill everybody’s growing and increased awareness of the issue of family violence, so by joining the never alone campaign you join my journey to support victims of violence – women and children – so we can challenge Government to make sure this whole problem never gets swept under the carpet again.

“Collectively we can become a very instrumental and powerful voice so the Never Alone campaign will join me on my journey and you can be part of that solution of change.”

Last week Rosie emailed the 21,000 supporters of her Never Alone campaign to encourage them to sign a petition supporting mandatory respectful relationship lessons in schools.

It’s expected she will ask every state Premier to commit to delivering compulsory domestic violence prevention lessons when she fronts them at this week’s Council of Australian Governments meeting.

“We need to get to a point where we need to unanimously agree that there should be zero tolerance of violence of any description. Violence in the home is every bit serious as violence on the street.”

“We need to see a strong community rejection of violence in the home.”

Visit www.NeverAlone.com.au to stand by Rosie Batty and the Luke Batty Foundation in their fight against family violence.