In Conversation with UQ alumna Famin Ahmed: domestic violence, the Famin Makes project and pro bono work

PRESS 'ESCAPE' on your keyboard to IMMEDIATELY LEAVE THIS PAGE if you need to.

TRIGGER WARNING: this interview contains discussions around topics such as domestic violence and family violence.

Famin Ahmed graduated from the University of Queensland with a Bachelor of Laws (Hons) / Arts in 2019. For the last 12 months, she has been running her charitable initiative, Famin Makes, where she sews hats and scrunchies to raise funds for Women’s Legal Service Queensland. JATL invited Famin to sit down with us and discuss a range of topics, including the origins and the future of Famin Makes, domestic violence in Australia, and the importance of doing pro bono work.

Would you be able to give us a brief overview of Famin Makes, and the reason(s) why you decided to start the initiative in the first place?

FAMIN: Famin Makes is a project where I sew reversible hats and scrunchies, sell them and donate 100% of the money to Women’s Legal Service Queensland. I started it last year when I was graduating Law/Arts from UQ in July. I wasn’t going to start work till January of this year. So, I had a 6-month break in between. In that time, a lot of my friends were travelling, but I couldn’t do that. I had to stay home to look after my mum and sister because my home situation wasn’t great at the time. I was worried that I might be bored for the 6 months, so I wanted something to do. I’ve always liked sewing, so I thought of this concept where I would sew and donate the proceeds to charity. When thinking about which charity to choose, I thought back to when I went to Women’s Legal Service with my best friend and I tried to get legal advice for some domestic violence happening in my own house. We got there, 15 minutes after a free drop-in advice session had started, and we were turned away. We were the seventh group of women turned away. We saw one woman turned away in front of us, who just burst into tears. My friend and I couldn’t stop thinking about what she was going home to that night because she couldn’t get advice. She might have been going home to an extremely dangerous situation. It could have taken a lot of courage for her to get to the point where she even went to Women’s Legal Service to get help. Getting turned away at that point could have been a huge step back. We were heartbroken by that. I couldn't stop thinking about how underfunded Women’s Legal Service is. Seven groups of women turned away in 15 minutes on one night. They have that free legal advice session twice a week.  I was thinking about how many women get turned away physically, every week, and that’s only the number of women that show up in person, in inner Brisbane city. WLS also has a phone advice line for women all around the state, including remote communities. Last year they couldn’t answer 40% of calls, from 6636 women, purely because of underfunding. That’s why Women’s Legal Service is the focus of the project.

On the Worldonomics podcast, you talked about how Famin Makes is a ‘one person show’ in which you single-handedly take on all of the administrative, design and social media aspects of the work. Now that you have a full-time job in the law, how do you manage your time so that you’re still able to keep up with Famin Makes?

FAMIN: The way I do it now, is that I only release a certain number of hat orders at a time, based on my assessment of how much time I will have that week to sew. This year I am working in a good job hours-wise, but next year I will be working in a firm which might have longer hours and I might have less time for Famin Makes. But with the structure that I have going now, where I just assess how much time I have on a weekly basis, it should be fine. I also want to add that when you get into a full time job in the law, it's important to have things outside of work that you enjoy - Famin Makes is that for me, and I’m really glad I have it.

On the same podcast, you mention that one of the reasons you don’t outsource any of the work is because it is a personal project for you. Is Famin Makes, as a creative outlet, also a way for you to come to terms with your experiences?

FAMIN:  It is not so much about coming to terms with my experiences, but it’s definitely linked to my experiences. My original motivation for choosing the charity was linked to my own experience of trying to get advice from Women’s Legal Service, but even more so - and I talked about this in the podcast as well - when I was in the first 6 months of doing Famin Makes, my home domestic violence situation wasn’t very good at all. I felt very helpless and like I couldn’t do anything to fix it. Being able to help Women’s Legal Service was a way for me to exercise some sort of agency and control and help the wider cause and other women who were experiencing what my family was experiencing, when I couldn’t do anything for my own situation. Now, I am still helping my mum go through the legal aftermath of a domestic violence relationship, and the system is just so broken and prohibiting against women trying to leave domestic violence. Experiencing that firsthand has made me acutely aware of the problems in legal system and very angry with it. I guess my ongoing experience is a constant source of motivation to keep trying to help Women’s Legal Service. So, it’s not so much ‘coming to terms’, and it’s not even exercising the agency anymore. But there is still very much a personal connection I have to the project because of what was going on in my life when I started it.

What is the general demographic of those making orders to Famin Makes?

FAMIN: In terms of gender, it is mostly female and that is obviously linked to the fact that a lot of my hats and scrunchies are for females. But I’ve also noticed that in a lot of social justice causes that I’ve been involved with over time, it’s often the females that are involved in social justice. It's disappointing that more males aren’t more passionate about social justice.

In terms of age, it is mostly people around our age ordering hats and scrunchies. That’s just a product of that the age group in my reach. But there are also quite a few older people making orders. The great thing about hats, and the reason why I stick with hats and no other clothes for the project, is that they’re universal. Anyone, any age can wear a hat. They are a great present for kids, they are a great present for your grandparents. I actually had a 95-year-old grandmother email me yesterday to order a hat!

Does your little sister ever help you make the hats and scrunchies?

FAMIN: For people who don’t follow my Instagram - I have a 9-year-old sister and she helps me with the scrunchies. She gets very excited about it and she likes to tell me when I run a "good business" or a "bad business". She gets very excited so I like to involve her!

How much have you raised for the Women’s Legal Service so far through your initiative, and do the entire proceeds of sale go to the Women’s Legal Service?

FAMIN: So far, I have raised more than $21,000 which is pretty crazy given I thought it’d be hard to get to $1000 when I first started. And it just kept going up and up really quickly! In first two months, I thought it would be cool if I got to $10,000 – and now I am at double that. It’s very crazy.

The entire proceeds go to the Women’s Legal Service. The way people pay is through a fundraising page, and the money goes directly to Women’s Legal Service. I don’t have many out of pocket costs – I mean, obviously it’s my time, and the electricity for the sewing machine. Most fabrics have been donated.

I saw on the Famin Makes Instagram page that at the end of 2019 you were invited to an afternoon tea held by the Women’s Legal Service, attended by former Justice Margaret McMurdo, former Governor-General Quentin Bryce, and the CEO of Women’s Legal Service, Angela Lynch. What was that like?

FAMIN: It was pretty crazy. Nat, the fundraising manager for Women’s Legal Service, invited me to this afternoon tea. I assumed it was like a general end-of-year afternoon tea for Women’s Legal Service, and that maybe I’d get a shout out. But that’s all I thought! When it came to the week of the actual event, my home domestic violence situation was really bad and I actually wasn’t going to go anymore. I was considering emailing and saying I couldn’t make it. Thank god I didn’t! When I got there, it was set up as a really fancy high tea, and it was very exclusive. I still hadn’t realised it was for me, until Nat mentioned that the high tea was to thank me. At the time, Angela Lynch was there, but Justice McMurdo and Quentin Bryce hadn't arrived yet. Then Justice McMurdo walked in and I was like oh my god. I didn’t know how to act. And everyone kept talking about ‘Quentin’ and saying, ‘when is Quentin getting here?’. In my head I was thinking, are they talking about Quentin Bryce? Surely not. And then Quentin Bryce enters, and I was dying inside. They were all so chatty and eloquent, and I was very conscious of how I was eating the food. I was like, am I eating this fancy enough? Should I be eating these biscuits with cutlery? I was also so underdressed. They were all wearing fancy dresses and I was wearing some ordinary pants and a shirt because I hadn’t realised it was going to be a fancy high tea!

It was just so amazing because I was otherwise feeling terrible that week. It was just this little afternoon of brightness. It made me feel so valued for the contributions I made. I never started this project for recognition and I actually didn’t even tell Women’s Legal Service about it until two months after I started it. But having that recognition is just a little extra benefit, and it’s nice to see people appreciate what you’re doing and it makes you want to keep going.

You have spoken about your experience trying to obtain legal advice from a community legal centre (Women’s Legal Service) regarding your domestic violence situation.  Having been on ‘the other side’, has this given you a new perspective on the law and/or access to justice?

FAMIN: Yes, definitely. It wasn’t just trying to obtain legal advice at Women’s Legal Service. It’s going through whole legal process in relation to domestic violence. I am in a very unique position in that I have just gone through five years of law school, and I have a background in the law. I am very educated about domestic violence. So, what that means for me is that I am big help to my mum going through this whole legal process. I am pretty much the middleman between my mum and our lawyer. It means that we save a lot of time and costs because everything goes through me first. And I can do my own research first, and help translate things from legal words to normal words to my mum and vice versa when she tells me her issues – I can translate it into a legal issue when we speak to our lawyer.

However, not every woman leaving a domestic violence situation has a 23-year-old daughter with a law degree helping them. Why is the system so prohibitive such that you need that to get through it? It’s just so expensive and so time consuming. A family lawyer is a minimum of $300/hour, and that is a non-experienced family lawyer. It’s just ridiculous. Normal people can’t afford that. It's very difficult to get legal aid for family law matters, the test to determine whether you get assistance involves counting your assets. The domestic violence relationship that you’re leaving could be one where a couple owns a million-dollar house – and that will be counted in the asset test. But when you’re escaping your domestic violence relationship, you can’t access the money in the form of that million-dollar house.

Also, everything takes so much time to go through the court process. Everyone wants to keep court as a last resort but sometimes it's the only option, especially when you’re dealing with another party who is an abusive person and doesn’t cooperate. For example, if you already have court orders made for your kids, and your abusive partner is not abiding by the court orders and refusing to return your kids to you on time, the only way you can stop them from doing that is going to court. To go to court you need to pay lawyers and you need to wait months or years, because the family court system is so clogged up. It’s just not an acceptable system.

I've also gained a new perspective on the system of domestic violence orders. For those who don’t know, you can get a domestic violence order, which is just a civil order against a person to not commit domestic violence against you. If they breach that order, it becomes a criminal offence. Now, that system sounds really good on paper and there are definitely benefits to it, but there are also big issues with how it works. The onus is on the victim to report the breach, so the victim then must go to the police and tell them what the abusive person has been doing. But at the same time, the abusive person could be living in the same house as the victim.  So, how do you feel comfortable reporting the abusive person and having the police just turn up to your door, when you’re still living in a house with that person? You’re worried about the consequences that will come from that, after the police leave. And unless it’s really serious – the abusive person is not going to go to jail for it. There’s no pragmatic system where that the abusive person is educated properly by police or anyone else to understand what they’re doing is wrong, or put in rehabilitation, to prevent violence after the police leave. It’s just a straight punitive approach of ‘you’ve breached the order, turn up to court’. The system is not pragmatic. Also, the abusive person can deny the breach in court, which means you then must go to trial to prove the breach happened. This means the victim, and potentially the children in the relationship, must go to court and give evidence. This is not a realistic option if you’re in that situation.

What do you think are some of the biggest barriers faced by people in domestic violence situations when it comes to seeking assistance?

FAMIN: There are so many. I am just going to focus on a few. Firstly, it’s the psychological barrier of what makes a woman think she should not leave. A lot of women don’t even know that domestic violence is wrong. They don’t know when they’ve been a victim of domestic violence. That’s partly because domestic violence isn’t just physical violence. There’s a whole range of things that can constitute domestic violence, for example, psychological abuse, surveillance, controlling the people who you’re seeing, controlling the people who you talk to, and financial abuse. All these things constitute domestic violence, but a lot of people think it’s only the actual, physical hitting. No matter what form of domestic violence is perpetrated in that situation, if you have been in that relationship for a very long time, where someone is constantly putting you down, controlling what you do - you just condition yourself to think that’s your life. You become submissive. There’s an official psychological term called ‘battered women syndrome’, which is when you’re psychologically conditioned to become submissive because you have been battered down for so long. That can lead you to not even think about leaving.

But then on another level, for women who want to leave, there’s the barrier of thinking ‘what’s going to happen when I leave?’. Imagine you’re in an abusive relationship, with kids, and you decide you need to leave the abusive partner. It’s not as easy as just telling an abusive partner, ‘I think we should break up and move to different houses’. That is when they’re going to retaliate and get really mad. They might beat you up because of that and start making everyone’s life a living hell. So, logistically, you have to start planning to leave in secret. This is difficult when the person is watching what you’re doing. Logistically, there’s this gap between when you’re planning to leave, and when you have to move all your belongings somewhere else. This is hard when you’re leaving an abusive person. It is why a lot of victims leave with their clothes on their back and must go into hiding. It is hard to do this, which is why a lot of people stay in their relationship because they think it’s easier.

Once you leave, it’s not a clean break. The abuse can very much continue once you leave. For example, if you have kids, and your kids are seeing your abusive partner, your partner can exert control and abuse through kids. This could include psychologically or physically abusing your kids or keeping the children for longer than agreed and threatening to not bring them back. You’re still under the control of that person. They can also stalk you and drive by your new place if they know where it is.

People don’t realise how dangerous it is once you leave, and we saw this with Hannah Clarke. Hannah had left. Her partner had a domestic violence order against him. They had mediation to determine who would get custody of the children. She had offered pretty much half-half custody to her partner, he refused and wanted to take them to court. And then he killed them all. There are so many stories of women and children getting murdered after they have left. Your fear for your physical safety is a huge barrier to leaving.

There is also the financial barrier. Approximately 90% of domestic violence cases involve financial abuse. This occurs when your partner controls all the finances. They might have racked up hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt in your name. You may have been threatened or coerced to agree to it. What this means, is firstly, you think you can’t leave because you have all these financial obligations to your name and can’t afford to pay them off. But even if you don’t have debts in your name, if your spouse controls all the finances and all of your money, you don’t have any money to keep yourself afloat, from the time that you leave, to the time that any financial settlement money comes through. As I said, settlement through the court system can take years. So, you must be able to support yourself for a solid period of time in between, and you may not have the financial resources to do that.

Does this differ with respect to culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) communities?

FAMIN: There are additional and unique barriers for CALD communities. There are huge problems for migrant women who have recently moved here – or wherever it may be - and they don’t have a support system at all. They don’t have many, if any, friends or family living in the same country as them. They don’t have people telling them to leave the relationship or offering them a place to stay. Even if you came here a long time ago, and you do have friends and family here – there can still be barriers. I am speaking from my personal experience with my community – the Bengali community.  A problem with many cultures, including the Bengali culture, is that there is a huge stigma around divorce and being a single woman. People in these communities grow up thinking it’s not an option to get divorced, and therefore leaving a relationship does not register as an option. You don’t even consider it. You just cop it because that’s what the whole community and belief system is structured around. Even once you start to think you should leave, you get scared of people in your community gossiping about you and shaming you. That happens. I can’t believe that people in this day of age still do that. It actually sickens me, the number of people in the Bengali community who have known what has gone on with my family and have not cared, have not followed up to check that we are okay, and worse still, gossiped about us.

There are so many women, in all different ethnic communities, that are stuck in these situations and feel like they can’t get out. There’s also the unique barriers for First Nations women. Any policy or law reform addressing domestic violence needs to take into account the unique barriers that women of different ethnicities face, otherwise it’s just not going to be effective. I’m really proud that the way that WLS provides its services takes that into account.

You were very involved with the UQ Pro Bono Centre while at law school. What sort of projects did you undertake, and did the experiences you gained through these projects assist you in any way when it came to establishing Famin Makes?

FAMIN: So I did a few projects with the UQ Pro Bono Centre. I first worked for Strategic Advocacy for Human Rights (‘SAHR’) on proposed amendments to the Criminal Code in Afghanistan. We were making sure that the amendments proposed respected gender equality.  A lot of our suggestions actually got passed, which was really cool. For the same organisation, I was involved in a project where we wrote guides for lawyers defending victims of domestic violence who killed their abusive spouses out of self-defence or duress.

In my final semester, I worked on a project about police complaints – so complaints against police officers who have done the wrong thing against civilians in Queensland. This was really interesting and interacted well with domestic violence because there are a lot of issues in terms of how the police system responds to domestic violence. Finally, I did Clinical Legal Education (LAWS5180) with the Refugee & Immigration Legal Service for a semester.

In terms of how these projects contributed to where Famin Makes is today – I think, for many people when they start law, me included - if you’re interested in human rights, you think you have to go work at the UN or a big international human rights organisation to make a difference. But when you do projects like this, you realise that there is actually a lot of injustice in our own community. There are a lot of ways you can make change by working on the legal system here. Famin Makes is just one example of this. That is not to say that those international organisations aren’t important, but you can also make as much of a difference in your own backyard.

I 100% encourage anyone in law to get involved with the UQ Pro Bono Centre and pro bono work. For anyone who has grown up with privilege – which is most people in the law, including myself, even though I have gone through hardships - it’s never been doubted that I could go to university and be given all these amazing legal opportunities. Many people, no matter how hard they work, can’t get to that position because they started a step back. Many people are simply born into a dangerous family, for example where their parents are abusive or drug addicts; the wrong country, for example a war-torn country that they need to flee; or the wrong race, one that is systematically oppressed and means that the person is in danger of being killed or jailed every time they walk out the door (as we’ve seen this week with the Black Lives Matter movement). For anyone who has grown up with privilege, and has the time and resources to help people, it is their responsibility to do so. If you have privilege, use it to help people who do not. This is especially the case with law students who are equipped with such important skills – the law impacts literally everyone in society. Use your legal skills to help vulnerable people.

What are the short-term and long-term plans for Famin Makes?

FAMIN: I don’t really know. I originally only planned to run it for 6 months and then stop when full-time work started, but I liked it too much. The plan in the short term is to keep going. It’s not something I want to do forever, because in the long term, I want to be involved in changing the system myself, going beyond just raising money for people who do. As someone who has a law degree crossed with someone who has gone through domestic violence firsthand, there’s a lot of privilege and potential I have to help other people in domestic violence situations going through the system. I want to use all the skills that I have to change it. That’s my long-term plan of helping the cause. For now, Famin Makes is what I’m doing.

What can we do to support this initiative?

FAMIN: Buy hats and scrunchies. Buy it as present, or for yourself. Wear them and plug the project! Post pictures of you wearing them on your social media. You can donate without buying anything, or if you don’t have money, just share the cause or tell someone about it. It’s not just about raising money; it’s about raising awareness for the whole issue. When reading this interview or whatever it may be, have domestic violence in the forefront of your mind. If someone or a friend is going through a situation, be there for them. Tear down the myths about domestic violence. Domestic violence stems from an attitude of disrespect to women and everyone can help to call out things that reflect this disrespect - take it seriously when you see it.

——————————————————————————————————————————

MORE INFORMATION
Follow Famin Makes on Instagram: famin_makes

Email Famin Makes: faminmakes@gmail.com

Link to the ‘Famin Makes for WLS’ fundraising page on GiveNow:
https://www.givenow.com.au/crowdraiser/public/FaminMakesforWLS

Link to the Women’s Legal Service Website: https://wlsq.org.au/

Link to the Worldonomics podcast Famin recently did with UQES: https://open.spotify.com/episode/6mvE5FhJS1MPzMlfu3OfC3

Find out more about the UQ Pro Bono Centre: https://law.uq.edu.au/pro-bono

DOMESTIC VIOLENCE HOTLINES - FOR THOSE WHO HAVE EXPERIENCED, OR ARE AT RISK OF DOMESTIC VIOLENCE

1800RESPECT
1800 737 732
24-hour national sexual assault, family and domestic violence counselling line for any Australian who has experienced, or is at risk of, family and domestic violence and/or sexual assault.
Call toll-free 1800 737 732.

Lifeline
13 11 14
Lifeline has a national number who can help put you in contact with a crisis service in your State.
Anyone across Australia experiencing a personal crisis or thinking about suicide can call 13 11 14.

Translating & Interpreting Service
131 450
Gain free access to a telephone or on-site interpreter in your own language. Immediate phone interpreting is available 24 hours, every day of the year, on 131 450.

Aboriginal Family Domestic Violence Hotline
1800 019 123
Victims Services has a dedicated contact line for Aboriginal victims of crime who would like information on victims rights, how to access counselling and financial assistance.

Kids Help Line
1800 551 800
Free, private and confidential, telephone and online counselling service specifically for young people aged between 5 and 25 in Australia. Call 1800 551 800 for help.



Interview by Melanie Karibasic (Vice-President of Careers)