A message from The RED HEART Movement founder Sherele Moody.

Every day I mourn two little girls I never met. Their names are Stacey-Ann Tracy and Sandra Dorothy Bacon. Stacey will be forever nine years old. Sandra will forever be five years old. My stepfather murdered both Stacey and Sandra. He murdered Sandra before I was born. He murdered Stacey four years after he married my mother.  I found out he murdered Sandra on the day he was charged with Stacey’s murder – the same day I became a witness for the prosecution at his second murder trial. Stacey’s death devastated my young life – I imploded and struggled for decades with guilt, sadness and my hate of him. I became a journalist because the reporting around Stacey’s death was appalling – she was reduced to nothing but a ‘sex murder’ in headlines. The RED HEART Movement and Australian Femicide Watch are not my legacy – these projects are Stacey’s legacy and Sandra’s legacy.

The RED HEART Movement and Australian Femicide Watch are dedicated to ending ALL forms of violence against women and children. 

This website is built around the Memorial to Women and Children Lost to Violence and the Australian Femicide and Child Death Map. Both are ONGOING journalism-based story-driven projects tracking every known Australian woman and child killed as a result of murder, manslaughter or neglect from white Settlement to now.

I document ALL women and children killed regardless of the perpetrator’s gender or the relationship between the victim and the killer. This means my work encompasses domestic violence, intimate partner violence, associate violence and stranger violence. Many people mistake my work as only focused on domestic and family violence. It’s important to understand, while domestic and family violence accounts for about 60% violent deaths, about 35% of femicides are the result of associate violence (where the killer knows the victim but is not related to them – for example a neighbour or a friend) and about 5% of femicides are perpetrated by strangers.

I started The RED HEART Campaign (now The RED HEART Movement) in 2015 to provide a platform for Australians to share their stories of violence survival, along wth a photo of a red heart drawn on their skin. RED HEART has become much more than a campaign – it’s now a movement of women supporting women and of women and men standing up to misogyny and violence. 

My work has grown exponentially over the years and reaches millions of people each month across social media. I provide much-needed in-person and one-on-one advocacy, support and care for families of homicide. There’s also the Australian femicide and child death counts. large-scale art projects designed to keep the memories of killed women in the public sphere, the She Matters podcast, vigils and rallies, justice campaigns, ethical media training and an apartment for women needing safe and secure transitional accommodation while they build a new and safe life.

The artwork across the website and my socials is by the incredible Amani Haydar. 

Everything I do is funded via my own resources and through the sales of RED HEART merchandise or crowd-funded donations. 

Amani Haydar is a lawyer, artist, writer, and advocate for women’s health, safety and well-being. Since her mum, Salwa Haydar, was murdered in 2015, Amani has been active in speaking out against gender-based violence. Amani uses lived experience, research, storytelling and visual art to confront the effects of violence and trauma on women in her family and more broadly. Amani’s work has been featured in ABC News Online, SBS Voices and the Arab Australian Other anthology published by Picador in 2019. Based in Western Sydney, Amani serves as an executive board member of the Bankstown Women’s Health Centre, is a part of Sweatshop Western Sydney and has exhibited artwork at Bankstown Arts Centre and Fairfield City Museum and Gallery.

Sherele Moody - Instagram: @sherelemoodyfemicidewatch; Twitter: @sherelemoody
Patreon - www.patreon.com/sherelemoody

Amani Haydar - www.bluethumb.com.au/amani-haydar

Digital Nomads HQ - www.digitalnomadshq.com.au

Katherine Benson