Rebecca Gibney has made an impassioned plea for greater domestic violence awareness after reflecting on her late father’s “angry” side.
The Back To The Rafters actress took to Instagram to share a sweet throwback snap of her father and uncle as kids, writing: “I found this photo of him today with his big brother Sean and I looked at this little boy with the sad face and it made me wonder once again what happened to him that made him become the angry man he so often was.”
Rebecca went on to say the headlines on domestic violence incidents coming out of Australia and the rest of the world has left her “deeply saddened”.
Rebecca called for more education in schools about domestic violence.
(Image: Getty)“Having grown up in that environment I always prayed that with time we would find ways to solve this problem,” she penned.
“Unfortunately it’s still as bad in NZ as it is everywhere else and it’s vital we keep talking about this MAJOR issue. It’s not as simple as locking people up. Yes we need harsher penalties and yes the laws must change but we also have to find other solutions to this hidden pandemic.”
The mother-of-one called for more education in schools around the taboo topic of domestic violence, to encourage the younger generation of boys to “talk more, fight less”.
“Make Respect a priority. And kindness, equality. Celebrate vulnerability, accept each other’s differences. And love them so fully that the thought of inflicting violence on another is utterly unthinkable,” she continued.
“I wonder if my father had been raised with these principles then maybe that little boy on the right would still be here.”
In 2009, Rebecca bravely admitted that she spent years in a downward spiral of depression, after growing up with a violent and unstable father.
“My father was an alcoholic. It scarred all of us,” Rebecca told ABC reporter Andrew Denton at the time, adding that her childhood was so traumatic that she has blocked many memories from her mind.
“My mother shielded us a lot from it. I could remember her putting us to bed and I, quite often, would hear Dad come home but she’d always shut all the doors, so you’d hear the yelling and the shouting and the slapping but you’d never actually see it.”
“When I was older, she said that, on the odd occasion, he beat her so badly she had bruises for six months.”
It was also Rebecca’s mum Shirley who gave the family a sense of stability throughout the confusion of moving house more than 40 times because Rebecca’s father Austin would “smash up the furniture”.
“Sometimes she’d wake us up and bundle us into the car and we’d drive around the block and we’d sleep outside,” Rebecca revealed to Andrew. “But she made it an adventure.”
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