Sporting star turned broadcaster Jelena Dokic has overcome a huge number of challenges from growing up in a war-torn country and being a child refugee to surviving horrific physical and emotional abuse and battling mental health challenges.
But earlier this year Jelena took the “strength in speaking up” she has used to share her own experiences in the hope she can now do that for disadvantaged girls and women as an ambassador for World Vision Australia.
Because for the former tennis champ, “the responsibility of having a voice and having a platform” means she now wants to help others.
Forced into marriage
Jelena travelled to Bangladesh to a community where nearly 68% of girls are married before their 18th birthday. There she learned how the generosity of Australians sponsoring girls has helped child marriage drop by almost half in the areas where the World Vision works.
In Dhaka, she met a young woman called Ruby and the young woman told Jelena how she was forced into marriage at just twelve-years-old.
Her husband was twenty-five and Ruby gave birth to their first child before passing her fourteenth birthday and then another soon after. Because both were girls, her husband abandoned them.
“Hearing Ruby’s story first hand and how devastating that was for her, really stays with you,” remembers Jelena, voice heavy with emotion.
“The things that she had to go through and that she gets up every single day and that she opened up to me … it was very emotional for both of us.”
Particularly affecting for Jelena, 43, was that her own struggles as a child were only “a tiny bit” of what young women like Ruby have faced.
“I grew up in poverty, and grew up in a home full of family violence, and it had a massive impact on me,” says Jelena.
“I know what it looks like not to have food on the table, not to even have water, not to have heating in winter when it’s minus twenty. You feel like people maybe don’t hear you and that you’re alone.
“That’s what these girls feel like.”
Sharing stories
In her two memoirs and the documentary Unbreakable, Jelena bravely revealed the abuse at the hand of her father and coach began when she was just six years old and continued as she became a tennis champion, ranking world number five at the height of her success.
While Jelena says she has done “so much healing through sharing my story”, she hopes now to help others by doing the same.
“I can change something by sharing my story,” she says, explaining how she hopes to offer a voice to the voiceless.
“Sharing victims and survivor stories has a massive power to change the world.
“I think my passion comes from maybe experiencing some of that. I also take my role in where I am now and what I do very seriously, what I’m silent about, when I’m not silent.”
Ruby is now focussed on ensuring her children have a happy and safe future.
“She’s incredibly strong,” says Jelena. “She fights every single day, and she gets up every single day. Her biggest hope in life is that her two girls don’t have the same fate that she does.”
Ruby confided in Jelena that her dream is to one day complete a sewing and tailoring course and have a machine at home so she can work and provide for a better life for her daughters.
And Jelena is determined to help make that happen.
Keeping her promise
“That is something that I personally will help her with,” says the Melbourne-based advocate. “I would love to see her do that and learn that.”
While Jelena has plans to visit other nations with World Vision, she plans on returning to Bangladesh see her new friend fulfil her goals.
“Ruby said she would love for me to come back again one day and see her, and I promised that I will,” says Jelena.
“I promised every single person, every single girl that I visited, that I’m coming back. And I’m going to keep that promise.”
Australians can support World Vision’s 1000 Girls campaign and sponsor a girl at worldvision.com.au/sponsor-a-girl or by calling 13 32 40.
Through child sponsorship, World Vision works alongside entire communities to improve education, strengthen healthcare and child protection, and address the root causes of poverty, creating lasting change for children, their families and future generations.
