Elena Rosenman is CEO of the Women’s Legal Centre ACT. Read our interview with her earlier this week.

Most people do not come to us because they have made a decision. They come because they cannot see their options clearly enough to make one. They have often spent months, sometimes years, weighing up a decision they cannot yet name. What will happen to my children? Where will I live? Can I afford to leave? Will anyone believe me?

They call because they need to know what their options actually are, rather than what fear, a partner, or well-meaning but inaccurate advice from friends and family has told them.

This is the piece of our work I most want the Canberra community to understand: seeking legal advice does not mean you are committing to a course of action. Coming to see a lawyer does not oblige you to leave a relationship, to go to court, or to do anything at all. It simply means you better understand the process, your rights, and what support is available, so that if and when you are ready to make a decision, you are making it with real information rather than fear.

That distinction matters more than people realise. What keeps people in dangerous relationships is rarely a lack of will. It is not knowing what comes next: what happens to the house, to the kids, to a life that suddenly has to stand on its own. So people stay, trying to protect what they love. Legal advice, given early and without judgement, can turn that fear into a plan.

This year, the Women’s Legal Centre ACT turns 30. In three decades, one thing has stayed constant: we exist because access to justice should never depend on what someone can afford.

We are a free, integrated legal service for women, trans and gender-diverse people in the ACT and surrounding region, and our lawyers work alongside social workers, cultural support officers and victim advocates so that a person’s legal matter and the human situation surrounding it are addressed together, not separately.

The need for that model has never been greater.

In 2024-25, we received 3,490 calls to our Intake and Advice Line, a rise of nearly 30 per cent on the previous year. We supported 1,709 women and 2,209 children.

Eighty-one per cent of our new clients were experiencing or at risk of domestic and family violence; in our Family Law Practice, that figure was 100 per cent.

Every woman who accessed our Mulleun Mura Access to Justice Program, our specialist service led by and for First Nations women, reported experiencing family violence, including coercive control and financial abuse.

Behind every one of those numbers is a person who made a call. One client, reflecting on her experience with our Centre, put it simply:

“I got my legal issues sorted, and this brought me peace and made my life so much easier. The support empowered me and made me feel like I had a voice.”

That is what specialist legal help can change. Not just the outcome of a case, but a person’s belief that a different future is possible, and that they will not have to reach it alone.

I would say two things to anyone reading this who recognises something of their own life in these words.

First, getting advice does not commit you to anything. It is simply information, and information is powerful.

Second, you do not have to do this alone. Services like ours exist because we understand what you are facing, and because no one should have to navigate it without support.

And I would say something to everyone else too. The more we, as a community, talk openly about what services exist, the more likely that information is to reach someone who needs it, at the moment they need it most. You may not know who in your life is quietly weighing up a decision like this. But the people who support them often start with a conversation.

None of this happens without a community willing to show up for it. Every conversation someone has about what services exist, every time a friend listens without judgement, every donation to a frontline service, adds up to someone reaching help sooner rather than later.

Thirty years on, that is still the job, and it is one we cannot do alone.