Rosie Batty: “I made the best decisions I could at the time."

Trigger warning: This post deals with child abuse and domestic violence and could be triggering for some readers.

Rosie Batty, whose 11-year-old son Luke was murdered by his estranged father after cricket practice in February, has hit out at child protection authorities and police.

Luke’s father Greg Anderson attacked the boy with a cricket bat, then stabbed him as he lay on the ground in Tyabb, south-east of Melbourne.

On Monday, the first day of an inquest into Luke’s death, the court heard how Mr Anderson made threats to his young son months before the attack. In one terrifying instance, Mr Anderson held up a knife and said it was “the one that could end it all”.

And yesterday, Ms Batty told the court nobody tried to stop Mr Anderson, and that she was offered counselling rather than protection when she sought help.

“I wanted support. I wanted other people to step in to make some decisions so it wasn’t just me facing Greg… The only suggestion they have is to have counselling,” she said.

“No one spoke to Greg. If he stopped being violent, I wouldn’t need counselling.”

Ms Batty also grew tearful when forced to defend herself.

“Why am I having to defend the decisions I made about our son?” Ms Batty said at one point.

“Isn’t it unfair that I’m having to be the one to answer for all this?,” she said.

“Did I ever think Luke would get smacked over the head with a cricket bat and stabbed to death? Of course I didn’t… So don’t ask me any more about what I did and the risk I thought there was…”

Ms Batty said she considered calling police when Mr Anderson turned up at the cricket oval that fateful day but decided against it, because previous attempts to have him arrested there had proved fruitless and she didn’t want to put her son through that trauma.

She also said she never thought Mr Anderson would kill Luke, but told the inquest she kept baseball bats in her room because she feared he could murder her, Yahoo!7 reports.

“I made the best decisions I could at the time,” Ms Batty said, according to news.com.au. “No one loved my son more than me.”

She also told of her terror at discovering Anderson was facing a child pornography charge.

“I thought, ‘My God – what else was there I don’t know about this man?’,” she said, according to 9News.

The inquest continues.

If you need help escaping domestic violence, you can call 1800 RESPECT 24 hours a day.

Domestic violence is “everybody’s business”, Rosie Batty says in this Bendigo Advertiser video:

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