When Hayley Wormleaton was just 19 years old, she witnessed her uncle murder her grandmother and cousin at their Lalor Park, NSW home. If the 'Empower You' app had been around eight years ago, she says the outcomes may have been different for her and her family.
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00:02 I witnessed my uncle murder my nan and my cousin.
00:08 (soft music)
00:27 The night started off normal, normal like every other night.
00:31 Nothing seemed to be out of the ordinary.
00:34 My uncle had come home.
00:38 He clearly wasn't acting like himself.
00:40 I heard my nan call out to me.
00:44 I then walked out of my bedroom door
00:47 and she was sitting on the lounge next to my nan
00:50 and he had a knife.
00:52 She then took a step to the left
00:56 and he proceeded to chase her to my neighbor's front lawn
01:00 and that is where my nan was murdered.
01:03 It seemed like a lifetime.
01:04 I finally heard sirens.
01:07 So I've opened the front door
01:09 and as I've opened the front door,
01:10 the police swarmed my front lawn.
01:13 They all stopped in a row
01:16 and they kind of backed off a little bit
01:19 and I knew that it was bad
01:21 and I saw my youngest cousin, Brayden,
01:26 I started calling out to him, asking him,
01:29 "Brayden, if you can hear me, please move."
01:31 He was not moving.
01:33 He didn't move.
01:35 - Research has shown that it takes a victim
01:49 25 instances of domestic violence
01:53 before they're ready to come and report it to police.
01:55 One of the functions of the app
01:57 is that it contains a diary or a log
02:00 where the victim can record anything and everything
02:03 about an incident if they're not ready
02:05 to come and report it to police straight away.
02:08 - The idea of the app was to make it
02:10 very user-friendly, easy to use,
02:12 so that it can be used by a child or an adult
02:16 in the same way.
02:17 So we built it in a way
02:20 where the functionality is easy to use.
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