Rosie Batty and Ann O’Neill.

Their children were killed in front of them. Just writing those words is chilling.

We take our children with us in our hearts everywhere, every day. They are at once the reason we live and the elephant on our shoulders. Their death is unimaginable.

In July this year when I spoke to her, O’Neill, now CEO of Angelhands, a trauma victim support group, said survivors go through the shock, the what if, the how, the what now.

“Nothing will ever make it make sense. You can’t put logical rational thinking to such an illogical irrational behaviour,” she says.

And Thursday we heard the next worst news. Lucy Cormack wrote: “Olga Edwards was found dead by police around 10am on Wednesday, when they responded to a report from a neighbour with a concern for welfare at the same home where the bodies of the children, 15-year-old Jack and 13-year-old Jennifer, were found.”

Now Olga Edwards is no longer a survivor of family violence.

There are many many victims of family violence and it’s not just the women murdered by their partners. It’s not just the children murdered by their parents. It’s the never-ending outward spiral of grief and illness, of injury and poverty. And on Wednesday this week, it also claimed another victim, Olga Edwards.

Let’s acknowledge her terrible grief.

But let’s also acknowledge the long-term impacts on women of domestic and family violence. Sarah Wendt, professor in social work at Flinders University, has just co-authored Sexual Politics of Gendered Violence and Women’s Citizenship after years of research.

She says the results are quite clear. The long-term impacts are physical, mental, social, material. Domestic violence is not an individual catastrophe.

“The lasting impact happens in real bodily ways. If you can imagine living in a climate of fear your whole life, that erodes your mental health. It doesn't just stop after the incident.”

And Wendt reminds us, if we still want to ask why it is that women don’t leave, that the most dangerous time for a woman is just after she leaves her violent partner.

“We must recognise that this is a social problem, a result of how we understand masculinity and femininity.”

And let us also acknowledge the role of the Family Court, about to undergo another major upheaval. Edwards told Batty about the impact the Family Court had on her and her family.

In June this year Attorney-General Christian Porter announced the Family Court would be folded into the Federal Circuit Court.

That announcement surprised anyone who knew the Australian Law Reform Commission had been asked to review family law system late last year.

There was no serious consultation with those who know anything about how the court works. It is a pragmatic dismantling of the Family Court and its appeals process, run by the best judges in the land. Some describe those judges as the “cream of the crop” and “the best legal minds in the country”. Now all that expertise will be hearing cases in the Federal Court, not consistently bringing their intellect and analysis to the kinds of cases that break our hearts.

Its new chief justice has already acknowledged how tough this transformation will be.

Christian Porter’s decision to close the Family Court will put further women and children in Australia at risk. As Alastair Nicholson, former chief justice of the Family Court, pointed out to me earlier this year, the Liberal Party has never been a great supporter of the Family Court.

“[John] Howard started this destruction . . . this insidious process. It shows a complete lack of respect for the importance of family law and there will be long-term harms for Australian families.”

It is not comforting to me to hear another banal announcement from COAG as we heard yesterday. We’ve now had promises through three successive prime ministers that there would be increased support for victims of family violence. We can be grateful to Rosie Batty for her single-minded advocacy which restored some of the funding to community legal centres. We must have proper funding for the work of those who will now oversee the family law cases.

Batty had to step back because advocating for the safety of women and children in Australia is too much for one woman – and she never really had time to emerge from Luke’s death. Olga Edwards was never able to emerge.

After the death of the Family Court, I fear the cases of families at their most vulnerable will be presided over by those who know little about parenting orders. Little about child assault, about child sexual assault. And those who know even less about family violence.

There will be pretend expertise and I predict that will worsen the situation for these families. I fear they will come before judges who know nothing more than maritime law or tax law.

They will make decisions that will cost more lives.

We are already at a stage where domestic violence is under-acknowledged and its serious impacts underestimated.

We can’t afford any more lives lost.

Jenna Price is an academic at the University of Technology Sydney