Most people buy their first home with a bedroom in mind. Sherele Moody bought hers with someone else's safety in mind. The award-winning journalist and Australia's leading femicide researcher has purchased a unit in inner Melbourne and is handing it over, rent-free, to women fleeing abusive relationships, according to reporting by The Sydney Morning Herald.
The project is called Stacey's Sanctuary, and the name carries a weight that goes well beyond branding. It is named after nine-year-old Stacey-Ann Tracy, who was murdered by Moody's stepfather in 1990. The project is part of Moody's commitment to ensuring her name and legacy live on. Moody's stepfather was guilty of abducting, raping and murdering two young girls in Queensland. His first victim, five-year-old Sandra Bacon, was killed in Townsville in 1962.
Sherele Moody is Australia's leading femicide and child death researcher, an award-winning journalist, a violence survivor and activist dedicated to ending all violence against women and children. She is the founder of The RED HEART Campaign and Australian Femicide Watch, through which she has recorded more than 2,500 deaths of women and children since 2015. The sanctuary is the latest and perhaps most personal expression of that work.
The sanctuary is located in inner Melbourne, with easy access to public transport and the city. Victoria recorded the highest rate of femicide in Australia in 2025. Despite this, it is one of the hardest places in the country to gain low-cost transitional housing. That gap is precisely the one Moody is trying to fill. The sanctuary is designed for domestic violence victims needing a step-up as they save money for a permanent rental. Abuse perpetrators often murder women after their victims have been denied access to housing. Women may be refused housing for a number of reasons, including not being considered at high enough risk, not having employment, or simply due to a lack of housing stock.
Moody has not waited for a grant or a government programme to make this happen. Everything she does is funded via her own resources and through the sales of RED HEART merchandise or crowd-funded donations. As of January 2026, she noted the renovations were taking longer than anticipated, given she spends about 60 hours a week on her RED HEART and Australian Femicide Watch work. Work on the unit began in November 2025, when Moody, alongside her partner and a friend, ripped up the flooring, removed the oven and stovetop, and started overhauling the bathroom.
The individual sacrifice involved is considerable. But Moody's initiative also throws a harsh light on a structural failure. The biggest reason women and children do not leave situations of family and domestic violence is because they do not have safe and secure housing to go to. Moody has estimated that Australia loses a woman every four days to violence. For every woman killed by a partner, former partner, or family member, approximately ten more women are lost to suicide following domestic violence, meaning the real toll may be one life every one or two days.
The federal government has acknowledged the crisis at a policy level. The Albanese government announced that 42 projects across Australia would receive a share of $100 million, building hundreds of new crisis and transitional homes for thousands of women and children impacted by family and domestic violence. A further commitment followed: on 2 December 2024, the federal government registered an updated Investment Mandate committing an additional $1 billion to the National Housing Infrastructure Facility, comprising up to $700 million in grants and $300 million in concessional loans, to be administered by Housing Australia.
Advocates, however, caution that funding announcements do not automatically translate into available beds. Research published in 2025 in a peer-reviewed housing journal argued that policies proposing temporary and private forms of assistance tend to over-individualise what is predominantly a structural problem, and that the gap between symbolic policy commitments and practical steps to address housing shortages needs to be narrowed. In that context, a single inner-Melbourne unit is a drop in the ocean. But it is also, for whichever woman walks through that door first, everything.
There is a conservative argument, worth taking seriously, that durable solutions to homelessness and violence require robust private and community sector involvement alongside government, rather than reliance on the public purse alone. Moody's model, funded by the community and administered by an individual with a proven record of accountability, is in some ways a demonstration of exactly that. The critique of bureaucratic inefficiency in housing delivery is not without substance: hundreds of applications were received under the federal transitional accommodation programme, revealing an enormous unmet need that no government has yet fully addressed.
What Stacey's Sanctuary represents, stripped back, is an act of individual responsibility at its most extreme. A woman spent her life documenting the deaths of other women, then spent her own money on a home she will never sleep in, so that some of those women might survive. The question of how many more Stacey's Sanctuaries are needed to bridge the gap between policy intent and lived reality is one that governments of all persuasions would do well to sit with. Those who want to support the project can find it through the Australian Femicide Watch website.