Today, Nicole Yade is one of Australia’s leading advocates for women escaping domestic violence.
As the CEO of the Women’s and Girls Emergency Centre (WAGEC), she leads one of the country’s largest frontline services supporting women and children fleeing abuse and homelessness. Every night, around 200 women and children find safety through the organisation she now heads.
But long before she was fighting to change the system, Yade was relying on it to survive. Appearing on marie claire’s podcast You’re Gonna Want To Hear This, Yade shared her own deeply personal story of growing up in a home shaped by domestic violence before finding herself trapped in an abusive relationship as a young mother – a cycle she had promised herself she would never repeat.
“I didn’t share my story for a really, really long time,” she said. “But I didn’t want women to feel alone. So many of us who work in domestic violence have had those experiences, and we’ve got through them. They will too.”
At just 24 years old, with a five-month-old daughter, Yade says she tried to leave her abusive partner countless times. “I couldn’t tell you, hand on heart, the amount of times that I was back and forth,” she said. Each time she left, he would plead for her to return. “He would beg me to come back. He’d say, ‘I’ll kill myself if you leave.'”
“You know, some of the most romantic moments in my life happened in that period. He’d promise to stop drinking. He’d promise to go to counselling. He’d say, ‘No one loves you like I do.'”
Like so many victim-survivors, she desperately wanted to believe things could change. “I had this fantasy about how I would raise my daughter and how her life would be different to the family life I’d grown up in,” she said. “That fantasy had been 24 years in the making.” But the final time she left wasn’t a brave walk towards freedom. “I’d love to say that the final time I left, I walked out with my head held high,” she said. “But it wasn’t like that at all.”
Instead, Yade recalled being violently dragged from her home while her baby remained inside. “I was dragged out of the house by my hair. I was in a simple kind of nightie. I didn’t have any underwear on. I didn’t have shoes. I didn’t have my wallet or ID.” “The door was slammed. My baby daughter was inside, and I couldn’t get back in the house.” Terrified after her partner had threatened to hurt their daughter if she ever left, Yade began walking several kilometres to the nearest police station.
“I was just screaming, ‘My daughter. My daughter. Please. You’ve got to help me get my daughter.'” Police returned with her to the house, only to discover neither her partner nor her baby were there. “There was a good day or so where I was just completely terrified,” she recalled. “I didn’t know if she was alive.”
Eventually, police found her daughter safe at a friend’s home. “I just remember crying,” Yade said. “I wanted to touch every part of her. Every little finger. Every little toe. Just to know she was okay.”
Leaving the relationship, however, was only the beginning. Yade says she became homeless almost immediately. After initially returning to her parents’ home with her baby, her father asked her to leave in the middle of the night. “I just remember standing on the footpath next to the letterbox, holding my baby girl and crying my eyes out,” she said.
“‘I don’t know what to do. I don’t know where to go.'” She spent time couch surfing before eventually finding a small unit where she started rebuilding her life from scratch. “It took me quite some time to get back on my feet,” she said.
Over the years, Yade built a career working in trauma services before eventually joining WAGEC, where her lived experience now shapes the support offered to thousands of women and children every year. Today, she says the public still misunderstands what it takes to leave an abusive relationship. “When you leave, there’s often an escalation in the violence,” she explained. “And that certainly was the case for me.”
She also wants Australians to understand that domestic violence does not discriminate. “It could be anyone,” she said. The women arriving at WAGEC come “from every walk of life, every profession, every socioeconomic background, every suburb.”
While Yade’s story is extraordinary, she is quick to point out it is far from unique. “Part of why I share my story is because it really isn’t that special,” she said. “Every day at WAGEC, we hear stories like this all the time.” Despite everything she has endured, Yade remains hopeful that change is possible—not just for individual women, but for Australia as a whole. “We don’t have to accept domestic violence as this thing in our community that we don’t know how to solve,” she said.
“We can solve it if we all stand together… No one deserves to live with violence.”
Walk For WAGEC
The Walk for WAGEC returns on Sunday, September 13, 2026, inviting Australians to come together in a powerful show of solidarity to help end violence against women and children. Participants can choose between a 5km walk or 10km run through Sydney’s Centennial Park while raising vital funds for the Women’s and Girls Emergency Centre (WAGEC), which provides crisis accommodation and support for women and children escaping domestic and family violence. Whether you’re walking in Sydney or supporting from elsewhere in Australia, every step helps create safer futures, raise awareness and ensure more women and children can access life-changing support when they need it most. To register, go to walkforwagec.org.au
Related stories
Native ad body.
Native ad body.
Native ad body.
