Justice at the Edges: What Leadership Means for Women Escaping Violence
“Leadership is standing beside those who are most unseen by the system.”
When Kaylee Neil talks about the law, she speaks with the measured clarity of someone who has sat across from it on behalf of others — not in a courtroom, but in the quiet, often overwhelming moments when a woman tries to understand what her rights are and what the system will actually do for her. Kaylee is not a distant observer of family law reform. She works inside it, every day, as a paralegal at a specialist family law firm in Brisbane — holding the gap between what the legal system promises and what it delivers for women escaping domestic violence.
A 2023 Menzies Global Voices Fellow and Bachelor of Laws (Honours) student at Queensland University of Technology, Kaylee has built her legal education in direct relationship with the communities the law is meant to protect. For her, the question that drives everything is not abstract: what does justice actually look like for a woman who has survived violence, and is now navigating a legal system that was not designed with her experience at the centre?
The Property Problem
At the core of Kaylee’s policy work is a problem that is both deeply practical and profoundly unjust. Her policy proposal — developed through the rigorous 2,500-word Global Voices Policy Fellowship — focused on ensuring that women escaping domestic violence can obtain a just and equitable property settlement. It is an issue that sits at the intersection of family law, financial abuse and the long shadow that coercive control casts over a woman’s ability to negotiate on equal footing.
Property settlements are among the most consequential outcomes of relationship breakdown for women who have experienced domestic violence. Yet the legal pathways to a just outcome are often inaccessible, prohibitively expensive, or simply unknown to the women who need them most. Financial abuse — the systematic control of a partner’s access to money, assets and economic decision-making — frequently continues through the legal process itself, as perpetrators use litigation as another instrument of power.
Kaylee’s work as a paralegal gives her daily exposure to this reality. She has seen how the law can be both a tool of liberation and a mechanism of further harm, depending on how it is applied, by whom, and with what resources behind it. Reform, in her view, is not about adding complexity to an already complex system. It is about removing the barriers that mean the most vulnerable women — those with the least financial means, the least legal literacy and the most to lose — are the ones most likely to walk away with less than they are entitled to.
From Brisbane to the United Nations
Kaylee’s selection as the Menzies Foundation Scholar for the CSW68 — the 68th session of the UN Commission on the Status of Women in New York — placed her at the largest annual gathering on gender equality and women’s empowerment in the world. The 2024 session focused on accelerating gender equality by addressing poverty and strengthening institutions through a gender lens — a theme that mapped directly onto the reform questions she was already working through in her policy proposal.
In the halls of the UN and across the parallel events and side sessions that make up the full texture of CSW, Kaylee encountered the global dimensions of the issues she had been grappling with close to home. The barriers facing women in property and financial settlements in Australia are not unique — they are variations on a structural pattern that plays out across legal systems worldwide, shaped by gender inequality, institutional design and the persistent undervaluation of women’s economic contributions within relationships.
The experience sharpened her conviction that domestic reform requires global awareness — that understanding how other jurisdictions have approached these problems, where they have succeeded and where they have fallen short, is essential to building better solutions at home.
The Law as Leadership
What distinguishes Kaylee’s approach is her understanding of legal advocacy as a form of relational leadership. Her volunteerism with the Australian Pro Bono Centre, Young Australians in International Affairs and UN Youth Australia — alongside her Queensland Youth Parliament experience — reflects a consistent orientation toward service that begins with proximity to people, not distance from them. Leadership, for Kaylee, is not performed from a position of authority. It is practised in the moments when you choose to stand in the gap between what someone needs and what the system currently offers.
That orientation matters enormously in the context of family law and domestic violence. Women seeking legal assistance in the aftermath of violence are not looking for advocates who understand their situation in the abstract. They need people who understand the texture of what they have been through, who can navigate institutional complexity on their behalf, and who will not flinch at the places where the system fails.
At the Menzies Leadership Foundation, we believe that this kind of legal advocacy — grounded in lived proximity, driven by justice and committed to the hardest cases — is precisely the kind of leadership Australia’s institutions need more of. Investing in Kaylee’s development is an investment in a future where the law works for everyone who needs it, not just those with the means to access it.
Kaylee Neil is a 2023 Menzies Global Voices Fellow. Applications for the 2026 Global Voices Fellowship are now open. If you are committed to leadership that centres justice, advocates for the unseen, and is willing to do the hard work of reform, we invite you to explore the Fellowship and stay connected with the Menzies Leadership Foundation’s broader emerging leadership community.
Australia’s legal future is being shaped through proximity — by leaders who understand that the most vulnerable cannot be served from a distance.
In a world marked by systemic inequality, financial abuse and legal systems that were never designed with survivors at their centre, the leaders who are making a difference are those willing to stand in the gap — between what the law promises and what it delivers, between institutional complexity and the women who must navigate it alone. They are advocates, not bystanders. They work in communities, not courtrooms.
Through its support of leaders like Kaylee Neil and the emerging generation of justice-driven reformers featured in Global Voices, the Menzies Leadership Foundation is committed to nurturing the kind of leadership that our times demand — leadership that is relational, grounded in lived proximity, and capable of removing the barriers that keep the most vulnerable from what they are entitled to.
If you are committed to leadership that centres justice, advocates for the unseen, and is willing to do the hard work of reform, we invite you to stay connected with the Menzies Leadership Foundation and the work advancing purpose-driven leadership in Australia and beyond.
