The story

Every week in Australia, on average, a woman dies violently, usually at the hands of someone she knows. Six women were killed in a seven-day period in October 2018.

However, the alacrity with which our leaders respond to acts of violence in the form of terrorism or, say, one-punch incidents provides a stark contrast to how we deal with family violence or sexual assault, where the victims are almost always female and the perpetrators are almost always male.

We often see seemingly trivial issues—such as a slip-up at a Bunnings sausage sizzle—generate more public engagement and policy response than the scourge of violence against women. As unionist Mich-Elle Myers tweeted in November 2018 after the Bunnings mishap, ‘One man slips on an onion, policies changed and the country loses its mind. 60 dead women from violence this year image’. Writer Clementine Ford tweeted that if the issue of violence was about strawberry growers or farmers—both sectors that have experienced awful crises—our leaders would be acting. This is not facetious: we have seen emergency responses to these issues. When strawberry growers faced a downturn due to a cowardly sabotage attempt (when sewing needles were placed in fruit), a campaign was led by Prime Minister Scott Morrison himself, who lashed out at the ‘grubs’ responsible and announced new penalties and increased jail time.2 If people had died as a consequence of this situation, let alone one every two days, a national crisis would have been proclaimed.

After the horrendous death of a 41-year-old Aboriginal woman in Alice Springs in 2017, a small story in the local newspaper referred to it as being of a ‘domestic nature’. Days later, the paper’s front page declared it was time to ‘stop the tragedy in the Todd’. According to journalist Miki Perkins in an article in the Sydney Morning Herald in July 2018, the victim’s distraught family and friends mistook this for a campaign to end violence against Aboriginal women. However, the ‘tragedy’ was a buffel-grass infestation of the Todd River, and the campaign was a call for locals to support a new Landcare group. It was a ‘cruel joke’, wrote Perkins.

Serious political issues such as terrorism rightly garner immediate and robust responses. But the issue of terror in the home, not so. Cartoonist Cathy Wilcox asked readers in one cartoon, ‘Is it fair to compare radical violent terror attacks to domestic violence, in terms of threats to our way of life? Of course not! Every time a terrorist attacks, or nearly attacks, we have to change laws, tighten security, blame certain communities, debate immigration and demonise our fellow citizens … whereas every time another person assaults or kills their partner, nothing changes, we’re sad, but we carry on … because that is our way of life.’3

Australians are ready for a change to this way of life. There is growing concern about the treatment of women. #MeToo, #LetHerSpeak, #TimesUp and other movements that challenge long-held practices and discrimination are sweeping the globe, and in Australia a spotlight is being shone on issues relating to sexism and sexual harassment. In June 2018 the Australian sex discrimination commissioner, Kate Jenkins, established the largest-ever inquiry into sexual harassment, while in March of the same year journalist Tracey Spicer launched NOW Australia, an organisation to help survivors of sexual harassment and assault in workplaces, notably in the media industry. In spite of inquiries, including a Senate inquiry into violence against women with disabilities and the landmark Victorian Royal Commission into Family Violence, the pace and rate of change are too slow and government attention waxes and wanes.

We have seen how momentum can be lost on this issue. In 2015, there was a wave of optimism: this would be the year that changed lives and laws. Behaviours and attitudes would alter and our nation’s leaders—of all persuasions—would designate the issue of gendered violence in Australia an emergency. This hope was due in no small part to Rosie Batty. She was seared in our consciousness when her son, Luke, was murdered by his father at a local cricket game in February 2014. A woman who endured unimaginable tragedy, she channelled her pain and efforts into putting the issue of family violence on the national agenda.

When Rosie was named Australian of the Year in 2015, I cried. The symbolism was overwhelming. A picture of gravitas and grace, she has built on decades of work by the women’s movement and the many women and men who have worked day in and day out for years to keep women and children safe, advocate for resources and drive policy reform. The day after Luke’s death, she made our nation realise that this violence doesn’t discriminate, saying, ‘Family violence happens to everybody. No matter how nice your house is, how intelligent you are. It can happen to anyone, and everyone.’ Her contribution to this debate can never be underestimated.

The sense of urgency for change was shared by many of us in 2015. In that same year, veteran feminist and pioneer of the shelter movement, Anne Summers, also urged us to act, saying in a blog post, ‘This is the year when we have to do whatever is needed to end this crime wave that in just two months has seen two women a week killed by their current or former partners.’

However, four years later there is still a lack of understanding among leaders and legislators, as well as the public, as to the extent of the violence, what causes it, and how we can address it. Where is the sense of urgency surrounding this issue when women are dying every week?

It is a fact that the biggest risk for becoming a victim of sexual assault or domestic or family violence is being a woman. The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), in its 2016 personal safety survey, shows us that one in three Australian women had experienced physical violence, and one in five had experienced sexual violence since the age of fifteen. An Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) report on family violence noted in 2018 that intimate partner violence was the largest contributor to death, disability and illness in women aged fifteen to forty-four. According to another AIHW report published in 2018 on homelessness services, it is the largest driver of homelessness for women, and a common factor in child protection notifications. Sound like an emergency?

Violence is perpetrated against women of all backgrounds, including young and old, women of colour, lesbian, bisexual and transgender women, and women with a disability. While Rosie Batty reminded us that any woman can be subject to violence, there are groups who experience greater levels of this violence, such as those with a disability and Indigenous women.

The rates of violence against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women are Australia’s particular shame. Research carried out by Our Watch, the organisation I chair that works to end violence against women and their children, shows that three in five Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women have experienced physical or sexual violence by a male intimate partner, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women are eleven times more likely than non-Indigenous women to die as a result of assault. A 2016 report by the government’s Productivity Commission revealed that hospitalisation rates for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women due to family-violence-related assaults are thirty-two times the rate for non-Indigenous women, and three times the rate for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander men. This is scandalous on a world scale—‘utterly horrific’, according to writer Celeste Liddle.

In the context of domestic and family violence, the murder of women and their children can be the final result of a long history of abuse. But violence against women is not limited to the home or intimate relationships. Every year in Australia, more than 300,000 women experience violence—often sexual violence—from someone other than a partner. Our understanding of these assaults and murders has been elevated with the murders of Eurydice Dixon in 2018 and Jill Meagher in 2012. By no means are these the only victims of such heinous crimes, but, as ABC podcasters Stephen Smiley and Angela Lavoipierre wrote in 2018, they ‘captured the public imagination’.

2019 commenced with another horrific murder of a young woman. Aiia Maasarwe, a 21-year-old Palestinian citizen of Israel who was studying at La Trobe University was attacked metres from her tram stop while on the phone to her sister. This appalling act shocked a nation, sparking a series of vigils and igniting a debate about male violence that could be nation-changing.

Violence against women takes many forms, and is known by many names: family and domestic violence, intimate partner violence, sexual assault, sexual harassment, dating violence, unwanted kissing and sexual touching, rape, sex-trafficking, threats against children, femicide—the list goes on. While less well-known, financial control and emotional and psychological abuse can also limit a woman’s world, her choices and sense of self, and those of her children, as much as physical and sexual violence. But no matter how the violence manifests, the common characteristic of perpetrators’ behaviour is to control through fear, and to place the safety and wellbeing of women and their children at risk.

This violence has an enormous impact—first and foremost on the women who experience it, but also on their children, and on society in general. There’s also an economic penalty: a PricewaterhouseCoopers report released in 2015 estimated the combined social, health and economic cost of violence against women in Australia to be $21.7 billion per year and increasing. The ABS reports that by 2021–22 violence against Aboriginal women will cost $2.2 billion per year. I would have thought the business case for preventing this violence, if nothing else, would be compelling for our leaders.

All violence is wrong, no matter who experiences it or who perpetrates it. Of course, not all men are violent and not only women are victims of domestic violence. Yet the data clearly shows that men and women experience violence very differently, in both severity and impact. Women usually experience violence and abuse at the hands of men they know, often in their own homes, often repeatedly, and sometimes over many years, if not a lifetime. In contrast, men typically experience violence at the hands of a stranger, usually another man, in public places. Both sexes are more likely to experience violence from men, and by ‘more likely’ I mean 95 per cent—that’s the percentage of men and women in a 2016 ABS report who identified the perpetrator of violence against them as male.

Understandably, people are concerned when acts of violence are trivialised or ignored, including acts of violence against men. As one male Commonwealth minister said to me, ‘You do realise that men are victims too, don’t you?’ Yes, there are examples of men being subject to family violence, but the claims of some groups (for example, the One in Three Campaign) that one in three cases of domestic violence is perpetrated against men is not supported by the statistics, particularly the death statistics. According to the Australian Domestic and Family Violence Death Review Network, between 2010 and 2014, of the 20 per cent of murders committed by women, more than two-thirds were by women who killed men who had been abusing them. There were two cases (out of 152 examined) where a woman killed a man she had a history of abusing.

Fiona McCormack, CEO of Domestic Violence Victoria, reminds us: ‘that family violence is primarily perpetrated by men and overwhelmingly experienced by women and children can be a deeply uncomfortable truth, but unless we have the courage as a community to look at why it is that some men choose to perpetrate violence, we’ll never be able to fix this’.4

She’s right. We cannot afford to ignore the influence of gender on violence perpetration. The violence is linked inextricably to gender inequality and is more likely to occur where gender inequality is ingrained in social and cultural norms, structures and practices.

No matter how inconvenient this truth, the manner in which we treat men and women in our society, and the messages we send children from the moment they are born, help create the story that ends in violence against women and children. We have to change the status quo. We have to change the story.