What Will It Take To See Domestic Violence Stats Drop?

We speak to Jess Hill (Australian journalist behind ‘See What You Made Me Do’), Delia Donovan (CEO of DV NSW) and Lisa McAdams (Founder of Safe Space Workplace) on what it will take to create real change and see domestic violence stats drop in Australia.

JESS HILL

Australian journalist + author of
‘See What You Made Me Do'

“As Rosie Batty said, as the National Recovery Alliance says, we need to get a lot more creative about how we see prevention.”

“We need to talk more about accountability, and recovery as prevention. Not just preventing it before it starts at adolescence, but talking about, how do we stop this perpetrator from perpetrating again? I don't think that we're putting enough effort into that.

It’s something that I’m working a lot on – making a much more sophisticated prevention framework. Because yes, it's wonderful having increased gender equality, but unfortunately, in a lot of the most gender-equal countries in the world – New Zealand included – family violence rates are extremely high. They’re extremely high in Iceland, which has ranked number one on the gender equality index for 14 years – 50% of women killed in Iceland are killed by their partners, or ex-partners. That's higher than the EU average of 38%.

So we really need to get much closer to what the evidence is telling us – that gender equality, while a very worthy aim that we need to pursue, is not going to get us there. We need distinct policies and levers, if we're going to change norms.

“We changed norms around drink driving, primarily by making people accountable for it. ”

We introduced RBTs and those norms started changing real quick - most people in Australia wore it as a badge of honour, to drive home pissed. Things like “I actually drive better when I'm drunk” was a classic thing to say – and the political capital that needed to be burned to introduce RBTs was huge, they had to-scale posters of politicians outside clubs, saying RBTs were going to destroy clubs and pubs.

So we need to think much more about not just awareness campaigns, that say you need to be thinking better, but about accountability, to change the way that we're behaving through various regulatory levers. We need to get a bit more creative and innovative on that front - and Australia does that really well.

THE CHANGES WE'VE SEEN SO FAR.

"I'd also like to highlight some of the ways in which things are changing – because I think there's actually been some incredible progress.

Like, if we take the issue of coercive control – five years ago, most people would not have heard of it. But ANU did a survey, and 55% of Australians now say they know what it means – which means that they actually know what family violence means, which they didn't before. And I say that as someone who had to learn from the ground up myself, 10 years ago, with a misunderstanding of family violence.

There’s the Coercive Control Law Reform in NSW and QLD, with Queensland being backed up by 89 recommendations from a task force, and up the top of that list was a Royal Commission into Policing in Queensland. So there's a lot more to support that systems reform.

There’s the Family Law amendments that have been pushed through by the government. And yes, with the Federal Government, we can certainly say that not enough is happening – but they were prepared to burn some political capital from the domestic violence sector side of things, because we were gearing up for a very scary campaign on Family Law. This is the only court where we've had the assassination of judges and the bombing of a court; the sorts of threats you get when you campaign in this space is very scary. Which is why a lot of people wouldn't campaign for a long time.

But what the government did was revoke the presumption of Equal Shared Parenting, which sounds like a really nice idea, but what it had done is it had given perpetrators the right to equal custody, no matter what had happened in the relationship, and no matter what continued to happen. There’s many other reforms going on in Family Court…which is a bin-fire of an institution, but is getting better.”

- JESS HILL

DELIA DONOVAN

CEO of DV NSW

"When we see real investment. Domestic and family violence is a complex and difficult problem - there is no silver bullet to fix it.

We need to tackle this problem at every stage, from primary prevention and early intervention, to crisis and recovery, in order to stop it at the start, and to support victim-survivors heal after violence. We need large-scale, long-term funding in all of these areas if we're going to see real change."

- DELIA DONOVAN

LISA MCADAMS

Founder of Safe Space Workplace

“We need governments that are brave enough to not be thinking about the votes.”

"We need them to say, 'We’re not going to make any impact in its first term, second term, third term – but this is a ten-term plan.'

Because this is thought to be a long-term plan and we're making a lot of headway now. It's the same with companies - they've got to go, this is a long-term.

We've got to start caring and not just ticking boxes.”

- LISA MCADAMS