National cabinet met today to announce a tectonic shift in Australia’s approach to tackling violence against women and children. In the midst of an epidemic of violence – at a time when we could all do with some hope – the vision of state, territory and commonwealth leaders around a table armed with new thinking and a shared vision for tackling gender-based violence is a welcome one.
After a 10-year national primary prevention strategy, bolstered by $300m in commonwealth funds, rates of intimate partner homicide have increased by a third in 2024. Sexual assault reports have climbed unabated for years and intimate partner violence rates in populous states such as New South Wales are on an upward trend.
Our efforts to prevent violence against women are not working. However, these efforts do not reflect the lessons that Australia has learned in other areas of prevention. Australian public health success stories – such as tackling HIV/Aids, reducing smoking and improving road safety – have buttressed education and awareness programs with interventions that aimed to change problematic or risky behaviour: making condoms cheap and widely available, making smoking more expensive or lowering speed limits.
The Australian strategy to prevent violence against women has had one target in sight: attitudes. Men who hold sexist and violent attitudes are more likely to perpetrate violence against women, so a logical proposition is changing those attitudes at scale would also reduce gender-based violence.
But the link between attitudes and behaviour is not as straightforward as it seems. A recent analysis of 40 years of sexual violence prevention efforts found that programs to change attitudes have no effect on rates of sexual assault. The authors called for prevention efforts to target violent behaviour more directly.
Not only is there a tenuous relationship between attitudes and violence prevention, but we’ve made limited headway against the attitudes we’ve been seeking to change. The most recent national community attitudes survey revealed no significant improvement in attitudes towards violence against women overall in the Australian community.
In a speech at the International Women’s Day parliamentary breakfast in February, Anthony Albanese declared that we “must face up to where we are falling short” and called for “new thinking” on addressing violence against women. He expressed particular concern about the cycle of violence, where some boys exposed to family and domestic violence as children grow up to perpetrate violence in disproportionate numbers.
This speech went largely unremarked in the media but my ears pricked up. For over a year now, domestic violence expert Jess Hill and I have been delivering talks and writing papers calling for a fresh approach to primary prevention: one that pays attention to the role of childhood trauma as well as other risk factors such as alcohol abuse, gambling and pornography.
We’ve been meeting with a mixture of relief and enthusiasm among frontline workers and anti-violence educators who see these issues playing out every day, but also frustration and even suspicion among those who have dedicated themselves to the task of attitude change in the hope of bringing about a more equal and violence-free society.
Radical change is difficult in this area of work. But the status quo could not hold. After years of government promises to end violence against women, with no such end in sight, the Australian public expects results. A willingness to make difficult political decisions became evident in May this year, when the commonwealth government committed to age verification for adult pornography, recognising the role of early pornography exposure in sexually harmful and coercive behaviour.
The announcements from national cabinet today include increased resourcing for frontline service providers and community legal services, both of which have been devastated by chronic underfunding, and more focus on high-risk perpetrators. Not only did the prime minister back in his earlier comments about the importance of support for traumatised children – a group that is constantly overlooked, mistreated and denied necessary care in Australia – but he specifically named alcohol, gambling and pornography as “harmful industries” that are contributing to the epidemic of violence.
Effective prevention takes political courage. It requires a willingness to ruffle feathers and confront vested interests for the common good. Primary prevention cannot be the fig leaf that governments hide behind in their efforts to defer politically challenging or expensive, but necessary, action.
There is no source of the Nile in violence against women and children; there is no sole cause or silver bullet, however convenient that would be. A singular focus on attitudes has provided political cover for governments to avoid the kinds of commitments that were laid out by national cabinet today.
At a crucial historical moment in the Australian response to violence against women, national cabinet has laid out an ambitious and multi-pronged plan for change, one that reflects more fully the scale of the challenge in front of us. But a blueprint is just the beginning. The only measure of success that matters is that fewer lives in this country are blighted by family, domestic and sexual violence.
Prof Michael Salter is the director of Childlight UNSW in the school of social sciences at UNSW and an expert in child sexual exploitation and gendered violence
In Australia, the national family violence counselling service is on 1800 737 732. In the UK, call the national domestic abuse helpline on 0808 2000 247, or visit Women’s Aid. In the US, the domestic violence hotline is 1-800-799-SAFE (7233). Other international helplines may be found via www.befrienders.org
