“We must face up to where we are falling short and look for new ways to do better … We must recognise that gender equality – while essential – does not safeguard against violence on its own. Indeed, even nations that lead the world on measures of gender equality are dealing with their own shocking rates of violence. Some of it – in the cruellest of ironies – occurring as a reaction to the progress being made … This is why addressing family violence cannot begin and end with efforts to achieve gender equity or economic equality. We have to go deeper than that.”
– Prime Minister, the Hon Anthony Albanese MP25
When the Australian Government released the first iteration of the National Plan to Reduce Violence against Women and their Children 2010-2022 (First National Plan) in February 2011, followed by the associated Change the story prevention framework in November 2015, this approach was innovative and world-leading.26 It was based on international evidence that highlighted the strong correlation between harmful gender stereotypes, violence-supportive attitudes and gender inequality and the perpetration of violence against women and children.27
At a time when no other country had a nationally coordinated approach to prevention, the Review recognises that Australia’s commitment to placing the improvement of community attitudes, respectful relationships and gender equality at the core of its mission to reduce gendered violence was ground-breaking. Gender inequality and harmful gendered attitudes are perennial challenges. Highlighting the historic and social context within which gendered violence thrives – and locking it in so firmly as the foundation for change – was significant. The Review acknowledges that we must keep sight of these longer-term objectives to achieve equality and end injustice for all Australians.
In the decade since the launch of the First National Plan, Australia’s prevention framework has evolved. In response to the advocacy of First Nations women, for example, it has been updated to recognise how the impacts of colonisation, racism, heterosexism, ableism and other forms of structural injustice all interact with gender, heavily influencing many people’s experience violence and associated harms.28
The past decade has also seen a rapid expansion in the evidence base. Improved evidence exists around the way in which certain factors – such as adverse childhood experiences, mental health and substance abuse – also intersect with gender and other inequalities to drive violence and abuse, compound harm and limit access to support.29
Australia has also begun to grapple more effectively with certain forms of gendered violence, including coercive control and its manifestations in financial and technological abuse.30 Although local perpetration data needs to be developed further, a growing evidence base is now available on the pathways that lead to perpetration.31 This research shows how to interrupt those predictable pathways and to redirect the trajectories of those already perpetrating.32
The Review acknowledges, however, that despite improvements to gender equality in a number of areas, we have not seen an associated downturn in the rates of gender-based violence.33 In other words, women may be experiencing some improvements in socio-economic and other forms of equality, but still fear walking home alone or what awaits them when they get there. This is a serious impediment to our ongoing project to improve equality. In fact, we will not achieve gender equality until we see tangible reductions in gender-based violence.34
Australia also faces an evolving threat environment, in which gains made over the past decade by dedicated prevention practitioners are being undermined by a growing backlash against women’s rights, LGBTIQA+ diversity, and the campaign for racial equity.35 This backlash is being orchestrated globally by a range of actors who are not only influencing global politics, but also targeting disaffected young men, especially online.36
This impact is playing out in classrooms across Australia, where sexual harassment from male students towards teachers and peers is rising sharply,37 as well as in the radicalisation of some young men globally.38 Australia currently lacks a coherent strategy for responding to this backlash. If Australia does not meet this challenge, the Review notes that this will likely result in higher rates of violence and abuse. If we cannot meaningfully connect with men and boys, we risk undoing decades of progress.
As recognised above, Australia has reached a period of such acute crisis that it must be seen as a national emergency. At such a critical inflection point, we need to bring our collective work and efforts together. As the evidence continues to grow and expand, the Review has concluded that our approach must expand with it – and that every prevention opportunity must be unlocked. In other words, we need to be flexible and responsive and pull every lever available to us – as long as we are doing so in a domestic, family and sexual violence (DFSV)-informed way.
This means interrogating whether privileging one approach or lens over another might be holding back good work in certain areas. For example, Change the story, the framework that guides the national approach to prevention, designates known risk factors for violence – such as child maltreatment, trauma, and substance abuse – as ‘reinforcing factors’, secondary to the gendered drivers of violence.39
While noting that these factors intersect with gender in many ways, this Review recognises that, in practice, the division of risk factors into first order/second order issues has led to those secondary risk factors being deprioritised, and some completely neglected. This approach does not align with internationally accepted prevention models, such as the World Health Organisation Violence Prevention Alliance, which seek to address the interaction between all risk factors – at the individual, relationship, community and societal level.40
The Review recognises that Change the story prioritises ‘primary’ prevention over ‘secondary’ and ‘tertiary’ prevention, designating ‘primary’ prevention as the form that will have the largest impact on gender-based violence.41 The Review heard from those working on the frontline and in community-based settings that, while the distinctions of ‘primary’, ‘secondary’ and ‘tertiary’ prevention may have meaning at a policy and theoretical level, the reality in practice is that they constantly overlap. What is more, the Review heard that these forms of prevention need to be operationalised together for service responses to be effective.
Further, the Review heard that this theoretical categorisation, as well as the siloing of services, often renders the real-life experiences of victim-survivors invisible. For example, the Review heard that engagement with a young person who is homeless and needs accommodation may formally be categorised as ‘early intervention’ if this is their first touchpoint with the homelessness sector. This young person’s need for housing security will likely follow a long history of abuse, however, during which time they will have been visible to other services which all had opportunities to interrupt that young person’s trajectory of harm and prevent it from escalating. ‘Early intervention’ for this young person therefore should have involved support early in childhood to identify and prevent further experiences of harm, rather than waiting till they touched the homelessness system. This highlights that, when it comes to the lived experience of people who experience and/or use violence, the neat lines that professionals have drawn around ‘types’ of prevention are abstract and can even lead to harm.
Similarly, the Review notes that Respectful Relationships programs in schools are classified as primary prevention – preventing violence before it occurs. The disclosures that those programs can elicit, however – and the response and referrals that should accompany these disclosures – fall within different categories that are theoretically ‘downstream’ from primary prevention. If these are not coordinated and resourced as part of a holistic response that incorporates awareness raising, education, response and support, we are missing a critical opportunity to prevent current and future harm. Even worse, young people may end up wishing that they had not disclosed.
Prevention opportunities exist across every domain – early intervention, response and recovery – and these should be given equal focus in our prevention strategies. More broadly, a violence prevention lens should be applied to every interaction with people using or experiencing DFSV, whether that be in schools, in court, in a doctor’s rooms, or at a refuge for women and children.
The Review calls for every opportunity, and every available mechanism, to be activated to stem trajectories of harm. Significant prevention potential exists in places and spaces that our current prevention framework considers ‘secondary’ or unorthodox. These must be incorporated into our expanded approach to more effectively reduce DFSV.
The challenge, of course, does not just relate to conceptualisation, but how those impacts on funding and coordination. For example, the Review heard from many frontline services that current funding streams do not enable them to provide a holistic community-based response, but instead compel them to privilege one ‘type’ of prevention over another and design their programs within a narrow frame. In many cases, these frontline services do the holistic work regardless. Because this is neither officially funded nor accounted for, however, it puts enormous pressure on services – either to find philanthropic funds to do the work properly, or to do the extra work unfunded – leading to burn out and threatening their sustainability.
When examining the levers at our disposal, the Review has been both practical and broad. This has been in keeping with its Terms of Reference, scoping what the Review is calling ‘the prevention potential’, whereby we seek to apply all available evidence-based approaches that prevent and reduce DFSV in a practical way.42 This includes the specific focus on homicide prevention, which the current prevention framework positions at the extreme (or tertiary) end of our responses.
When homicides of women and children are escalating – and when we are faced with a global wave of organised misogyny – Australia must be open-minded and willing to interrogate how it can improve. In any area of policy, it is vital that we constantly reassess; test our approaches for efficacy and impact and collaborate.
Gender-based violence is endemic. It has touched nearly everyone in some way (even at early ages), either through their own lived experience or that of their parents and grandparents.43 Prevention work is predominantly an effort at stemming the transmission or repetition of harm. Further, there is no one single factor that leads to perpetration. In keeping with a public health approach, the Review notes that we must accurately identify and direct attention to those risk factors, so we can also identify the protective factors and target our responses effectively.
The primary finding of this Review is that potential for prevention exists in more areas than Australia has previously recognised. This potential is explored throughout the remainder of this report, in which the Review highlights priority areas to guide policy action and inspire new ways of thinking and responding to this emergency. The Review invites policy and decision makers to rethink the way that they perceive prevention and the resulting opportunities for greater focus and investment. This was the task set out in the Review’s Terms of Reference. It encourages policy and decision makers to recognise and truly understand that ‘prevention’ is not just about stopping violence before it starts, but also acting to prevent it from occurring again, as well as from escalating into ongoing harm.
Of equal importance is the invitation to break down current silos and expand our approach so that we do not get in the way of our own success. To do this, we must examine the current theory of change that informs our national prevention framework to ensure that it enables good practice; recognises intersectional experiences of all kinds; and, consistent with models of continuous improvement normalised across public health strategies, learns from and adapts to a perpetually growing evidence base. We have a responsibility, particularly to current and future generations, to be mature and curious in our approach to prevention, and constantly reassess whether our strategies are having the desired effect. If we can expand and unlock the potential of prevention, we will get closer to our shared goal: a country in which everybody feels valued, respected and safe.
Accordingly, the Review recommends that an independent review of Change the story be conducted by a multi-disciplinary team to keep pace with the evolving evidence base, both domestically and internationally, and to ensure that it accounts for the intersecting experiences of different communities. To accelerate community-based prevention interventions and understand what works in an Australian context, the Review also recommends the establishment of a five-year Prevention Innovation Fund, co-funded by the Commonwealth and states and territories. The purpose of this fund should be to unlock the prevention potential by:
- supporting critical prevention work being conducted in organisations across the country to respond to violence that has already occurred and to prevent further violence; and
- exploring interventions to prevent violence that meet different needs of local communities; and testing new approaches to prevention.
All projects funded under the Fund should be properly evaluated and inform the national evidence base through a new clearing house function in the Domestic, Family and Sexual Violence Commission (see Recommendation 19). The Fund should also:
- address key action areas named in this Review, the domains of the National Plan and be closely informed by Action 8 of the First Action Plan 2023-2744;
- explicitly prioritise intersectional approaches – including efforts to end violence against First Nations women and children; women and children with disability; migrant and refugee women and children; LGBTQIA+ people; and in remote and regional parts of Australia like the Torres Strait;
- prioritise community-controlled organisations and the specialist DFSV sector, including the sexual violence and men’s behaviour change program sector;
- prioritise collaborative and joined-up proposals and require non-specialist organisations (including alcohol and other drugs and homelessness services) to partner with a specialist DFSV service to be eligible;
- prioritise programs that target early intervention and recovery for children and young people; and
- be managed by an advisory panel that includes frontline service providers, lived experience advisors, and government representatives.
| Recommendation 4 |
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The Commonwealth and state and territory governments to expand their approach to prevention to acknowledge the global evidence base to leverage all prevention touchpoints more effectively. This should include:
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