The following principles underpin each recommendation and should be at the forefront in their implementation. In our efforts to prevent domestic, family and sexual violence (DFSV), Australia must:

1. Explicitly prioritise the experiences and needs of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and recognise that DFSV in Australia is rooted in our historical context and colonial legacy. To address this violence and prevent it, our efforts must be genuinely led by First Nations peoples in a way that embeds and promotes cultural safety, place-based approaches and self-determination.
2. Adopt an intersectional approach to preventing DFSV that understands this violence as being symptomatic of broader, systemic issues that intersect with race, class, disability, and sexuality and recognises the intersectional realities that exacerbate violence for certain groups.
3. Embed implementation science to bridge the gap between research and practice. To do this, build in the systematic uptake of research findings, including emerging evidence, across the implementation of policy, programs and practice in Australia. Where appropriate, implementation of recommendations needs to involve genuine engagement and testing with the people and communities they will impact, especially Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
4. Collect more data to address gaps in our understanding. This should prioritise opportunities to collect both qualitative and quantitative data and building in activities that improve and expand data collection.
5. Continually inspect, understand and adapt to the emerging and changing role of technology. This should include understanding and responding to the opportunities that technology may present, as well as the unintended consequences technology may cause or exacerbate.

A national emergency – and an ongoing national priority

1. The Commonwealth and state and territory governments to agree that ‘ending gender-based violence, including violence against children and young people’ becomes an ongoing priority of National Cabinet.
2. The Commonwealth and state and territory governments to strongly embed and build on culturally-informed and place-based domestic, family and sexual violence responses for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women, families and communities, noting the significant work under way to develop a First Nations National Plan. This should include genuine and ongoing consideration of the evidence provided to the Senate Inquiry into Missing and Murdered First Nations women and children, and the commitments under Target 13 of the National Agreement on Closing the Gap.
3. The Commonwealth and state and territory governments to prioritise the experiences of communities that are marginalised especially Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, migrant and refugee communities, women and children with disabilities, LGBTIQA+ people, older women and regional and remote communities in implementing all of the recommendations in this report. Addressing gender-based violence for communities experiencing intersecting forms of marginalisation lays the foundation for population-wide success. Where applicable, implementation should involve a genuine and sustained co-design approach to ensure that affected communities are identifying priorities of greatest urgency and value to them.

The prevention potential

4. 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:
   1. an independent review and expansion of Change the story beyond primary prevention, with a focus on accommodating the evolving global evidence base around the prevention of violence across early intervention, response and recovery; and
   2. establishing a five-year co-funded Prevention Innovation Fund, understanding what works better in an Australian context and at a community level.

Prevention through people

5. The Commonwealth and state and territory governments to adopt a strategic and coordinated approach to embedding the distinct experiences of children and young people in their own right. This includes through the establishment of a Youth Taskforce under the National Plan to End Violence against Women and Children 2022-2032 (National Plan), supported by the Domestic, Family and Sexual Violence Commission, to ensure implementation of the National Plan accelerates a focus on children and young people.
   
   This strategic work should be complemented by more immediate efforts to support children and young people who have experienced violence, including:
   1. support and recovery for young children, with a focus on programmatic responses which maintain and repair a relationship with the protective parent, including in the context of the family law system, as well as upskilling Independent Children’s Lawyers (Commonwealth and states and territories);
   2. developing tailored and developmentally appropriate, as well as youth-specific and informed, service responses for child sexual abuse, children and young people who have experienced family violence, young people using violence at home, and young people using and/or experiencing violence in intimate relationships, drawing on available evidence and practice frameworks available through Australia’s National Research Organisation for Women’s Safety (ANROWS) (states and territories); and
   3. in recognition that certain cohorts of young people will not be in the care of statutory child protection systems or a protective parent, develop and deliver an appropriate and tailored response to young people escaping violence and seeking financial support and safe housing (Commonwealth and states and territories).
6. The Commonwealth Government, with states and territories, to develop a national, coordinated and co-designed approach to engaging with men and boys, and on healthy masculinities and violence prevention. This should include:
   1. establishing intersectional, DFSV-informed advisory mechanisms for engaging with men and boys with multi-disciplinary expertise (e.g., health, education, tech), including the establishment of an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Men’s Advisory Body;
   2. adopting a strengths-based national definition and measurement methodology for healthy masculinities to guide future campaigns and/or program implementation;
   3. developing or expanding DFSV-informed program responses across sectors, focusing on healthy relationships and masculinities throughout men’s life transitions, including school leavers, new fathers, separation/relationship breakdown, recent migration and recent unemployment; and
   4. developing a national response, attuned to the experiences of men and boys, responding to the rise of online misogyny and radicalisation through targeted investment in research to understand relevant risk factors and the extent of harm; collaboration with specialist frontline educators; and a focus on evidence-based tech-industry regulation.
7. The Commonwealth to undertake further structural reforms to strengthen women’s economic equality, in recognition of the interconnectedness between lack of economic security and vulnerability to DFSV. This should include:
   1. consistent with the recommendations of the Women’s Economic Equality Taskforce (WEET), abolishing the Child Care Subsidy Activity Test, as an immediate first step towards universal access to early education for Australian children, noting the current Activity Test limits flexibility in accessing child care for women in casual and insecure work;
   2. adopting in full the WEET recommendation to remove a major and escalating form of financial abuse against women seeking child support (recommendation 6.5);
   3. expanding eligibility for the Low Income Super Tax Offset (LISTO), in order to increase women’s superannuation balances as they age;
   4. developing a successor plan to the National Plan to Respond to the Abuse of Older Australians (Elder Abuse) 2019-2023;
   5. undertaking further reforms including expanding eligibility to address the economic insecurity experienced by women on visas who are victim-survivors of DFSV; and
   6. strengthening workplace health and safety laws to complement the positive duty on employers to prevent workplace sexual harassment, sex discrimination and harassment under the Sex Discrimination Act 1984 (Cth).
8. The Commonwealth and state and territory governments to expand the evidence base on how to build capability of family and friends to identify and respond to DFSV as “natural responders” in their relational contexts with victim-survivors and perpetrators. In the immediate term, the Commonwealth should resource Lifeline’s DV-alert to expand its current community-focussed program offering, prioritising increased reach and frequency of facilitator-led delivery to regional and remote areas, as well as delivery virtually.

Prevention through responses

9. The Commonwealth, through the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) and with state and territory governments, to expedite a needs analysis to determine unmet demand in DFSV crisis response, recovery and healing (excluding police), with the view to develop a pathway to fund demand. This should take into consideration the needs of different groups of women and children and the demand for targeted and culturally safe responses, such as ethno-specific services and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community-controlled organisations, with a particular focus on remote communities.
   
   More immediately, there should be a significant funding uplift for:
   1. legal services, noting the recommendations of the Independent Review of the National Legal Assistance Partnership and the expiry of the current partnership on 30 June 2025;
   2. crisis accommodation, noting commitments to date and what is outlined in Recommendation 10; and
   3. establishment of nationally consistent travel assistance for people escaping DFSV who live in remote areas (Commonwealth and states and territories).
10. The Commonwealth and state and territory governments to apply a prevention lens to the resourcing and delivery of crisis response and recovery services. This includes through:
    1. replacing motels and other high-cost temporary crisis accommodation with specialist crisis accommodation that provide wraparound services (states and territories);
    2. resourcing the DFSV sector for long-term case management, following the needs analysis identified in Recommendation 9 (states and territories); and
    3. increasing linkage between the DFSV and homelessness sectors, and align these sectors in national frameworks and plans (Commonwealth and states and territories).
11. The Commonwealth and state and territory governments to activate the health system and workforce as a key prevention lever. This should include:
    1. equipping and resourcing General Practitioners (GPs), perinatal, and mental health and alcohol and other drug (AOD) services to identify and support DFSV victim-survivors and people who use violence (Commonwealth and states and territories);
    2. creating a specific Medicare item number for GPs that enables them to spend appropriate time with people affected by DFSV (Commonwealth);
    3. mandating training of professionals in general primary and mental health settings in adult and child safeguarding, including DFSV, as a requirement for registration through the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (Commonwealth and states and territories); and
    4. Increasing cross-sector collaboration between the AOD and DFSV sector and provide specialised services for women that are family friendly and support caring for children (states and territories).
12. The Commonwealth and state and territory governments to take targeted efforts to address the significant gaps in responses to people who use violence. This should include:
    1. strengthening initial justice responses to facilitate advice and assistance beyond legal needs, which can help to reduce risk and improve compliance, including access to crisis accommodation (states and territories); and
    2. improving the national evidence base, quality, capability and supply of men’s behaviour change programs, including through a focus on continuous improvement. Behaviour change programs should:
       1. be part of a community-coordinated response;
       2. be provided at appropriate intervention points;
       3. emphasise the value of associated support to victim-survivors through partner and family safety contact; and
       4. facilitate/co-locate access to support for needs related to harmful substance abuse, histories of trauma, cognitive impairment and mental ill-health through a DFSV-informed lens (states and territories, with Commonwealth supporting national consistency and best practice).
13. The Commonwealth and state and territory governments to work together to strengthen multi-agency approaches and better manage risk, with a lens on harm and safety, for victim-survivors of DFSV, including risk of homicide and suicide. This should include:
    1. the development and implementation of nationally consistent risk assessment and management principles to be utilised across the full range of roles identified as having decision-making and/or support functions in relation to DFSV, with a proactive approach to preventing misidentification (Commonwealth and states and territories);
    2. strengthening information sharing within and across jurisdictions – including through the National Criminal Intelligence System (NCIS) (Commonwealth and states and territories);
    3. the introduction and expansion of multi-agency responses, including fit-for-purpose police co-responder models – with an immediate focus on collaborative responses that increase access to forensic examinations (states and territories);
    4. a national approach to strengthen systems responses to high-risk perpetrators, including through trialling and evaluating DFSV threat assessment centres and evidence-based focussed deterrence models (states and territories, with Commonwealth support); and
    5. all jurisdictions establishing mechanisms that are DFSV-informed for independent oversight and accountability of police response and management of DFSV (including members investigated for DFSV). These mechanisms should sit outside of police forces and be civilian-led (states and territories).
14. The Commonwealth and state and territory governments to work together to build the specialist DFSV workforce and expand workforce capability of all services that frequently engage with victim-survivors and people who use violence. This should be done through:
    1. commissioning analysis into current and future labour supply for the DFSV specialist services sector and recommendations to build and support a secure and sustainably resourced sector; and
    2. establishing a DFSV National Workforce Development Strategy that would expand the capacity and capability of sectors, such as the DFSV specialist sector, providing emergency services and accommodation, and including the men's behaviour change sector and the sexual violence sector; and
    3. establishing a strategy for capability uplift across other intersecting workforces, and prioritising legal, justice, child protection and health (including AOD and mental health) sectors.
15. The Commonwealth and state and territory governments should further expand and prioritise work on Action 6 in the First Action Plan (2023-2027) of the National Plan to recognise the full range of sexual violence including where it occurs apart from DFV particularly noting the recommendations from the forthcoming Australian Law Reform Commission inquiry into justice responses to sexual violence.

Prevention through systems and industries

16. The Commonwealth and state and territory governments to undertake an immediate audit of how DFSV perpetrators are weaponising government systems, and to respond to these findings. This audit and subsequent plans for reform should be informed by Safety by Design principles.
    
    The Commonwealth Government should build on work that is already underway and prioritise systems where significant harm is occurring, such as: family law, child support, immigration, and taxation.
17. The Commonwealth and state and territory governments to work with industries that are well positioned to prevent and reduce DFSV, including homicide, with a focus on alcohol and gambling industries, in addition to media and pornography. This includes reviewing and strengthening alcohol and gambling regulatory environments to prioritise the prevention of gender-based violence. This should include:
    1. adopting clear primary objectives in state and territory liquor regulatory regimes to prevent gender-based violence, alongside existing objectives around alcohol harm reduction (states and territories);
    2. restrictions on alcohol sales, delivery timeframes (states and territories) and advertising (Commonwealth and states and territories);
    3. stronger restrictions leading to a total ban on advertising of gambling (Commonwealth and states and territories);
    4. examining the density of electronic gaming machines, and use of online gambling, in relation to the prevalence of DFSV across different populations and communities (Commonwealth and states and territories);
    5. establishing and embedding national standards for media reporting on gender-based violence (Commonwealth); and
    6. ensuring the age-verification pilot for online pornography tests both the technology, and how age verification assurance systems will be implemented, including the participation of the major technology platforms used by Australian children.

Further, the Review recommends that the Commonwealth Government work with the Foundation for Alcohol Research and Education (FARE) and other organisations on a framework to ensure the development of an integrated and focused effort to address the role of alcohol in DFSV.

18. The Commonwealth Government to continue to support the eSafety Commissioner to undertake increasingly complex work preventing gender-based violence, which includes working with the technology industry on the improvement of policies, practices and accountability.

Prevention through learning and data

19. The Commonwealth Government to expand the functions and powers of the National Domestic, Family and Sexual Violence Commission and establish it as a statutory authority. Expanded powers should include performing a clearinghouse function, having stronger powers to gather information, and to continue monitoring the implementation and funding associated with the National Plan.
20. The Commonwealth and state and territory governments to further strengthen data collection, in relation to DFSV. This includes:
    1. working in partnership with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities to embark on a process to determine a community led approach to data collection that accounts for Indigenous data sovereignty principles;
    2. increasing intersectional and disaggregated data, as well as a particular focus on improving data on regional, rural and remote communities such as the Torres Strait Islands, in addition to improving data on LGBTIQA+ experiences, experiences of people with a disability, and children and young people affected by family law processes;
    3. establishing a national data set focusing on the extent and nature of perpetration to inform and improve response; and
    4. prioritising enhancements to the measurements framework for the National Plan to include further quantitative targets.
21. The Commonwealth and state and territory governments to develop a consistent approach to death review processes and improve knowledge on the relationship between DFSV and suicide. This should include:
    1. establishing and uplifting death review panels across all jurisdictions, including with First Nations support units and protocols (state and territory governments);
    2. strengthening national coordination and consistency of DFSV death review processes, and learning and sharing of findings (state and territory governments supported by Commonwealth); and
    3. initiating an urgent inquiry into the relationship between DFSV victimisation and suicide, with a view to developing a methodology for accurate counting of the DFSV death toll (Commonwealth, state and territory governments).