Change is Possible

Apologies to subscribers, it’s been an aeon since I last posted. I did not anticipate becoming so busy when I started this Substack. I hope to return to regular service in the coming months.

There are so many things I’d like to write about here, and I will return to those pressing stories when my time becomes my own again. In the meantime, I thought I’d publish a speech I delivered to two audiences over the past few weeks. Firstly for the Central Coast Domestic Violence Network alongside longtime family violence leader Moo Baulch, a comrade and friend I’ve known for the past decade; and secondly to the excellent team at Meli Geelong last week.

It’s a reflection on how we can generate genuine systemic change, as well as the potent combination of good data and the centring of lived experienced.

Big thanks to Moo Baulch for hosting, to the Central Coast Domestic Violence Committee for having us, and to Arely Carrion from Mounties Group for her generous support

How can we create systemic change?

I want to start by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land on which we meet, the Darkinjung people, and I pay my respect to the Elders,  past and present. We owe our deepest gratitude to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples for how they cared for lands, waters and their communities.

When we arrived on the tall ships 240 years ago, we brought some wicked social problems with us. Child abuse, family violence, gender inequality, misogyny, coercive control – we imported them like invasive pests.

Now, we must help to repair the damage, and empower First Nations communities with the right to self-determination. We must create a better future for our children – especially First Nations children. Justice and self-determination should be inalienable rights, and if we are going to make any real progress in this country we must finally tell the truth about our violent past and our violent present. We must make visible the systems of discrimination, racism, and power and control, and use all our ingenuity and willpower to fix them.

Which is what we’re here to talk about tonight. Now, Sharon and I have already solved the world’s problems over the phone, so I feel well-prepared.

But really, I actually do spend most of my days obsessing over how to solve the world’s problems – specifically how we respond to coercive control and family violence. Sometimes that means grinding along and marching furiously against political brick walls – special hello to the Abbott and Morrison governments, good times.

But sometimes, the gate between the impossible and the possible swings open. A change of government, a ministerial reshuffle, or a few star players in all the right positions of power. Then you see magic happening.

And by magic, I mean meaningful reform.

The kind of reform that can change Australia.

What does this look like? If you don’t mind going on a brief stroll down memory lane, let’s turn our minds back a few years to 2017. It had been a couple of years since Malcolm Turnbull ousted Tony Abbott, who you may remember as the former minister for women. For a few years we had not only a feminist prime minister imposing bonk bans on the federal parliament, but also gave two unlikely portfolios to an unashamed Liberal Party feminist, Kelly O’Dwyer: she became the minister for women, and the minister for finance. Now, back in December of 2017, the world was still reeling from the #MeToo movement, which had gone viral two months earlier. Literally, right up until Christmas and into 2018, one’s morning routine consisted of waking up, grabbing a coffee and catching up on which of your artistic heroes had been exposed as a sexual deviant overnight.

More than that though, as the great feminist journalist Kristine Ziwica wrote at the time, “The protective cladding of power and privilege that had long silenced victims and shielded powerful perpetrators had been pierced,” wrote journalist Kristine Ziwica. “You could hear the alarm bells in Hollywood and around the world: beep, beep – rape-culture systems are down.”

This was a rare moment of structural weakness in patriarchy: a vulnerable piece of flesh had been exposed, and it was as though women all over the world received a subliminal message that now was the time to draw back their arrows and shoot.

O’Dwyer didn’t waste time.

Long story cut short: determined to do something meaningful to improve women’s economic security, O’Dwyer supported the ambitious and visionary Sex Discrimination Commissioner, Kate Jenkins, to produce the radical, paradigm-shifting Respect @ Work report. Fifty-five recommendations to thoroughly transform working culture in Australia: including a whopper: a positive duty for workplaces to prevent sexual harassment, which would put sexual harassment on the same footing as workplace injury.  Of course, by the time Respect @ Work was finished, Turnbull was out, and Jenkins hand it to Christian Porter, who shelved it for a year. Back to the grind. But despite the Coalition refusing to introduce a positive duty, Jenkins kept at it: speaking at webinars for anyone who would host them, biding her time, playing the long game.

After 2021, when chickens came home to roost for the Coalition and women marched furiously across the country, the headwind of angry women was behind the Albanese government, and they made an election promise to adopt all 55 recommendations, including the positive duty. So now we have it: world leading reform that obligates workplaces to prevent sexual harassment from occurring. Lawyer Josh Bornstein – who has worked on countless sexual harassment cases – told me the positive duty obligation is worth a million bystander training sessions, because it actually requires the organisation, legally, to root-and-branch consider how to minimise sexual harassment occurring, which means looking at the profile of the workforce, the gender composition, wage differences and so on. The workplaces that would most need to change - he pointed out with some relish – are what Jenkins categorized as the most high-risk ones: where you have men in their fifties and sixties dominating at the top, and women in their twenties and thirties down the bottom. (By the way, combining the ministries of women and finance is a dead-set winner. Katy Gallagher now holds these dual portfolios – and we have seen powerful changes adopted from her Women’s Economic Equality Taskforce, like the abolition of the punitive Parents Next program and the restoration of the single parenting payment to single parents with children aged up to 14).

I wanted to go on that little stroll together just to remind us all that even in times that feel hopeless and heavy, when it feels like nothing is being done, there can be seismic changes afoot just out of sight.

Now, I don’t know if you’ve felt it, but that gate of possibility has swung wide open again over the past few weeks. Horribly however, in this sector, that gate too often swings on the hinge of a horrific domestic homicide – or in the case of this year, a seemingly relentless run of them. It’s the worst part of the public-facing work – that you’re at your busiest following a murder or the annihilation of a family, because the public is aghast, and the media suddenly needs accountability and answers. Honestly when I get those phone calls, I sometimes feel like curling up under my doona and just hiding – because when the public is horrified, so am I, and so is everyone in the sector who has to talk to the media about them. I can’t help feeling in those moments that this is a person we failed. We also know that these moments of shock, grief and anger can also be harnessed as teachable moments. But even there, it is such a difficult balance, especially when you have very little details about the specific case.

Over the past 15 years or so, we’ve seen these big media moments come and go – sometimes they usher in huge change, sometimes not.  But there is something different about this one: more momentum, more determination from journalists to keep it going, and a federal government that has committed to ending gendered violence in a generation. I used to scoff at that, because it sounds absurd, but I’ve since decided to use it. End it in a single generation, you say? You’d want to be making some pretty significant changes, and some pretty big funding commitments to do that, right?

Now, the federal government did not give additional funding to frontline services in the Budget, and that travesty must be corrected next May. But - the government is committed to investing money and manpower into finding a way out of the stalemate we’re in. They actually do want to tackle this problem.  

And one area it wants to shake up is the way we define and resource prevention work.

At the heart of our gendered violence prevention strategy is the population-wide project to achieve gender equality, improve community attitudes, and address harmful gender norms. Now let me be clear from the outset: to eradicate domestic abuse we do need to change community attitudes, and we need to see that attitude change correlate with changes to behaviour. This means confronting and overturning the prejudices that underpin gender inequality, from unequal pay rates to our gendered responses to shame and anxiety. Teaching kids what respectful relationships look like (and doing so in a way that connects with the most resistant among them) and confronting bullying at school is also an essential part of this. But long-term community attitude change is a strategy that could take decades to yield results. In the meantime, abusers remain largely out of sight, run systematic campaigns of degradation and terror, and commit acts that are, so far this year, escalating to murder every four days.

I feel a sense of urgency about this, like so many people in the sector and here tonight, because victim survivors across Australia - who regularly email me, call me, and speak to me at events like these - do not have time to wait.

For the past five years, I’ve toured across Australia speaking on coercive control at more than 350 events for communities, frontline workers, health workers, magistrates and lawyers. I’ve listened to their fears and frustrations in mostly regional areas: Darwin, Geelong, Wagga, Shepparton, the Illawarra, Coffs Harbour … that’s just a few I’ve done so far this year. The frontline workers consistently say that sexual violence and coercive control cases are becoming more complex and severe. They are clear about the connections between harmful, unregulated industries like mainstream porn and gambling, and they are desperate for more resources to work with children.

Victim-survivors are at their wits’ end. They’re trying to restart their lives, find housing and help their kids heal from the trauma inflicted by the perpetrator, even as he continues to torment, stalk and dominate them though systems such as child support and the family law courts. They wonder how on earth they can prevent their kids becoming victims or perpetrators themselves. But what can they do? Support for child survivors is inadequate, especially in regional areas. And the most desperate are those who are caught in the family law system, and ordered to hand over their children to a parent they know is dangerous.

I also get several emails a day from people in the most desperate and complex circumstances, emailing me because they feel they have nowhere else to turn.

That was what drove one man to contact me about his sister-in-law. I share this story with his permission.

His sister-in-law is married with a 6-week-old baby. She’s not allowed to wear make-up. Or choose her own clothes. She doesn’t have independent internet access, or control over her own phone. She is not allowed to message people – her husband messages on her behalf, pretending to be her. She is banned from using social media. She is banned from leaving the house without him, or without his permission. She is banned from seeing her family without him being present. The house is wired with CCTV and microphones. She won’t step outside when her family does visit, and the last visit was 18 months ago. She’s 31 years old – he says she’s popular, funny, attractive, well-educated, with a loving family. And this man has turned her life to ash. Her brother-in-law is desperate to help her. He has documented every tiny detail over the past 7 years, so the records are clear. But police won’t help. Her church won’t help. The attorney general in their state won’t help. Friends are terrified and walking away. Family don’t know what to do. The system is failing her, and he feels utterly helpless. This is a murder suicide waiting to happen, he says, and he doesn’t want to see police wringing their hands in 12 months’ time, apologising for their failings.

But what would happen to this woman and her child if she decided to leave? How would she reliably protect her young child from this man, who is clearly fixated and dangerous? Our systems are so unsuited to protecting women and children from dangerously fixated men that many feel they have no choice but to stay, or to go back to them – six times on average before they leave for good.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. When we talk about prevention, we need to be talking not just about having better conversations with boys and teaching them about respectful relationships – the admirable project to ‘stop it before it starts’ - but also about:

- How can we stop someone who is already violent from being violent again?

- How do we hold people who use coercive control and family violence accountable?

- What loopholes do we need to close - what practices do we need to transform - to stop perpetrators weaponizing systems like Centrelink, child support and the family law courts to continue their abuse?

- How can we help victim parents and their children recover from coercive control and family violence, so those kids don’t grow up to become victims and/or perpetrators themselves?

- How can we regulate harmful industries like alcohol, gambling, mainstream porn and social media? In our current prevention approach, the private sector is predominantly engaged in terms of education and training to create safe and respectful workplaces. That’s important, but there is no mention of business models that are actually causing or exacerbating gendered violence. We need to get serious about the impact of certain industries – particularly gambling and alcohol – on the severity and impact of perpetration. Because we know that calls to domestic violence helplines spike during football grand finals – so how are we seeking to address the toxic nexus between sport, alcohol and problem gambling?

- And last but not least, how can we make meaningful structural changes to achieve greater gender equality which will lead to meaningful cultural change – just like Kate Jenkins and Kelly O’Dwyer did with Respect @ Work?

Essentially, the challenge in front of us is: Why isn’t long-term prevention work paired with a relentless focus on doing everything possible to prevent violence today?

These are the questions that myself and Professor Michael Salter have been asking over the past few weeks, since publishing a paper we wrote called, ‘Rethinking Primary Prevention’. The ideas in that paper were developed over the course of a year, in consultation with frontline workers, advocates and victim survivors. We presented it at a few conferences for the sector last year; in fact, one of those was the Central Coast Connections conference last year. Essentially, we are arguing that policymakers need to take a wider view of prevention.

Professor Kelsey Hegarty, who is the joint chair in family violence prevention at the University of Melbourne and the Royal Women’s Hospital, echoed some of our thoughts in a recent article. She says that strategies to change gender attitudes in Australia are essential – such as effective respectful relationship programs in schools that really connect with boys – but this will be less impactful if kids are going home to households where their fathers are role modelling abuse and violence (and I would add – where they are also seen to get away with it). In Australia, this is happening in four in ten households. Interrupting this cycle is essential, she says.

I think it’s essential that we see how prevention works across multiple domains.

Accountability – for perpetrators and the systems that enable them – is prevention: We need to prevent violent people from continuing to be violent. How do we best do that?

Recovery from coercive control and family violence is prevention – it helps break the multi-generational transmission of violence.

And in line with this, Crisis Response is also prevention. It’s not just the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff – it’s often one of the first places victim parents and their kids have a safe place to breathe and start to imagine a better future. They can be a place that kickstarts the beginning of recovery – and would have much better results if we could actually stop perpetrators exploiting systems to torment, dominate and exploit their victims post-separation.

But what we need to see is this: Women’s refuges aren’t just warehousing women and kids who should just be allowed to stay home. Refuges are actively preventing homicide, and they are preventing suicides, and the decisions by state and federal governments for the past few decades to systematically underfund the refuge system and provide short-term grants drastically undermines the sector’s ability to do their acute homicide and suicide prevention work.

Anyone who has worked in refuge or in the sector will have their own stories that vividly illustrate this. For me, it is the story of Leila Alavi.  

In 2014, which was when I started reporting on domestic abuse and family violence, Leila was 26, and working as a hairdressing apprentice in Auburn. A few months earlier, she had left her abusive husband after he threatened to kill her and ‘fix up’ her sister and friends. She knew he could do it: he’d already been fetishising her murder, by repeating a routine where he would pin her to the ground, choke her until she almost lost consciousness, then cover her face with a blanket and jump on her body. Leila found the courage to flee their home and take out an apprehended violence order. But she was still afraid that he would come after her, so she started calling domestic violence refuges, looking for a safe place to hide. But no room was available – not in Sydney, not even in nearby regional areas. She was given vouchers for a hotel in Kings Cross, but after a few nights on her own Leila became scared and went to stay with her sister. After calling up to a dozen refuges a day, Leila gave up hope that she would find protection, and decided to return to work.

She was loved at work – known for being kind and generous and virtually angelic. Once, when a client with cancer complimented Leila on her wallet, she emptied it and gave it to her.

But Leila shouldn’t have been at work. She should have been in hiding – and she knew it. When her ex-husband turned up at the salon, Leila decided to go outside to talk to him, so he didn’t cause trouble inside the salon. She was found dead in her car in the underground carpark, with fifty-six stab wounds.

Leila’s sister later said her grief was unbearable. She said, “I keep thinking: why didn’t someone help her? Why didn’t she receive the protection she needed?

Just two months after Leila was murdered, Prime Minister Tony Abbott announced a $30 million awareness campaign on domestic violence. ‘We need to end this tragic and deadly epidemic,’ read the media release. ‘Importantly, we must also ensure that any woman or child who may be suffering understands that this is not acceptable and support is available.’

Reading that release, the cognitive dissonance filled me with rage.

We like to think that things have gotten better. But women had a better chance of getting protection and support in refuge back in 2014 than they do today.  Back then, I was told around half of the women and kids seeking refuge had to be housed temporarily in motels, until a refuge bed became available.  The average stay was five nights, which up from one night five years earlier, and there were 50 women and kids being accommodated in motels across Victoria every night.

Ten years later, the average stay for women and kids is fourteen nights. And now - there are up to 350 women and kids in motels across Victoria every night.

I would love to give you the equivalent stats for NSW, but apparently those aren’t so readily available. So let me just give you a snapshot of what’s happening in Victoria. We can presume it is just as bad here – and from what I hear, probably worse.

One of the biggest points of referral to refuge and crisis accommodation is the Safe Steps Family Violence helpline. They deal with around 350 calls per day, and 70 per cent of the people (mostly women) who call them are rated as ‘Serious Risk Requiring Immediate Protection’. In April, 52 per cent of their clients had active suicidality – that’s up from 40 per cent in January.

A few lucky clients will make it into refuge immediately – around seven per cent. But Safe Steps says that commonly, every refuge bed in the state is full by around 9am. So 93 per cent of those callers in their highest risk category will have to go to a motel first – compared to 50 per cent back in 2014. Almost all of these clients are facing life-threatening danger – 90 per cent have been strangled. A third of Safe Steps clients are from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds, 13 per cent are Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander, and 20 per cent have a disability.

Now in these motels, single women, women with kids, they sit and wait to find out what their future will be. They may be hypervigilant, receiving incessant texts and calls from their partner, threats. They will receive food vouchers, but there is usually no stove. They will be visited by a support worker, but for most of the day they will be alone and unsupported, trying to balance the needs of their kids with their own fear and trauma and the absolutely endless number of phone calls they need to make to organise their life: intervention orders, Centrelink, maybe police, schools, banks, utilities companies, real estate etc. Facing that impossible dilemma: do I face this uncertain future, where I may be taking my kids into poverty with literally nothing, or do I go back to what I know – and go back to the perpetrator?

Half of them do give up, like Leila did. They make an unsafe exit – including going back to the perpetrator. And half will end up coming through the system again.

Last year, in Victorian motels while they were waiting for a space in refuge, four women suicided. In at least one of those cases, there were children present.

And here’s what really drives me spare: using motels as temporary crisis accommodation costs MORE per night than an actual refuge. This is true of NSW, and it’s true in Victoria. Safe Steps has established a short-term alternative to motels called Sanctuary, which was co-created by frontline workers and victim survivors and accommodates women and kids for three weeks, while they wait for a bed in refuge. When they’re allocating beds in Sanctuary Safe Steps prioritises the clients with the most complexity who usually end up waiting the longest in motels – women with disability, no income, women with pets etc – and provide a complete wraparound service that attends to their needs, and that of their kids (if they have them). They have 24/7 care staff, nurses, legal aid, financial counselling, immigration services, police to support intervention orders, counsellors, teachers for the kids to remain in education during their stay, music and play therapists, a maternal health nurse, even a therapy dog). So, when these women and kids leave to go into refuge, they leave with an assured income through Centrelink, safe separation in terms of Government Services like Medicare; visa issues in the process of being resolved; legal proceedings under way; intervention orders in place.

And all of this is cheaper than putting them in a motel.

Eight months into the pilot (which has now been evaluated), only one of the 200 people who went through Sanctuary ended up returning to the perpetrator. Compare that with motels, from which 50 per cent of clients make unsafe exits, and that same number end up re-engaging with Safe Steps and going through the whole process again. 99 per cent of women and kids going through Sanctuary did not need to re-engage with Safe Steps.

If Safe Steps could establish 70 more Sanctuary dwellings, this would take the bulk of women and kids out of motels across the state. 29 existing dwellings have already been identified and are ready to go this year. Ideally, they want to see all clients identified as being at serious risk going into Sanctuary – not into motels.

Now whether that’s the exact model that we need, or whether we need to focus on establishing more actual refuges, is not for us to answer tonight.

But we face such enormous complexity in responding to domestic abuse, and the solutions are often not obvious. In this case, the answers are not mysterious.  If we can’t grab fruit hanging this low, that actually saves lives and saves money, governments should just admit they have no intention of doing what’s necessary to drive down rates of coercive control and family violence.  

There is no silver bullet to solving the most corrosive social issue of our time. But courageous and dedicated people around the country are pushing the boundaries of what’s possible and getting remarkable results. If we were to become really serious about ending domestic abuse and devote the funding and resources necessary to do it - and especially if we were to empower the people applying place-based solutions to their own communities - I think the results could be spectacular. It would, in my opinion, be one of the greatest nation-building exercises in Australia’s history.