One might expect that the domestic violence sector would be feeling hopeful. Just last week, the prime minister announced a $4.7bn plan over the next five years to address the “national crisis” of family and gender-based violence, declaring it a key priority.
Instead, the last few months have been marked by turmoil and tensions in parts of the sector, as debates about the best approach to combating violence against women have escalated – and sometimes turned personal.
The drama splashed on to the pages of the Sydney Morning Herald last week when text messages from anti-violence campaigner Rosie Batty to advocate Jess Hill and academic Anne Summers, accusing them of being divisive and undermining the work of others.
Those working in the sector have told Guardian Australia that things have been tense. They’ve described people in prominent positions contacting others in the sector and telling them off for publicly voicing criticism; of debates shut down before they start; and of researchers and service providers who have for years been so nervous about losing their government funding that they’ve tweaked program proposals to match what they think the government wants to hear.
The ructions centre around debates about the government’s prevention strategy.
Too far upstream?
The National Plan to End Violence Against Women and Children largely focuses on something the sector calls “primary prevention” – that is,“stopping violence before it starts” by combating gender inequality and misogynistic attitudes and structures.
But Hill, an author and anti-violence educator who has spoken to many on the front line, says the emphasis on primary prevention felt off.
“It seemed to me that there was an undue primacy being put on the gender equality approach,” she says. “I thought I’d missed something in the national plan, I read it four or five times. There was so much of this discussion that was left out.”
That included targeted interventions at groups who are more likely to offend – like those who had themselves been the victims of DFV as children – as well as interventions around alcohol and drug use, which research has shown can increase the severity of violence.
But, she says, these were not only not getting sufficient funding or attention, but people were even too scared to mention them in discussions because it didn’t fit the narrative from government.
Alcohol and gambling also to blame
Sue Webeck, the CEO of Domestic Violence ACT, says there is “definitely a frustration” among some in the sector at the “large volumes of money being announced” for primary prevention.
“It’s a really idealistic idea that we can stop all violence before it starts. And so those conversations are fraught, because there are a multiplicity of ways that we can prevent, respond, intervene and support somebody.”
Webeck says it was seen as “a palatable form of intervention” for the then Coalition government.
Another person in the sector, who did not wish to be named, agreed. Looking that far upstream is a “very conservative position”, they say, because “it devolves responsibility of prevention to the individual level, it assures the community that something’s being done”. They say the focus should be more “around alcohol, around gambling, around social media regulation, and that’s very tough”.
Hill says while there is unhappiness among many of the people she talked to in the DV sector about this focus on primary prevention, people “wouldn’t speak publicly, for fear of backlash”.
‘Fear of voicing disquiet’
Multiple people in the sectorsay they have been told not to speak on certain topics by leaders in the sector, that certain conversations are regularly shut down, or that they have learned to self-censor for fear of losing out on tenders or research funding.
In April, Hill and Prof Michael Salter, an expert in child sexual exploitation and gendered violence at UNSW who declined to comment for this story, published Rethinking Primary Prevention, in which they argued that Australia’s strategy had not worked.
“According to multiple metrics, the gender equality approach has not only failed to actually reduce and/or prevent violence, it has achieved only marginal improvements to community attitudes over the past decade,” they found.
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This argument caught the ear of the Albanese government, which, incentivised to action by the horrific spike in deaths of women in the first half of 2024, commissioned a rapid review of Australia’s prevention strategies.
The six-person panel, which included Hill, met earlier this year for 12 weeks. The panel’s findings were largely accepted by the government and informed its funding announcement last week.
But while Hill and Salter’s arguments seem to have persuaded government, they were not met with universal approbation.
“I think it’s actually been divisive, and I think in the sector there’s been some level of frustration and dismay at the way that primary prevention has been represented,” says Prof Michael Flood, who researches on gender, sexuality, and interpersonal violence at Queensland University of Technology.
‘Fighting over crumbs’
Flood says primary prevention work has not been “funded and implemented” at the scale and breadth that would really contribute to change.
“But I think there’s also been some fear about voicing that disquiet, for fear of jeopardising funding or risking relationships with government.”
Bu there has been some progress.
“Community attitudes in Australia have improved over the last two decades, rates of physical assault have gone down, rates of intimate partner homicide overall have gone down, although there’s been a spike in those in the last year or so.”
Alison Evans, the CEO of Centre for Women’s Safety and Wellbeing in Western Australia, says she feels the risk of Salter and Hill’s commentary about primary prevention is that in her state, primary prevention has hardly begun.
“In Western Australia, we’re just starting to see that investment come through from our state government and so we feel it’s way too early to be saying, ‘oh, that’s not working’, when it’s hardly touched the ground yet. So that’s disappointing, because there is a lot of evidence that really supports the primary prevention work.”
Everyone who Guardian Australia spoke to agrees part of reason for the tensions is the fact the sector is hugely underfunded, which Evans says can lead people to feel they have to take what they can get and “fight over [the] crumbs”.
“I’m sure the federal government wouldn’t like to hear this after its announcement on Friday, but it certainly is a space of scarcity,” she says.
“It’s not coming from a place of self-interest, it’s really coming from a place of feeling that moral injury that we know workers feel when they can’t give the response that they so much want to.”
