CHAPTER 20
Ann Curthoys, Catherine Kevin and Zora Simic
On 9 March 2021, Anne Summer, livestreamed her International Women’s Day keynote speech. Are ‘we as a country’, she asked ‘succeeding in reducing domestic and family violence against women’? Pointing to evidence which showed no discernible reduction since the inauguration of the National Plan to Reduce Violence against Women and their Children 2010–2022, her short answer was ‘No. We are not.’ To explain the failure of the National Plan to achieve its core objective – ‘a significant and sustained reduction in violence against women and children’ – Summers offered two interlinked explanations: ‘political failure and bureaucratic ineptitude, manifested in the absence of any indicators to measure progress’. She also hoped that ‘someone is working on a history of the National Plan because we need to know, in granular detail, how it went awry’.1
A week later, thousands of women protested across the country against sexism and gendered violence, including in Parliament House. Soon after these #March4Justice rallies, the federal government’s Women’s Safety Taskforce announced a National Summit on Women’s Safety to be launched with an online national survey to discuss the next 12-year National Plan. In swift response, people from across the domestic and family violence sector expressed cynicism about another ‘talk-fest’ at a time of unprecedented pressure on frontline services, pressure due in large part to the ‘shadow pandemic’: the upsurge in domestic violence under conditions of isolation and lockdown.2 The domestic violence crisis of which so many spoke seemed intractable. Even as overall rates of violence have fallen, rates of domestic, family and sexual violence have not. Indeed, national surveys show that since 2014, there have been increases in women being hospitalised and people seeking homelessness services as a result of family and domestic violence.3
Due to pandemic restrictions, the National Summit on Women’s Safety was held virtually on 6–7 September 2021, with Prime Minister Scott Morrison delivering an opening keynote address in which he described the number of women killed by their former or current partners as a ‘national shame’.4 While over 400 people participated in the Summit and in roundtables in preceding days, scepticism about the federal government’s commitment to eradicating gender-based violence continued. The exclusive nature of the invitation-only Summit and its narrow remit were widely criticised, including by the LGBTQIA+ community and by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women who called for a separate National Plan. With no major announcements made at the Summit, Delia Donovan, CEO of Domestic Violence NSW, declared it a ‘missed opportunity’. ‘Without action’, she wrote, ‘a plan is just that – a plan.’5
How can history help us understand domestic violence? How can historical knowledge and perspectives contribute to the development of policies and strategies that significantly reduce domestic violence and mitigate its effects? One of the ways an historical understanding can help is to know how and why we have the policies we do and what alternatives have been considered. When, how and why did domestic violence become a matter of government concern? What ideas are embedded in current policies, and what other ideas have there been? How valuable have past ‘talk-fests’ been in the development and implementation of policies? Here we focus on discussion at the national level, looking at significant national conferences, summits and forums and the ideas, knowledge, strategies and policies that arose from them.
National conference on domestic violence, 11–15 November 1985
We start with the first government-initiated national conference devoted to the question of domestic violence, held in November 1985. The attorney-general, Lionel Bowen, requested that the Australian Institute for Criminology in Canberra host such a conference as a basis for providing the government with advice. At this point, there had been 12 years of feminist activism on the issue, beginning with the establishment of the first women’s refuges from violence in Sydney in 1974. One by one, state governments had responded and established agencies to formulate policy and provide services, but the federal government had played little role. An important factor in the Hawke Labor government’s new interest in the topic was its decision, in the wake of the world conference in Nairobi in July 1985 that concluded the UN Decade for Women, to develop a plan of action for advancing the status of Australian women. The government recognised that any such plan would need to include policies concerning domestic violence.6
Organisers of the inaugural national conference on the issue intended that it would provide the government with the information it needed to develop adequate criminal justice and welfare policies, including provision of resources for ‘ethnic groups and Aborigines’ about whom knowledge was relatively scarce.7 They wanted an ‘action conference’; one that would gather and present current research, bring individual voices into conversation with this research, and encourage small group discussion wherever possible. The planning of these discussions was presented as both an acknowledgment of the ‘personal nature’ of the issue and a way of working towards ‘attitudinal realignment’, which was understood as integral to any change. The audience included staff from women’s refuges, police, employees of Commonwealth departments, as well as victim/survivors. Over five days, more than 300 participants listened to the testimonies of survivors and support workers, representatives of various church and migrant community organisations, and the findings of academic researchers in disciplines including psychology, history and sociology.
Even at this early stage, there was a sense that the government needed to convert talk into action. In his opening address, Bowen spoke of ‘inquiry after inquiry’ and said he was encouraged by the prospect of this much-needed national overview. Bowen’s address criticised the legal mechanisms available to women, especially in family law, and called on the police to see their responses to victims as crucial and not be discouraged by poor sentencing outcomes.8 It quickly became clear that developing consensus on the best way forward would not be easy. Even the term ‘domestic violence’ itself was under dispute. The very first presentation, by refuge worker Dawn Rowan, began with a critique, referring to ‘Criminal assault of women in their homes (euphemistically called domestic violence)’.9 Vivien Johnson reminded the conference that the women’s refuge movement had carved out the terrain, including the replacement of the term ‘wife bashing’ with the ‘spurious neutrality of “domestic violence”’, which distanced the issue and avoided the critique of marriage contained in ‘wife bashing’.10 The work of women’s refuges as sites of data collection and deepening understanding of the issue was central to the first phase of the conference, in which 39 out of the 45 papers were presented by women. Feminist perspectives were well represented, with the patriarchal family as a site of violence against women and children featuring in many of the presentations. Feminist contributors wanted to have domestic violence considered and treated as a crime and saw long-term solutions as dependent on the achievement of gender equity. A paper by Judith Allen, then a postgraduate history student, contributed an historical perspective and helped inaugurate historical studies of domestic violence in Australia.11
The move towards a national strategy on domestic violence, 1986–96
The Hawke Labor government’s decision to develop a plan of action concerning the status of Australian women was followed by a flurry of discussions, consultations and reports, many of them commissioned by the Office for the Status of Women (OSW). Some of these investigations addressed domestic violence, such as a report in 1986 on Aboriginal women’s issues written by Phyllis Daylight and Mary Johnstone, which drew attention to concerns that domestic violence in Aboriginal communities was increasing, and that alcohol played an important role.12 In a major report entitled Setting the Agenda in 1987, the OSW observed that during the extensive consultation process, ‘Violence against women and children emerged as a priority’.13 This report laid the groundwork for the Commonwealth government’s promised action plan, entitled National Agenda for Women and adopted in February 1988. The National Agenda represented a milestone in the development of national domestic violence policy, announcing that the government’s aim was to ‘see an Australia which was free from violence in the home’. In pursuit of this aim it would introduce strategies to reduce the incidence of domestic violence, change community attitudes, further develop support services, and improve police responses.14
Also drawing attention to domestic violence was a growing national government concern with violence in Australian society generally in the wake of two mass firearms killings in Melbourne in 1986 and 1987. In October 1988 the government established a National Committee on Violence in which gender issues were included in its terms of reference. At the committee’s invitation, the Australian Institute of Criminology commissioned a series of reports and convened two major conferences, in 1989 and 1993, to gather expert opinion on violence in Australia, the second of which paid serious attention to domestic violence and the competing theoretical approaches to explaining it.15 These were published in 1995 as the edited collection Australian Violence: Contemporary Perspectives. In a prescient preface to the book arising from the second conference, Sandra Egger commented:
The deconstruction of masculinity, the examination of the interactions between gender and other powerful forms of oppression such as class and race, and the examination of the role of masculinity in the different forms of violence in different social relationships (including male to male violence) represent potentially useful avenues of inquiry in our search for explanations.16
There were several other important national initiatives at this time. In 1991, a coordinating body called the Secretariat of National Aboriginal and Islander Child Care Agencies produced a handbook by Maryanne Sam entitled Through Black Eyes: A Handbook of Family Violence in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Communities (1991). It began with Maureen Watson’s evocative poem ‘Don’t Bash the Loving out of Me’.
In her introduction, Sam wrote, that ‘it has become important to talk about family violence, to open all the closed doors, to change the attitudes and dispel the myths that have for so long kept many of our people in the dark and alone’.17 The handbook outlined many of the issues surrounding Aboriginal family violence and proved popular, leading to a second edition in 1992.
The National Committee on Violence delivered its final report in February 1990, recommending the development of uniform national legislation and improved training of police officers.18 Soon after, the government committed $1.34 million to establish a committee to deal specifically with violence against women. The new National Committee on Violence Against Women was asked to initiate research, coordinate education programs, provide a forum for consideration of policy and legal issues, and above all to develop the first national strategy on violence against women, which would coordinate the work of federal and state governments.19
It was clear that the problem was larger than even experienced feminists had realised. As part of Women’s Liberation, Anne Summers had been a co-founder of Elsie, Australia’s first feminist refuge. Later she became a ‘femocrat’, initially as the head of the OSW during the Hawke Labor government and subsequently as an adviser to Paul Keating, who became prime minister in December 1991. In that role – despite her experience at Elsie almost 20 years earlier, and the emergence of violence against women and children as a priority for the OSW in the late 1980s – she was ‘staggered’ that in focus groups ‘almost every woman’ mentioned violence. ‘I had no idea violence against women was so pervasive’, she later wrote, ‘and I did not have a clue how to respond to it.’20
In October 1992, the Labor government launched a National Strategy on Violence Against Women and presented it in December to a meeting of all the state premiers. It aimed to focus state and federal governments on similar goals and continue the task of encouraging research and engaging with experts.21 It was far reaching, announcing that ‘This National Strategy has been prepared within the context of a changing society; the ongoing development of relations between Commonwealth and State/Territory Governments; an evolving national identity; and constitutional reform.’ It was also ambitious, announcing its intention ‘to provide direction to governments to seriously and systematically address violence against women and measure their progress towards the ultimate goal of eliminating violence against women in Australia’. The strategy was strongly influenced by feminist approaches, attributing domestic violence to male attitudes and power over women, and recommending policies aimed at gender equality and women’s economic independence.22 In her autobiography, Anne Summers describes the strategy as a ‘dry’ document, which was at odds with the passion women brought to the issue.23 Perhaps it was, but almost 20 years later, people working in the field on domestic violence were still telling researchers of its value and regretting that more had not become of it.24
The National Strategy on Violence Against Women lasted for only three years, for Labor would lose office in March 1996. It saw some action, such as the production of national guidelines for training people working in the area, which continued to be used for years after, and a Stop Violence Against Women community awareness campaign in 1993.25 Public awareness and government accountability were heightened in December 1993 by the UN General Assembly’s adoption of the Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Violence Against Women, a declaration in which Australian representatives had been closely involved. Significantly, in May 1994 the Australian Bureau of Statistics published the first Australian National Crime Statistics on domestic violence.26 Yet the mood in Canberra was shifting. The year 1994 was the UN International Year of the Family, which produced in Australia fierce debates over what a family was, and which brought into prominence the rise of new right conservatives keen to keep families together, whatever the circumstances. It was also the time when an angry, anti-feminist ‘men’s rights’ movement was emerging, which explained men’s violence as a product of their unequal treatment in the family law system and argued that women were just as violent as men.27
‘De-gendering’ domestic violence in the Howard era
Feminist influence on government policy on a range of issues including domestic violence plummeted when a socially conservative Coalition government led by John Howard came to power in March 1996.28 Openly anti-feminist, it cut many services to women, slashed the funding of the OSW by 40 per cent, and abandoned concern with many ‘women’s policy’ issues.29 The new government was concerned with maintaining strong families, and was aware that domestic violence undermined family life and placed a heavy strain on police, courts and health systems.30 The result was not an abandonment of involvement in domestic violence but rather a reconceptualising of it, ‘de-gendering’ it to align with the conservative government’s espousal of family values.31
In September 1996, only six months after the new government came to power, the OSW mounted yet another national conference on domestic violence with the task of developing a new government policy. A year later, on 7 November 1997, Howard convened a National Domestic Violence Summit in conjunction with the annual meeting of state premiers, at which the new policy was launched.32 Howard commented that,
Domestic violence not only has traumatic personal consequences but also inflicts enormous social and economic costs on the whole community. Many women do not seek help from crisis services, and it is time we addressed their needs. We have all come together today to find new approaches which work so that Australian families can live free of the fear of violence … We must acknowledge that domestic violence is not a private matter, but a serious issue for our whole society.33
The government described its new program, called Partnerships Against Domestic Violence and supported by all Australian heads of government, as ‘a major part of the Government’s strategy for strengthening families, preventing family break-down and creating healthy and safe communities’.34 It left considerable responsibility to the states but did emphasise the importance of a cross-fertilisation of knowledge and provided Commonwealth funding for a range of programs.35 Despite its distinctively different language and approach, the new policy continued many of the features of the old, in supporting specific groups and funding public education on the issue. Important initiatives funded under the Partnerships program included a clearinghouse for domestic and family violence research and data at the University of New South Wales, a national study of the annual cost of domestic violence, and a focus on Indigenous family violence.36 After six years in operation, it was replaced by the Women’s Safety Agenda in 2005, which continued many of the Partnership program initiatives.
Framing domestic violence since 2007
Another change of government, this time from Coalition to Labor in November 2007, brought another change in direction, one that was reminiscent of the changes made by Labor in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In a speech on 17 September 2008, the new Labor Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, made it clear that the new government saw domestic violence as a gender issue.
‘Violence against women’, he said, ‘is difficult to talk about … it is degrading and damaging to experience.’ He asked how it could be that half a million Australian women experience violence from their partners and emphasised the need to turn this terrible statistic around. ‘Because each of these statistics is a human face. And it is my gender – it is our gender – Australian men – that are responsible.’37 Reintroducing the language of ‘violence against women’ that Coalition governments had removed, Rudd announced the creation of a new body to develop a new plan for action to reduce violence against women and children.38 After extensive consultation, in March 2009 the Council to Reduce Violence against Women and their Children released its national 12-year plan for 2010–22. It was supported by all state governments, and after a very close election in August 2010 and with Julia Gillard as prime minister, an updated version was finally released in early 2011.39 In launching it, the Minister for the Status of Women, Kate Ellis, presented the plan as innovative in seeking to ‘focus so strongly on prevention’, to ‘look to the long term – building respectful relationships and working to increase gender equality to prevent violence from occurring in the first place’ and ‘to focus on holding perpetrators accountable and encourage behaviour change for the future’.40
Feminist framings of domestic violence were again at the foreground, but with a greater focus on community-specific responses. This plan, which is due to expire in 2022, has a strong emphasis on prevention, on holding perpetrators to account, special provision for Indigenous families, and national support services. The plan was divided into four three-year segments, each of which was carried out, despite a change back to Coalition government in 2013. It is noteworthy that where the Howard government had overturned the Keating government’s plan and replaced it with an entirely new one, the Coalition governments from 2013 onwards have not done so. In the last ten years, domestic violence has gained more public attention than ever before, especially with the appointment in 2015 of bereaved survivor of domestic violence Rosie Batty as Australian of the Year. On 24 September that year, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull described domestic violence as ‘a national disgrace’ and called for it to become ‘UnAustralian’ to disrespect women.41 His successor from August 2018, Scott Morrison, in introducing the fourth and final stage of the National Action Plan, pledged an extra $328 million to combat domestic violence, and commented that the government would target ‘the negative attitudes that lead to violence’. He went on to say that a ‘culture of disrespect towards women is a precursor to violence, and anyone who doesn’t see that is kidding themselves’.42 As the closing date of the government’s National Action Plan came into view, the Coalition government felt it incumbent on it to produce a new plan. Hence the 2021 Summit with which we began. It is indicative of how the conversation around domestic violence has changed since the Howard years that the keynote speakers for the Summit included June Oscar, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner, Kate Jenkins, Sex Discrimination Commissioner, and Julie Inman Grant, eSafety Commissioner, as well as Prime Minister Scott Morrison.
Lessons from history: We need talk and action
So, what do we make of this brief history of federal government policy on domestic violence since 1985? How might it help those involved in the struggle to reduce domestic violence and support its victims?
First, we find it significant that both sides of parliament now assume that Australia must have a national plan to address problems of domestic and family violence and violence against women generally. When Paul Keating launched the first such plan in 1992, the National Strategy on Violence Against Women, it was something new. Even five years earlier, it was unclear to many whether the national government should be concerned with domestic violence at all. Domestic violence has been a highly political matter, and Labor and Liberal-National Coalition governments have developed different policies, but beyond these political differences we can see a shared concern with the persistence and destructiveness of domestic violence for women and their children. A lesson from history, then, is that bipartisan support for crucial issues is possible, and that it can be sustained and built on by those in the sector, as well as by policymakers.
Second, the connections between feminism and the task of challenging domestic violence have been strong and yet troubled. Key debates over the causes of domestic violence, the role of gender power differentials and gender dynamics, and the question of criminalisation of domestic violence and its effects in marginalised communities, have been going for a long time and remain unresolved. The call made by Sandra Egger in 1995 for an intersectional analysis, which takes into account the operations of gender, race and class remains as important as ever. While the needs of Aboriginal women and their families have been recognised in feminist and other public discussions for some time, it has taken longer for governments to properly address the very important question of how best to tackle domestic and family violence in Aboriginal communities, a process that needs to be led by Aboriginal people. Given this history, we suggest that governments support the recent call made by leading Aboriginal women for their own dedicated National Plan.
Third, understanding the emotional dimensions of domestic violence has come to the forefront, stimulated by Jess Hill’s insightful book, See What You Made Me Do: Power, Control, and Domestic Abuse (2019). The domestic violence sector had sought a public education campaign on emotional abuse as a form of domestic violence during the Howard years, but a proposed campaign in 2003 was cancelled when ‘senior figures did not like the advertising message’.43 Perhaps it will help those grappling with the issues raised by the notion of coercive control to know that domestic service providers have been conscious of this issue for a long time.
Finally, there is the question of talk and action. The history we’ve outlined here indicates their strong relationship. The foundational 1992 strategy, for example, emerged from the conferences, consultations and research preceding it. While the political complexion and commitment of any government in power has an enormous effect, so too has the accumulation of knowledge and experience in the domestic violence sector since it emerged in the 1970s. Sharing of ideas and information has been effective in the past.
The impatience of service providers with the 2021 Summit we see as not so much a protest against talk per se, but rather, in a context where service providers are stretched to the limit, against talk which simply repeats what we already know, ignores rather than builds on past experience, and does not have a practical effect. Sadly, this is what appears to be the case in the 2021 National Summit on Women’s Safety. The final delegates’ statement reiterated meaningful commitments which have been made many times before: to primary prevention; to long-term government investment by all levels of governments; to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples leading their own responses; to improving the criminal justice system; to recognising lived and diverse experiences; and to gender equality, among other priorities.44 Ultimately, however, the outcome from the 2021 Summit was simply a plan to make a plan. Given the existing National Plan lacks proper indicators to measure its progress, the onus is on present and future governments to properly substantiate and resource their oft-proclaimed commitment to ending violence against women and children.