Five-month delays for counselling of violent men
As Australia struggles with a surge in calls for help to domestic violence services, treatment programs for violent men are also struggling to meet demand.
On the day before dozens of anti-domestic violence advocates, service professionals and specialists from the health, welfare and justice systems arrived in Canberra for crisis talks, a former Channel Seven reporter was refused bail in court after being charged with choking and assaulting a woman at a Vaucluse home. She was hospitalised after the alleged domestic violence incident.
The day after the crisis roundtable, hosted by Domestic, Family and Sexual Violence Commissioner Micaela Cronin, a woman was stabbed in the head and chest as she left a Sydney gym, allegedly by a former partner. Police believe the man had been in a “very short” relationship with the woman earlier in the year and had hidden himself in a car park waiting for the woman to leave the gym.
In the two-and-a-half weeks between Cronin announcing the emergency talks in Canberra and the event actually being held on Tuesday, four more women were dead, in each case allegedly at the hands of a man.
In central-western New South Wales, Molly Ticehurst was allegedly murdered by her ex-boyfriend, who was on bail for rape and stalking charges relating to her. Emma Bates in northern Victoria was bashed by a neighbour, police allege. Erica Hay in Western Australia died in a house fire allegedly set by her partner. And Joan Mary Drane, also from WA, was found dead less than two days after she called police about her “erratic” son.
The mood in Canberra might have been hopeless, given the five weeks of wall-to-wall coverage about the hideous nature of male violence, but most of the 70 people in the room for the crisis talks were defiant.
Domestic Violence NSW chief executive Delia Donovan tells The Saturday Paper the organisation has notched up 50 years since “women were out marching on the streets, were squatting in derelict houses in Glebe to establish the first women’s refuge”, but much about what feels like a “new and alarming” crisis is the same old story.
Men who can’t or won’t handle their own controlling natures have found new ways to express them even as women have made some progress on equality.
“Fifty years on – we continue to face the same issues,” Donovan says.
“In 1975, the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics found that 80 per cent of women stayed in a violent relationship because they had nowhere to go. In 2021, the Nowhere to Go report found 7690 women in Australia returned to violent partners for that very same reason.
“Fifty years on we are still struggling to
“So it’s really hard to be safe when you’ve got nowhere safe to go as an alternative to the home that you’re currently living in. If you can’t get safe and affordable housing, you are stuck.”
be heard and funded by both federal and state government.”
If there was a rallying cry at the talks in Canberra, it was a near universal acceptance that women and children in particular, but all victims of family violence, must be kept safe at the point of harm and that vastly more resources are needed to achieve this. On its own, however, this will never end the cycle of gendered violence.
On Monday, Sex Discrimination Commissioner Dr Anna Cody made the obvious point that so much of women’s safety was about having the means to flee. Money and secure housing, in other words.
“Violence doesn’t finish on the day that someone leaves the relationship. We know that women are most at risk when they’re anticipating separation and having separated, so we need that ongoing support to ensure that they can actually stay free from violence and have that economic security,” Cody told ABC Radio National.
“It’s a preventative measure. It will stop homicides.”
Specifically, she called for a full increase to the unemployment payment Jobseeker, from $45 to more than $75 a day, because it was “absolutely impossible” for people to live on at the current rate.
“I would certainly be calling for a rate that enables young people who are in violent relationships and older women who are in violent relationships to be able to leave, so at the same rate as the pension,” she said.
“I know that the Economic Inclusion Advisory Committee said 90 per cent of the pension but, really, to ensure that people can have a living, dignified life, it needs to be at that 100 per cent.”
This is the kind of ongoing support that was required, she said, because a one-off payment of $5000 was a small step that ultimately led nowhere. Only $1500 of those grants is in cash and strict eligibility conditions saw just 36 per cent of applicants get access before April last year.
The leaving domestic violence payment, announced by Anthony Albanese after national cabinet met to discuss the epidemic of male violence, is an extension of a trial set up by the Morrison government.
Social Services Minister Amanda Rishworth told the ABC earlier this month the government had no intention of changing the criteria. Joan Mary Drane, for instance, would not have been eligible.
“This payment is specifically for leaving an intimate partner relationship,” Rishworth said. “That is not currently looked at as being expanded.”
Although Treasurer Jim Chalmers has hinted there may be extra relief in the budget for people on welfare, it is not expected to go beyond cosmetic tinkering, potentially to supplements or Commonwealth Rent Assistance, which is not available to most people on benefits.
Nobody expects the government to go anywhere near lifting the rate to even 90 per cent of the pension, even if it prevents murder.
The key refrain from the roundtable was a familiar one: the country cannot keep trying the same things and expecting the problem to go away.
“I want to take a moment to talk about the importance of primary prevention here. Too often we focus on this issue of gendered violence too late,” Delia Donovan later told The Saturday Paper.
“Yes, people stay or return to violence when the government and communities fail to provide adequate support. So yes, the housing crisis, the cost-of-living crisis, the pressure we are all feeling, is reducing people’s ability to be safe.
“But people – a statistical majority of which are men – are also choosing to use violence. As a society we need to investigate why that is and what other choices we are promoting and providing.”
Donovan says frontline workers at Domestic Violence NSW’S member services “know when violence is due to spike”.
It’s the grim predictability of the male mind and its response to certain kinds of stress.
“We know there will be a spike in violence on holidays, on NRL finals nights, on any night where alcohol use is prevalent,” Donovan says.
“We also know that violence increases where there are natural disasters or recessions. The choice to use violence is exacerbated by alcohol, by stress. We can see the data but what we really need to be doing is stopping the violence before it starts.
“We need to educate our citizens of all ages on consent, on what respectful relationships look like, on what healthy masculinity looks like, on alternative ways of responding to stress.
“This is where the real work for our nation begins. This is primary prevention.”
It is a difficult conversation to have when women are being murdered at an alarming rate and in such visible, distressing circumstances. While it is true there has been a downward trend in homicide rates for women killed by men across the past three decades, there was a sharp rise of 28 per cent in 2022-23, when 60 women died at the hands of men, compared with the previous year.
In the 2023 calendar year, at least 10 per cent of the 64 women killed were First Nations women, according to Djirra chief executive Antoinette Braybook.
The community group Counting
Dead Women Australia, run by the feminist movement Destroy the Joint, has tallied 28 women killed by men in Australia up to the end of April this year. This figure includes the five women who were killed in the Westfield Bondi Junction stabbings.
As a result of these high-profile murders and national rallies on Sunday, April 28, Lifeline told the ABC it had recorded its busiest ever day with a 20 per cent increase in calls and online contact.
A 1800RESPECT hotline spokesperson told The Saturday Paper “in recent weeks 1800RESPECT has seen an increase in the number of people contacting the service for support, including an increase in the number of people contacting the service for the first time”.
In Queensland, Dvconnect runs both a women’s phone service and a men’s. Director of clinical governance Michelle Royes tells
The Saturday Paper it is experiencing surging demand on both and across its related services.
Call volumes from January to March this year are up 10-20 per cent on the women’s service from the same time last year. There was a more than 30 per cent increase in the current quarter compared with the same time last year.
The men’s service, which takes calls from men experiencing violence or from people with concerns about a man they know using violence, has also experienced a strange phenomenon: a small but significant surge in men calling about their own use of violence.
“As a result of the media coverage and the significant injury and murders that have happened in the last few weeks, we’ve actually seen more men reaching out saying, ‘I’m worried about my use of violence,’ ” Royes says.
“On the first day of DV Prevention Month, which is the 1st of May in Queensland, we saw four unique individuals call for help, like specifically and explicitly worried about their use of violence.
“So that’s not all our calls. We get lots of calls that present as homelessness or family and friends being worried, or professionals. But for men to say, ‘I’m actually worried about my use of violence, can you help me?’, that’s a great number.
“Men talk about their use of violence all the time. Men are continually reaching out for help with their use of violence all the time. The problem is they don’t really say it in ways that we are listening for as a community.”
After the crisis meeting in Canberra, Domestic, Family and Sexual Violence Commissioner Micaela Cronin said one area of persistent discussion was whether we knew enough about “current and potential perpetrators of homicide”.
In a statement, she said: “Men seeking to change the trajectory of their behaviour have very limited options.
“Whilst a great deal of work has gone into building the evidence-base, there is still a lot that we do not know about who perpetrates violence and the triggers for this. Research to better understand perpetrators will be critical to ensure our interventions can be effectively tailored.”
In NSW, for example, No to Violence, which represents service providers for men’s behaviour change programs, says there are
“at least 480 men using violence currently on waiting lists” for intervention programs.
“Service providers told us that their waitlists usually have between 20 and 40 men, with men waiting on average between 3 to 5 months to access programs,” its state prebudget submission says.
“This means many men are waiting for more than 200 days to get help to change their behaviour. Every day that these men wait to engage in interventions, the safety of victimsurvivors is compromised.”
One of those who spoke at Commissioner Cronin’s roundtable is clinical psychologist and Movember global director of research Dr Zac Seidler, who has a particular interest in male attitudes to violence and how this affects the lives of those around them, as well as their own wellbeing.
The two are inextricably linked.
“We’re not going to find a way to shift these statistics unless we get men on board, and men who are very clearly at risk,”
Seidler says.
“It’s very difficult and it’s largely unpalatable. And this is the thing: it’s not everyone’s responsibility. It’s not for the women’s sector to kind of grapple with this stuff and, you know, have empathy and time and research endeavouring to understand the lived experience of men. That is a very taxing thing to do …
“But there has to be a willingness for government and others to support those efforts. Otherwise, we’re only dealing with half of the puzzle here.”
There are cultural problems with the way men view women, Seidler says, but there are those who are clearly at risk and who warrant the earliest intervention possible.
“And the really important thing is that over 70 per cent of men who have killed their partners have a mental or physical health issue, a pre-existing one,” he says.
“They are in touch with the health system. They are very clearly in touch with the justice system. And yet they are slipping through the cracks.”
If there is an “unpalatable” element to the discussion of intensive support for high-risk men, it mostly arises from genuine fear in the women’s safety movement that scarce resources will be diverted from already woefully underfunded services.
Royes from Dvconnect says both need funding simultaneously, at least in the short term, and it needs to be substantial.
At the end of April, Queensland Premier Steven Miles announced a 20 per cent boost in domestic violence service funding for the state – a truly massive increase in state budget terms – but this was still nowhere near enough to run even at baseline levels from the past year. That baseline is “well short” of the current demand levels Dvconnect is seeing.
“They’re having to make terrible decisions every single day to help the people that they’re working with about, you know, do we try to do this or that because the options are so limited,” Royes says of her staff.
“And the cost-of-living pressures are putting strain on victim-survivors as a barrier to leaving. So it’s really hard to be safe when you’ve got nowhere safe to go as an alternative to the home that you’re currently living in.
“If you can’t get safe and affordable housing, you are stuck. And there aren’t many options out there that aren’t already overwhelmed.”
In last year’s budget, the federal government provided $169 million over four years to hire 500 new frontline workers to support people experiencing domestic, family or sexual violence. Last Sunday the minister for women, Katy Gallagher, said states and
• territories had hired only 30 people so far. National Domestic, Family and Sexual Violence Counselling Service 1800 737 732.