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Late last month, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said violence against women had become a “national crisis.” His comments come after thousands of people gathered in major Australian cities to demand government action over alarming statistics, with campaigners identifying at least 29 women who have been killed in Australia so far this year.
In addition to this, recently released government data reveals that in the 2022-2023 financial year, 34 women were killed by a current or previous intimate partner, an increase of 28% from the financial year previous. In other words, trends in Australia’s domestic violence problem are moving in the wrong direction. While the prices are lower that in the United States, for Australians, the risk of violence and death from a partner is now increasing.
The government has now responded: in the new federal budget, Mr Albanese’s government has committed A$1 billion, or about $665 million, over five years to help women and children fleeing domestic violence.
But among those who work with victims and survivors, optimism is hard to find.
Many advocates, like Michelle Glasgow, chief executive of Women Illawarra, a not-for-profit organization founded in 1979 that provides services to rural New South Wales, point to decades of experience with public outrage. public – seeing countless women march to end domestic violence, stop victims of sexual assault, access health care and safe housing, and demand fair and equal access to employment. None of this, they note, has produced much progress.
“We’re still beating on the same drum,” Ms Glasgow said.
The problem persists, she added, because too many communities and men are still stuck in the laissez-faire attitude of “She’ll be right, buddy.” »
“She won’t be right, buddy,” she said.
In her region, demand for Women Illawarra’s services – circles of support, educational programs, court advocacy and pathways for abused women into and out of the justice system – has increased exponentially in recent years, particularly after the pandemic-related lockdowns. Many women are stuck in what she describes as a constant cycle of seeking responsibility and security.
“It’s another full-time job to seek help,” Ms Glasgow said. “It’s relentless.”
From Melbourne’s outer suburbs, Tara Schultz, an abuse survivor and advocate for others in this situation, painted a similar picture of no change, particularly for women who are poor or face other forms of disadvantage. Low-income young women are even more likely to be kicked out of school due to behavioral problems or substance abuse or to be targeted by a predator than to be referred for help, she said. she declared. “Young girls still face the same problems I did growing up. »
And as bad as it is in Australia’s cities and suburbs, the problem is often even worse in remote areas.
Just this week, a nearly year-long inquest into four of the 76 Aboriginal women killed by their partners in the Northern Territory since 2000 was extended after the coroner said she had seen no improvement over time. time.
“Beyond the investigations and reports, it remains unclear to me what has actually been done to begin to address the urgent needs in the Northern Territory,” Northern Territory coroner Elisabeth Armitage told a court from Darwin on Monday.
The landmark inquiry, which began in June last year, not only examined specific deaths, but also trends in domestic, family and sexual violence in the territory. While the territory represents less than 1% of Australia’s population, women there are seven times more likely to be killed by domestic violence than the national average, and the victims are almost always Indigenous.
Indeed, in addition to all the standards factors of violence (such as gender inequality and discrimination), poverty, trauma and other forms of disadvantage are deeply rooted in the Northern Territory, says domestic, family and sexual violence expert Chay Brown. Problems like hunger; a lack of running water, electricity and electricity; and homelessness, at rates up to 30 times higher than the rest of the country, fuel instability, fuel violence and hinder services that could help, Dr. Brown said. The services available, she added, have “ridiculously low” funding and do not have the resources to care for an area twice the size of Texas.
“In most of these places there are no paved roads, no telephone coverage, no public transport. And yet all the measures and everything we talk about when it comes to domestic violence assumes that people live in urban centers.”
In the Northern Territory, policing models presented to the inquiry showed rates of domestic, family and sexual violence are expected to increase by 73 per cent over the next decade. This figure would be lower than the 117% peak recorded over the past decade, but it would still be a staggering increase that many experts attribute to a lack of attention to root causes such as homelessness and poverty. poverty, all in a country that is among the richest in the world. world.
The human cost of this, says Dr Brown, who worked on previous government plans to tackle domestic violence, will be “astronomical”.
“For those of us on the ground, we see it every day. It’s not a job, it’s not a 9 to 5, it’s our life,” she said. “People are dying and, upstairs, they’ve forgotten about it.”
Here are this week’s stories.
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