The next 10-year national plan to end violence against women and children must give greater emphasis to the experiences of First Nations communities, LGBTQ Australians, young people, and other at-risk groups, a major report has recommended.
A consultation report, taking in the views of almost 500 policy experts and community advocates, has called for a more inclusive understanding of family and sexual violence to underpin the new plan, with children recognised as victims in their own right and the experiences of Indigenous Australians, women with disabilities, migrant women and LGBTQ groups embedded in the rollout.
Social Services Minister Amanda Rishworth has released a long-awaited consultation report into family and domestic violence.Credit:Alex Ellinghausen
Prepared by Monash University’s Gender and Family Violence Prevention Centre, led by Associate Professor Kate Fitz-Gibbon, the report suggested the name of the national plan be changed to ensure it “is inclusive of violence experienced by all priority populations and forms of gendered violence”.
Fitz-Gibbon said the findings of the report, which was handed to the federal government last year and finalised in February but not previously released, had been reflected in the draft national plan circulated earlier this year.
“In the drafting of the plan, you can definitely see concerted attempts to ensure that we recognise a range of different priority communities and there will be divergent views on how well that’s been achieved,” she said.
“[Those groups] experience perhaps similar forms of violence, but access to services and the way in which the system works for them are vastly different. We need to ensure that that’s identified and that we can provide the most effective tailored responses.”
But she stressed the focus on women had to be central to the national plan.
“The research shows us very clearly that women are disproportionately impacted by domestic family and sexual violence victimisation. We see one woman killed every nine days in Australia.”
The consultation report, commissioned by the former Morrison government, was developed to inform the new 2022-32 National Plan to End Violence against Women and Children, which will come into effect this year once states, territories and the Commonwealth jointly sign off on it. The current plan ended in June. Women’s ministers are meeting in Adelaide next Friday to discuss progressing the plan.
The Coalition released the draft national plan in mid-January but did not publish the consultation stakeholder report nor another separate consultation report with victim-survivors. It released the latter before the election after survivors complained that their voices were being silenced, but it sat on the stakeholder report.
Fitz-Gibbon said the current national plan, which expired in June, suffered from a lack of targets or progress indicators by which to measure what had been achieved over the past decade.
“There’s a very clear call in our report that this needs independent monitoring and accountability so that we’re not looking back in 10 years time and saying, ‘What happened? How did this work?’,” she said.
Social Services Minister Amanda Rishworth, who released the stakeholder report on Thursday, said it was an “important step” towards finalising the national plan, but did not commit to pushing for specific targets to be included.
“I’m going to work with my states and territories on what targets – as the service deliverers – what targets they might want to see included. I will be certainly working with them to make sure it’s as robust as possible,” Rishworth told the ABC.
The report found the next national plan must incorporate “an intersectional lens” to gender-based violence – a reference to a type of feminist framework that considers how “intersecting” factors such as age, race, disability, gender identity or class can combine to increase marginalisation. To that end, the report said the plan must recognise the underlying drivers of violence “disproportionately affecting LGBTQIA+ populations”.
“One of the key barriers identified by stakeholders was the ongoing existence of binary ways of thinking about sex and gender across key services, including housing and visa status, as well as a tension between mainstream women’s service and services specific to the LGBTIQA+ populations,” the report said.
“On housing, stakeholders acknowledged the lack of inclusive housing supports for LGBTIQA+ populations, with several stakeholders reflecting that while refuges will take lesbian and queer women, it was unclear which refuges are open to nonbinary and trans women.”
The report also called for the plan to embed “the right to truth-telling, healing, and self-determination” for First Nations communities, to ensure it was “inclusive of the forms of violence experienced by people with disability”, for a strategy to address the lack of safe housing for victim-survivors in regional and remote Australia, for greater recognition of older victim-survivors and for more research into the prevalence of domestic violence within military and veteran families.
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