Average refuge stays are blowing out to up to a year due to lack of housing for victim-survivors. Permanent Australian residents remained in refuges for an average of 84 days, and temporary visa holders had an average refuge stay of 130 days, “with two services reporting averages as high as 365 days”.
Seven thousand children and young people received support during the reporting period, but about 80 per cent of services reported not having a dedicated team or individual for children’s support, and half were not funded for such a role.
Professor Kate Fitz-Gibbon, a leading Australian and global family violence scholar, said the report’s findings reflected a recognised problem with misidentification.
“This data from the sector confirms what our research has documented – that misidentification of women victim-survivors occurs all too often,” she said. “That this report quantifies the problem at such a high rate is extremely troubling.”
Fitz-Gibbon, a former director of the Monash Gender and Family Violence Prevention Centre and current chair of Respect Victoria, called for immediate action to reduce the prevalence and risk of victim misidentification.
Before introducing any new laws on coercive control offences, “we should ensure our existing laws and policies are working effectively to ensure safety and do no harm”, she said.
Police misidentification of victims happens when police incorrectly identify the aggressor, often due to factors like misinterpreting self-defence as aggression, victim-blaming, communication barriers like language or mental state, perpetrator manipulation, and discriminatory views.
Chief justice of the Federal Circuit and Family Court, Will Alstergren, is calling on Australian men to get engaged in reducing family violence.Credit: Eddie Jim
Victoria Police estimates misidentification happens about 12 per cent of the time.
The report comes as the chief justice of the Family Court, Will Alstergren, said men must cease being apathetic about violence against women and that it is significantly under-reported and at crisis point.
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About 70 per cent of matters that come before the court involve allegations of family violence.
“The level of risk and harm is totally unacceptable,” Alstergren said, and men needed to engage with efforts to reduce it.
Alstergren is holding a symposium on Friday at the Commonwealth Law Courts of 100 leaders from male-dominated sectors including business, sport, education, law and government. They will discuss strategies to get Australian men throughout the community involved in combatting family violence.
“Men have to now step up and stop being apathetic, and realise this isn’t a campaign against them, it’s for them: it’s an all-of-society issue, not a women’s issue,” Alstergren said.
He said he regularly attended events about ending family violence at which almost all the attendees are women, and called on male leaders to engage with the “wicked” problem.
“This [family violence] is shocking when you actually see it up close. It’s not just the people who die – it’s the hundreds and thousands of women and children who get so badly affected, and you see many don’t recover,” he said. “It is totally unacceptable that we have this level of risk and harm.”
Professor Kelsey Hegarty, head of the University of Melbourne’s Safe Families Centre and joint chair in family violence prevention at the university and the Royal Women’s Hospital, said family violence survivors had mixed opinions about coercive control laws, “but I totally think it can lead to misidentification”, she said.
“Men who use coercive control are often using physical and sexual and other things, they’re definitely using isolating, monitoring, gaslighting and financial control, but when you take that by itself and make it a separate entity or [criminalised] behaviour, there will be women charged when they’re probably not criminals.”
Governments around Australia have been under pressure to introduce stand-alone coercive control laws since the murder of Queensland woman Hannah Clarke and her three young children by her estranged husband, Rowan Baxter, in 2020.
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Baxter exercised serious coercive control over Clarke before burning her and their three young children to death in the family car and then killing himself.
Coercive control has been outlawed as a stand-alone offence in NSW, Queensland and Tasmania.
Farha, of Safe and Equal, said marginalised women were most likely to be wrongly identified as perpetrators already, and would be at the greatest risk of being wrongly targeted by any new coercive control law that could be manipulated by offenders.
“We know it is likely to impact Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women, women from migrant and refugee communities, LGBTIQA+ communities, and women with disabilities; all of whom are often wrongly identified by police as primary aggressors instead of those in need of safety,” Farha said.
Antoinette Braybrook, chief executive of Djirra, an Aboriginal community-controlled family violence service, said frontline workers were seeing an alarming rise in racial targeting of Aboriginal women as primary aggressors.
“Women are being criminalised and incarcerated, their children taken, while their safety is overlooked,” she said.
“The criminalisation of coercive control will intensify this harm. It will perpetuate and exacerbate the systemic violence and racism that Aboriginal women already experience, and create new ways for the system to be used by perpetrators, against women. ”
Sector experts argue that coercive control is already an offence covered by Victoria’s wide-ranging family violence laws.
“We really implore both of them [the government and opposition] to listen to the experts in the sector about the potential ramifications, particularly the potential for misidentification,” said Farha.
A spokesperson for the government said: “Coercive control is insidious, abusive and manipulative. We stand side by side with victim-survivors of family violence and always will.
“We have a nation-leading system in Victoria focused on recognising coercive control and holding perpetrators to account. Because of that, we are well placed to implement a stand-alone offence of coercive control, and we will work with the sector to get the settings right.”
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