Each year,  significant numbers of women are murdered by men, and hundreds of thousands more experience extreme violence and coercive control from intimate partners. More than 60 women were murdered in 2018. Over 50 women were murdered from intimate partner violence in 2019. 56 were murdered in 2020. Over 70 women in 2023. So far in 2024, one woman every 4 days is being murdered. 

In Australia, intimate partner violence contributes to more death, disability and illness in women aged 25 to 44 than any other preventable risk factor.

It's shocking, and there is so little action or significant funding from our politicians.

Millions of Australian women and children have experienced domestic abuse, violence and coercive control.

This is a national emergency. Clearly what we’re doing right now isn’t working.

We are women and men urgently calling on the Prime Minister to establish a Royal Commission into the prevention of violence against women. We need to find better solutions to one of the most urgent crises facing Australian women and the community as a whole.

The Royal Commission would investigate, but not be limited to, :

• Current state and federal funding arrangements and the inadequacy of these in adressing this crisis. Investigation into the needed levels of funding to adequately address current DV strategies, shelters and frontline services.
• Investigate the tenuous nature of frontline funding and benefits of giving longer term guaranteed funding to front line services.
• Focus on the perpetrators of the violence, and the ineffectiveness of current intervention programs
• The setting of hard targets with hard deadlines in communities for domestic violence rates and direct intervention with perpetrators on an ongoing basis.
• Spotlighting the perpetrators, and investigating adopting the highly effective strategy of focused deterrence, in every region of Australia, that was introduced into Boston in the 1990s and implemented by High Point, N.C in the US, through the justice reinvestment project in Bourke Australia and similarly the Caledonian System from Scotland.
• Investigating setting up a network of female-centric police stations across Australia like those found in Argentina and Brazil. These have been shown to be highly effective. These stations are largely staffed by women, focus entirely on family violence and offer services such as childcare, financial counsellors, legal help and psychologists for women trying to leave abusive relationships
• The challenges facing current frontline services like women’s refuges and community legal centres and how to better support these services financially and otherwise
• The state of DA deterrance education programs in schools across the country,
• Whether the legal system is delivering justice for survivors, victims and their families, especially in the family courts.
• Investigation of the concept of "parental alienation" and how this is used as weapon against mothers who have been subjected to coercive control and violence.
• Whether bail laws and conditions are preventing violent criminals from re-offending and how these could be strengthened, perhaps through mandatory sentencing and refusal of bail for DA cases
• A national review of domestic violence and family violence deaths/near deaths that have occurred when the accused is out on bail or has a DVO or AVO 
• The regulation of damaging industries (including porn, gambling, alcohol and social media). As per Jess Hill "We know young people feel that pornography is normalising sexual practices that girls and women describe as painful or unpleasant, and mainstreaming dangerous practices such as non-fatal strangulation."
• The nature of media reporting of domestic violence and intimate partner murders of women, and how this could be changed to prevent the current bias towards the perpetrators.

From there, the commission would report their findings and recommend solutions.

We call for all governments to commit to then adequately fund and implement all the recommendations of the Royal Commission.

We can’t just accept that this death toll is inevitable. As a nation, we need to do better. Sign this petition if you want to see a stop to the ongoing violence towards women in Australia.