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EXCLUSIVE: In a rare interview, Sex Discrimination Commissioner Anna Cody backs calls for domestic violence to be treated the same way as terrorism, and says the national plan needs to go further. By Karen Barlow.
The case for treating domestic abuse as terror
Australia’s sex discrimination commissioner says domestic and family violence needs to be regarded the same way as terrorism to get the appropriate response.
Anna Cody champions the description of “family terrorism” that then Australian of the Year Rosie Batty used in 2015 to draw national attention to the scale of domestic and family abuse in this country. The commissioner tells The Saturday Paper that this year’s sharp uptick in deadly violence is “appalling and horrific” and shows the national effort to change course is “clearly not enough”.
While backing what she called the “solid bones” of the government’s national plan to end gender-based violence, Cody says more must be done to address a “severe, deep, ongoing, enduring issue”.
Cody, who succeeded Kate Jenkins in September 2023, is a forthcoming conversationalist for someone who has done few interviews since her appointment to the role. She was formerly dean of the School of Law at Western Sydney University and chair of Community Legal Centres Australia, as well as an advocate for human rights on United Nations committees. One of the formative cases of her early career was her work with a survivor of the Stolen Generations in a case against the state of New South Wales, and she helped establish a domestic violence service in Alice Springs. As sex discrimination commissioner, Cody is also tasked with guiding the delivery of the workplace reforms outlined in the landmark Respect@Work report of her predecessor in 2020.
She sees a clear crossover between this sphere and domestic abuse. Workplace violence, she says, “relies on gendered norms, gendered expectations, which is absolutely connected to domestic and family violence”.
“I am consulting with women across a range of backgrounds about what changes they need, and often the way in which women experience violence or harassment at work, it can be a safe space, work can be a safe space for women who are experiencing violence in their family,” she says. “And yet it can also be used by violent partners as a way of controlling them also, so their experience of violence can extend into the workplace.”
She wants to take a more holistic view of abuse and what is driving and sustaining it.
“I think we do need to think about domestic and family violence as what is it in our systems that is enabling this to happen,” Cody says.
She talks about a model of entrapment keeping women and families within violent situations. A lack of financial and housing support is part of it, “but it’s also the systems that need to change, the policies that need to change so that there are routes out and so that we ensure that violence doesn’t continue in those systems”.
Cody says an example would be going over the social security system to ensure there are pathways to help women who are in or are leaving violent relationships.
For financial institutions, it would be to make sure all banking products are safe for women in violent relationships.
“They make profits out of providing financial services, but they don’t have a licence to enable the perpetration of harm,” she says.
Cody also describes the legal systems across the states and territories in this space as “patchy” and in need of harmonisation.
In a recent op-ed for Women’s Agenda, Cody pointed also to the need for “specialised initiatives for First Nations and culturally and racially marginalised communities developed by them”.
In an exclusive interview with this paper this week, she says, “This experience of women and family members of domestic and family violence, is our response big enough? Is it really responding to the depth, the gravity, the severity of it? My answer is ‘no’.”
It was almost a decade ago that Rosie Batty – whose 11-year-old son, Luke, had been murdered by his father just a year and a half earlier – called for more frontline funding as a priority. “Let’s start talking about family terrorism. Maybe then, with that context and that kind of language we will start to get a real sense of urgency,” she said.
In the intervening years, rates of domestic and family violence have remained constant in Australia. This year has brought an awful intensification.
Homicide statistics from the Australian Institute of Criminology for 2022-23 showed that a woman was killed every 11 days by a current or former partner, with 34 such fatalities.
Australian Femicide Watch has counted 52 women killed through violence or abuse in the first half of this year.
The target of the National Plan to End Violence Against Women and Children, launched in October 2022, was to reduce female intimate-partner homicides by 25 per cent each year.
“Do we think about it on a par with terrorism?” Cody asks. “What sort of resources are we putting into anti-terrorism and yet how many women have been killed in comparison to how many people have been killed in terrorist attacks?”
Funding for counter-terrorism efforts for the 2024-25 year is about $2.5 billion, allocated across the Australian Federal Police, ASIO, AUSTRAC and the Australian Border Force. Increases this year include a $76 million boost to the domestic spy agency, as the budget papers acknowledge espionage and foreign interference has surpassed terrorism as ASIO’s principal security concern.
The government will also spend an extra $160.8 million over the next two years on anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing reform.
The government’s new budget spending on women’s safety for the 2024/25 financial year adds up to about $286 million, though there are ongoing measures such as funding for the 1800Respect counselling line. It all comes under the $3.4 billion envelope for the 10-year national plan.
The plan includes commitments by the Commonwealth as well as the states and territories, which are primarily responsible for criminal justice responses.
Nestled in the 85 Commonwealth initiatives in the plan is funding for a fifth and sixth phase of the “Stop it at the Start” ad campaign that aims to break the cycle of violence with the emerging generation. There is also $83.5 million for respectful relationships education and $40 million for a national consent campaign targeting young people.
Healthier masculinities, behavioural change, holding perpetrators to account for their behaviour and system-wide reform is stressed in the plan.
The national plan’s proponents also recognise that the murders of women and children are part of a spectrum of violence and coercive control that politicians are only gradually coming to appreciate fully. This month a parliamentary inquiry heard signs that financial abuse, a known indicator of escalating physical violence, was also on the rise. National Australia Bank last week told the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Corporations and Financial Services that last year it received about 60 calls a month relating to financial abuse. This year, for that one major bank alone, it’s been 200 calls a month.
Leading the national plan, Minister for Social Services Amanda Rishworth said in a statement to The Saturday Paper: “There is more to do to achieve our shared goal with states and territories to end violence against women and children in one generation.”
The minister insists there is flexibility in the national plan, which she notes was developed in partnership with victim-survivors, advocates and the family, domestic and sexual violence sector. In her statement, Rishworth said there is room to add “new activities to achieve our goal under the plan, particularly in relation to new and emerging risks like online extreme misogyny”.
Anna Cody praises the government’s budget move to make permanent the one-off Escaping Violence Payment as a “good first step”, noting that victim-survivors need longer term support.
What she’d like to see is more funding for frontline crisis services, such as emergency housing, sexual assault, trauma counselling, First Nations and community legal centres, as well as an increase to JobSeeker so women leaving violent relationships would be paid
a pension rate survival benefit or other
income support.
Struggling specialist service providers are urgently calling for more frontline support, including a long-term national funding agreement between the states and Commonwealth.
The current mode of funding is year to year, rather than the certainty of multi-year funding.
“Can we just fund existing services properly first?” says a women’s safety provider, who requested anonymity for fear of jeopardising their funding.
Cody is also optimistic, however. She sees bipartisan recognition from the federal opposition that gendered violence is unacceptable and intolerable, though there’s been no specific policy measures at this point in the electoral cycle to address it. She is looking forward to budget updates in the next mid-year economic and fiscal outlook at the end of the year.
The government’s expert panel, headed by Domestic, Family and Sexual Violence Commissioner Micaela Cronin, will report in the third quarter on its “rapid review”, which is expected to recommend more interventions.
“I know that the minister for women, Katy Gallagher, is deeply committed to this issue, as is the prime minister,” says Cody. “So, I would expect to see some changes and some commitments both to the direct funding for frontline services, but also some of the preventative approaches that we’re going to need to erase domestic and family violence.”
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has called the violence a national crisis, while some advocates want it deemed a national emergency.
Cody says an urgent response is needed and the community expects action.
“I think that we need to use that momentum because it is really significant,” she said.
“It affects so many women in their lives. We know that almost two thirds of women who are in a violent relationship are experiencing financial abuse. We know the numbers of women who are being killed. It is huge. It is intense. It is severe. And so, let’s use the focus to try and drive some change.”
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on July 20, 2024 as "Domestic abuse is terror".
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