Special report: As Australia moves towards a world-first national strategy to tackle attacks in the home, some experts say the approach is badly flawed, with too much emphasis placed on sexism and not enough on alcohol, poverty and other causes

Australians are being told that gender inequality is the root cause of domestic violence. But is it?

If 2015 seemed like a year-long consciousness-raising exercise on domestic violence, a communal confronting of a once-ugly secret, this will be the year we find out whether we will seriously do something about it.

The funding of refuges, the role of the police and courts, the holding to account those who terrorise their partners at home – all these things are under scrutiny across the the country. There is unprecedented momentum, goodwill and hope.

Yet there remains a tension, barely spoken about publicly in Australia, about something fundamental: why is domestic and family violence happening in the first place? What causes it?

The tension is far from theoretical. What is the best approach if we want to, not just respond to violence after it happens, but prevent it before it starts? And if we want to prevent intimate partner violence in particular, how much hard evidence is there about what works and what does not?

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Politicians, senior police, domestic violence organisations, many researchers and most of the media speak virtually in one voice about the causes of domestic violence, saying the irrefutable evidence is that the root cause or key driver is gender inequality – the dominance of men in our culture and the stubborn stereotypes about the role of men and women.

Malcolm Turnbull took little time after he became prime minister last September to call for a “cultural shift” in Australia’s attitudes to women: “Let me say this to you: disrespecting women does not always result in violence against women. But all violence against women begins with disrespecting women.”



This view is pervasive, often presented as self-evident, yet there are serious researchers who have serious doubts. They suggest we are getting this wrong or at least partly wrong, and urge a more nuanced discussion and policy response. If they are right, ideology and politics are far too dominant in Australia’s approach to such a crucial issue at such a crucial time. If they are wrong, it may be that many of us are resistant to acknowledging the deep sexism embedded in the culture and its role in violence against women, both physical and psychological.

“The current responses to domestic violence need to be enhanced or replaced with evidence-based approaches, like addressing contributing factors such as alcohol, drugs and mental health,” says Prof Peter Miller, principal research fellow and co-director of the violence prevention group at Deakin University.

Miller’s expertise is violence, especially alcohol-related violence, a factor in around half of domestic violence incidents reported to police and two-thirds of incidents in Indigenous communities.

“The politics of gender need to take a back seat now,” says Miller. “It is time to change, otherwise the feminist framework, while vital, will become a hindrance.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Monash University’s Thea Brown, whose research into domestic violence examines whether men’s behaviour change programs actually change men’s violent behaviour. Photograph: Meredith O'Shea

It is a problem when ideology rather than evidence forms a basis of discussion and has the impact of stifling discussion Prof Thea Brown

There has never been so much determination to reduce the violence happening routinely in our homes. (Domestic violence usually refers to intimate partner violence, most commonly by men against women; family violence is a broader term that includes violence within a family, such as a teenager assaulting a sibling or a parent.)

This is a violence that kills on average one woman each week in Australia, terrorises children who witness it, often for the rest of their lives, and is soaking up police time and resources – police respond to a domestic violence call every eight minutes. It is not at all clear that domestic violence is increasing – and the percentage of homicides classified as domestic has gone down in recent years – but what has indisputably soared is the reporting of attacks to police, one sign of a transformed culture.



Victoria is conducting Australia’s first royal commission into family violence, due to report next month, and respectful relationship programs will be compulsory in schools from this year. The government is preparing the state’s first gender equality strategy, specifically to reduce violence against women.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A mural to mark White Ribbon Day at Gymea Bay public school in New South Wales. Photograph: Gymea Bay public school

For the first time the state governments of Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland have appointed ministers charged with preventing domestic and family violence. NSW is rolling out initiatives, including specialist police squads targeting repeat domestic violence offenders, and the country’s first disclosure scheme that would enable a person to find out if their partner has a violent criminal history, a controversial British idea also being considered in other states. Queensland has had an inquiry led by the former governor general Quentin Bryce, and the government has pledged to implement all 140 recommendations.

Domestic violence involves every level of government and there is a strong expectation of national leadership and for agreement on a common approach. One of Turnbull’s first acts as prime minister was to commit himself to an issue he called a “national disgrace”. A national summit is due later this year and the minister for women, Michaelia Cash, expects a national domestic violence order scheme to be introduced in the first half of the year.

There is so much activity, endless media coverage and calls for all of us to “do something”. Yet at the beginning of a new year there is also a pause, a holding of collective breath until a few crucial things are clarified. The conclusions of Victoria’s royal commission are awaited across the country. Another big test will be this year’s federal budget, and what resources and policies are pledged.

Just as vital is the strategic response. The next phase of the National Plan to Reduce Violence against Women and their Children is due in the next few months. Most Australians would be unaware of it, but the plan started in 2010 as a 12-year bipartisan pledge to achieve a “significant and sustained reduction in violence against women and their children” by 2022. All state and territory governments signed on.

The plan is now at its halfway mark and the government is soon to announce what’s called the third action plan, essentially what steps will be taken from this year until 2019. The problem is, as Dr Lara Fergus of Our Watch says, that it hasn’t got anywhere on its key goal. While the plan is given credit for achieving unprecedented cooperation between the states and territories, it hasn’t resulted in any measurable reduction in domestic violence or changes in community attitudes about violence against women. In fact, nothing much that any government has done since the issue was first pushed on to the public agenda in the 1970s has prevented domestic violence.

“This is do or die,” says Fergus of the importance of this moment. Fergus is the director of policy and evaluation at Our Watch, a group set up under the national plan to drive policy to prevent violence against women and their children. “The overarching goal is to achieve a sustainable and significant reduction in violence against women and their children by 2022 which is a huge ask, no country in the world has ever seen a reduction like that,” she says.

“We’re halfway through this plan which was visionary and world-leading when it was released and we haven’t seen any movement on that primary goal.”

What is proposed – and Our Watch is central to it – is a national prevention strategy that would indeed be a world first. There is huge momentum behind it, and at heart it means this: if we accept the evidence that gender inequality is the root cause of domestic violence, we need to transform relations between men and women at every level to significantly reduce it. No other country has taken that approach in a systemic and nationally endorsed way.

Our Watch defines gender inequality as the “unequal distribution of power between women and men and adherence to rigid or narrow gender roles and stereotypes”. It is the patriarchy, and all the sexist assumptions that go with it, that is the root cause or key driver of domestic violence against women.

Under this analysis we need to transform the balance of decision-making power between men and women and end sexist assumptions about male and female behaviour if we want to prevent domestic violence. We need to eliminate the gender gap in wages, in political participation, in leadership positions if we want to stop domestic violence. We need to change the way we raise our boys and girls. We need to shift the way we think about women’s and men’s roles. Seemingly small things such as sexist jokes, and assumptions that men are better at leadership than women, need to be confronted.

All these goals may be laudable in themselves but the argument is they are essential to reducing or even eliminating violence against women. Our Watch and other groups say domestic violence at its heart is a symptom of a deeply sexist culture and the way to reduce it is “deep societal transformation”. It will take time – at least a generation – to get there.

Knowingly or not, we give boys licence to act abusively and we develop in girls deference to that behaviour Ken Lay

“It is not possible to end violence against women and their children without addressing the systemic inequalities of power between men and women, along with the construction of narrow and stereotypical gender roles that support and are reinforced by these inequalities,” it says.

In November, Our Watch released a national framework to prevent violence against women and their children, called Change the Story. It was a “watershed moment” according to its chair, Natasha Stott Despoja. A “world first”.

Such a framework was anticipated under the national plan, and the expectation now is for all governments, state and federal, to endorse it. This is the approach that domestic violence groups and others involved in this area want the federal government to adopt for the next stage of the national plan.

That would sign Australia up to a strategy with a specific gender equality approach, including sustained respectful relationship programs in schools that would involve teachers and the broader community as well as students to challenge gender stereotype; a big communication campaign that would go well beyond awareness raising; getting the media to change the way it reports on gender issues; and for business to commit to seriously address gender inequality in the workforce. The details of how this will be done remain sketchy, but the important first step is to get the strategy endorsed.

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Consensus is close. It is difficult to name one person involved in this area in a senior position who questions the gender equality framing of domestic violence. Michaelia Cash launched the Our Watch strategy.

Ken Lay, former Victorian police commissioner and now chairman of the Council of Australian Governments advisory panel on reducing violence against women and their children, says: “Knowingly or not, we give boys licence to act abusively and we develop in girls deference to that behaviour. Boys will be boys, and it’s up to girls to adjust accordingly … our culture is possessed [of] destructive attitudes about gender that allow domestic violence to prosper.”

Rosie Batty, 2015 Australian of the Year, says: “If you do not see that [domestic violence] as a gendered issue, I have no idea what we have to do to convince you. Because right now I do not hear of two men a week being murdered at the hands of their partners.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The federal minister for women, Michaelia Cash, with 2015 Australian of the Year and anti-domestic violence campaigner Rosie Batty and Malcolm Turnbull in September after the federal government announced funding for preventing violence against women. Photograph: Julian Smith/AAP

Domestic violence groups were heartened to hear Turnbull framing the issue in the same way as they do, as one about cultural attitudes to women. “It was a real shift in the language and it is clearly aligned with what we’re saying,” says Fergus. “There is a real opportunity to pull this together.”

But if not a single other nation has tried to transform its gender relations with the express purpose of reducing violence against women, is there any evidence it will work?

“We have nothing we can look at in another country and say, ‘Look at how well it worked over there.’ We are asking for leadership,” says Fergus.

Dr Emma Partridge, who spent a year researching and writing the Our Watch framework, says there is little evidence specific actions by governments have reduced the prevalence rates of domestic violence.

“The problem is bigger, the problem is deeper, the problem is far more substantial, and far more entrenched in social and cultural norms, structures and practices,” she says. “Therefore you need a much bigger, deeper more significant approach to dealing with it.

“Of course it’s a hypothesis because no one’s ever tried to change the gender norms, structures and practices in a society at a population level before.”

All of which makes people such as the violence researcher Peter Miller very frustrated indeed. Miller has no doubt gender inequality is critical to understanding domestic violence, especially given the history of courts, police, politicians and the broader population either turning a blind eye to violence against women or condoning it.

Women have struggled for equality, and continue to do so, in both developed and developing nations. Husbands beating wives was once legal under common law – the famous dictum of the 19th century judge Francis Buller was that a man could chastise his wife physically so long as the stick was no thicker than his thumb. It wasn’t until the 1980s that all Australian states made rape in marriage a crime.

But Miller argues there have been significant changes in attitudes in Australia and other developed nations, both legislatively and culturally. The feminist dominance of the debate now is “deeply flawed”, he says, if the goal is to prevent the tiny number of men who do commit violence from doing so.

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He says the debate now assumes domestic violence is completely different from other forms of violence, whereas they have much in common. And, he says, the gender inequality thesis ignores that women are perpetrators in a substantial minority of cases, and that there is domestic violence between same-sex couples which has nothing to do with gender inequality.

“The decision for the very small percentage of people to step over that line to strike somebody else is exceptionally complicated and it doesn’t come down to whether their attitudes towards men or women are inappropriate,” he says.

“In other countries there are different discourses that are better informed by evidence – it’s not simply the gender inequality card that’s played, however important that is.”

Miller is finishing a study into the role of alcohol and drugs in family violence. He know that views like his are unpopular and believes research is too dominated by those who take a strong feminist approach to violence against women.

He says a few years ago, a major health organisation commissioned him to research alcohol’s role in interpersonal violence but refused to publish it because it didn’t like its conclusion that alcohol was a causal factor, a proposition anathema to those convinced of the gender inequality thesis. He doesn’t want the organisation named because he says it wouldn’t help to get past the black-and-white approach in Australia and because there are so few organisations funding research in this country.

“We are in danger of both losing credibility and momentum in Australia,” he says. “As much as I believe that I am some sort of feminist, I am not one that puts that agenda over the agenda of fixing this issue and reducing violence.”

Thea Brown has also had difficulties researching domestic violence. Brown has been a professor of social work at Monash University for more than 25 years and is finishing off a major study into parents who kill their children. And so, when she started a research project in 2012 into domestic violence and whether men’s behaviour change programs actually changed men’s violent behaviour, she was astonished at the “harassment” she says she received.



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Brown told Victoria’s royal commission into family violence last year that she had never experienced anything like it in all her years of research. She says the feminist framing of domestic violence among some groups is so strong they are nervous about academic research in case their approach is shown to be flawed.



“There’s a very strong ideology in some domestic violence services and it becomes an anti-research ideology because research is feared in case it threatens the ideological basis of the program,” Brown told the commission. “It is a problem when ideology rather than evidence forms a basis of discussion and has the impact of stifling discussion.”

To the commission and in an interview with Guardian Australia, Brown said that No to Violence, the peak Victorian body whose members run men’s behaviour programs, advised their members not to cooperate with Brown’s research. That made it much harder for Brown to approach men to participate, and the research was delayed for 12 months. Her results will be published this year.

Brown’s view is that No to Violence was suspicious that her research might find its approach – a feminist one that challenges men’s attitudes towards women – flawed. Brown broadly agrees with the perspective that domestic violence is at heart about gender inequality but she resented the notion that that should have any influence on academic research.

No to Violence’s chief executive, Jacqui Watt, was not involved in the organisation when Brown’s research began but she says there were concerns about its methodology and usefulness and they weren’t consulted before it began. “[We told our members that] we can’t vouch for the safety of this work, and therefore we can’t say to you you should participate – we didn’t say don’t,” she tells Guardian Australia. The group is unashamedly feminist in its approach but Watt says it has no problem with research.

This is just one incident but it brings to the surface the the role of pre-existing beliefs in research, particularly in such a highly charged area as domestic violence. There are no definitive studies, and the area is still relatively new. For now, the most common model to explain what causes domestic violence is the so-called socio-ecological model, used by the World Health Organisation for all forms of interpersonal violence.

It suggests – and Our Watch and other domestic violence groups endorse it – that you can’t only explain violence in terms of the individual, such as whether a person was drunk, or whether they suffered a mental illness, or were unemployed. You need to put the violence in a social context of women being seen as less important than men, and of sexist assumptions being so normal we barely notice them. It’s a long-running debate – psychologists and others emphasise the individual reasons why someone becomes violent, while acknowledging the cultural. Feminists overwhelmingly emphasise the cultural, economic and political.

It is not as though Our Watch denies the complexity of domestic violence. It names many “reinforcing factors” such as alcohol, poverty and mental illness that can increase the likelihood and severity of violence. But it stresses that gender inequality is the underlying cause, with other issues intersecting with gender at different times and in different communities. Factors including alcohol and childhood trauma come into play sometimes but gender inequality is always there, they insist.

Yet contributing or reinforcing factors are hardly given prominence. Lay never talks about them. Batty, whose campaigning on domestic violence has done as much as anyone to deepen the understanding of the issue, seldom emphasises them. A video Our Watch released to go with the Change the Story strategic plan is blunt.

“This is a story about a boy and a girl,” it begins. The girl is told “how pretty she is, never how clever she is, that if she wears a short dress, she’s asking for it”. As for a boy, “he learned that women aren’t equal to men from a very early age”. This is a story of “how gender inequality contributes to the murder of around one Australian woman almost every week”. The video raises no other factor involved in domestic violence.

Our Watch did release a 13-page report summarising the local and international evidence on the causes of domestic violence. It acknowledges that the field is still new but argues the evidence on the central role of gender inequality is strengthening. Fergus says there has been an explosion of research in the past decade, and the old approach that there was a “shopping list” of factors causing violence against women has become more sophisticated – factors such as alcohol or mental illness or the experience of violence in the perpetrator’s childhood filter through the key issue of gender inequality.

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Locally, a November report commissioned by the federal government on young people’s attitudes towards violence against women brought Lay to tears. That report is designed to inform a $30m government prevention campaign and its crucial finding is that while Australians overwhelmingly reject domestic violence as criminal, unconscious attitudes towards violence against women persist, especially among young people. We are raising our children to perpetuate violence against women, it says.

When presented with scenarios in which men were aggressive towards women, boys as young as 10 were quick to blame the victim, suggesting the girl was in part responsible. Girls were fast to blame themselves when presented with identical scenarios, with one suggesting a male was “just having a bad day”.

Do these attitudes lead to violence? Our Watch says they do. Surveys such as the 2009 National Survey on Community Attitudes to Violence Against Women found that men who held sexist, patriarchal or sexually hostile attitudes were more likely to condone or perpetrate violence against women.

Fergus and others are open about the gaps that remain in the research and don’t pretend the gender inequality analysis is settled. For instance, one ubiquitous claim is that countries with greater gender equality have lower rates of domestic violence. Often cited is a graph (below) from a 2010 UN comparison of 56 countries. That graph is everywhere – Our Watch publishes it, as did Victoria’s royal commission.

The UN graph comparing violence in 56 countries.

Yet its relevance to countries like Australia is questionable – Miller dismisses it as nonsense because the countries with higher levels of gender equality and lower levels of domestic violence are countries like Australia. Measurements include life expectancy between men and women, adult literacy, educational opportunities and wage equality.



“It’s a classic fallacy [argument],” Miller says. ‘’The countries with greater gender equality have got better rates of all forms of violence. They’ve got lower rates of economic and social inequity. Do I want our society to look more equitable? Absolutely. Would I put it down to just a single variable? Absolutely not.”

According to WHO research, the highest rates of physical and sexual violence are in countries where women may have few rights at all, such as Iran, Iraq, Liberia and Ethiopia. Australia is in the “high income” category where rates of domestic violence are lowest, along with nations such as Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Iceland, Japan, Israel, New Zealand and Britain. Violence generally, and violence against women in particular, remains unacceptably high, but overall, the wealthier and more developed a nation, the lower the rates of domestic violence tend to be.

Fergus acknowledges the limitations of that graph, but says there are other studies that take into consideration a nation’s level of development. One important 2015 analysis of 66 surveys from 44 countries published in the Lancet controlled for a country’s socioeconomic status. It looked at women’s status, economic participation, political participation and gender-related attitudes. It concluded that while it is irrefutable that violence against a partner decreases as GDP increases, “GDP is actually a marker for more complex social processes and transformations in women’s roles that frequently accompany economic growth and modernisation”.

It supported the gender hypothesis of domestic violence, saying that even at the country and regional level, it was factors related to women’s status, such as educational achievement, women’s access to employment and property, and male authority over women that helped predict the prevalence of violence against women.

At Victoria’s royal commission, the commissioner, Marcia Neave, asked pointed questions of Fergus and Renee Imbesi from VicHealth, a statutory authority that has played a leading role in promoting the gender inequality thesis. First, Neave asked: if domestic violence is at heart about gender inequality, and gender inequality has improved significantly in Australia in the past few decades, why has there not been a big reduction in violence against women?

Second, if Scandinavian and Nordic countries in particular have good records on gender inequality, what is the evidence that there are lower incidences of family violence compared with Australia?

And third, is too much effort going into gender equality at the expense of the causes of violence more generally, whether against men or women, and how we might reduce it?

Fergus says the question about why domestic violence has not significantly improved in Australia is “a really good question and one we don’t know [the answer to]. We’ve only actually been doing the personal safety survey since 1996.” That survey measures all forms of interpersonal violence. In 2012 it found that one in four women in Australia had experienced at least one violent incident at the hands of an intimate partner or ex-partner since the age of 15.

Fergus points out that data is based on reported violence and that as gender equality improves women are likely to feel more confident to report it. Responses from police and other services improve, too.

“My second answer to that question is that most measures of gender equality in a country are structural ones – things like legal equality, levels of education, representation in parliament. Whereas what we are talking about – and this is what gets us into hot water – is not just about the structural stuff.

“We break it down into structures, norms and practices. The structures are what we mostly measure, but social norms – the things we believe – are harder to measure and just as powerful. That’s what’s changed on smoking in the last 30 years – the social norm of it being cool.”

The question of whether countries with high levels of gender equality, at least legislatively, have lower rates of domestic violence is far from clearcut.

According to the 2014 World Economic Forum’s global gender gap index, the five most gender-equal countries in the world as measured by the gap between men and women on health and survival outcomes, education, economic participation and political empowerment are all Nordic countries – Iceland, Finland, Norway, Sweden and Denmark. All those countries are considered to be global “role models”, according to the report, having closed more than 80% of the gender gap.

For instance, at the top of the list is Iceland, once called the “most feminist place in the world”. It has the highest women’s labour participation rate in the world, for instance, at 88%, supported by heavily subsided childcare, with each parent receiving three months’ parental leave, and another three months for either parent. Gender quotas for company boards are enshrined in law.

Australia ranks 24th of the 142 countries measured, rating highly on education and heath, but falling down on political empowerment such as women in parliament and in ministerial jobs.

If the gender inequality analysis were correct, Nordic countries would be expected to have lower rates of violence against women. Yet a major study released in 2014 found that Nordic women experienced the worst physical or sexual violence in the EU.

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More than 42,000 women in the EU’s 28 countries were questioned face to face about physical, sexual and psychological violence, by partners and non-partners. Just over 50% of Danish women interviewed said they had experienced physical and/or sexual violence at least once since the age of 15, followed by 47% of Finnish women and 46% of Swedish women, according to the poll by the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights, which promotes human rights throughout the union.

The agency’s head of research, Joanna Goodey, struggled to explain the results, suggesting women in these countries were perhaps more aware of domestic violence and more likely to talk about it. What is also hypothesised is that as women’s equality improves, there is a backlash from men feeling their power is eroding, which may temporarily increase domestic violence.

For those convinced that the evidence overwhelmingly supports the gender inequality analysis – and therefore how countries need to to respond to it – the resistance is a predictable response from those either invested in the way things are, or from those uncomfortable in facing the real-world consequences of a male-dominant society.

“Gender challenges people, that is the crux of the issue,” says Fergus. “It goes to the core of our identities, our relationships, who we think we are, whether we think our society is functioning as it should or not.”

She says with a note of frustration: “The evidence is settled, it’s in, it’s there. When I say I’m confident, I’m really confident.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Emma Partridge and Lara Fergus from Our Watch, a group set up under the Australian government’s plan to drive policy to prevent violence against women and their children. Photograph: Meredith O'Shea

There are others less confident and equally frustrated that the dominance of the gender equality way of looking at domestic violence is pushing out other significant factors that, they argue, could make a big difference to reducing violence against women if they weren’t so sidelined.



For instance, reports of domestic violence to police, in common with all forms of violence, is concentrated in disadvantaged areas, particularly in the regions and in remote Indigenous communities. The suggestion that domestic violence is experienced by all women in all communities is of course true, but there are pockets where it is far more pronounced.

In a study of domestic assaults reported to NSW police from 2001 to 2010, 19 out of the top 20 local government areas were rural or regional areas and the top five were all remote – Bourke, Walgett, Moree Plains, Coonamble and Wentworth. Four of the five have Aboriginal populations whose experience of violence of all kinds is far higher than that of non-Indigenous people.

One of the strongest predictors of violence is being exposed to it as a child, or being abused as a child. A WHO analysis of 10 studies found that exposure to violence during childhood increased the likelihood of someone being a perpetrator three or four times.

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“Overwhelmingly, it’s about a history of violence in their own life,” says Miller. “Victims become perpetrators, and victims become victims.” It’s not inevitable, he says – early intervention and positive role models can break the cycle – but the evidence is irrefutable.

In a statement to the Victorian royal commission, the mental health expert Prof Patrick McGorry stated unequivocally that family violence was the “result of multiple factors including untreated or poorly treated mental illness and/or substance misuse. These are potent causal factors which have been very poorly responded to in terms of preventive care.

“While there is no intention to make any excuses for criminal behaviour or oversimplify the drivers of violence, there seems to be a reluctance to even discuss or highlight the obvious facts in some of these high-profile cases.”

One high-profile case was that of Greg Anderson, Batty’s former partner, who murdered their son, Luke Batty, in 2014 at a suburban cricket ground outside Melbourne. The coroner, Ian Gray, last year found that Anderson was likely to have had a mental illness (he was fixated on religion and experienced delusions) and that many chances to connect him with mental health support had been missed, mostly a result of his own reluctance.

Fergus agrees that more work needs to be done on how different individual factors intersect with gender inequality to cause violence against women. She agrees, too, that in individual cases, some factors loom larger than others.

“But none of them by themselves drives the violence, and none of them operates in and of itself,” she says. “They all operate through a society in which we have extreme levels of gender norm, structures practices, gender stereotyping, differences in power and relationships.”

To a layperson, it’s not easy to understand why whether something is labelled a “cause” or a “driver” or a “contributing factor” matters much – however it is achieved, the aim is to prevent the violence happening. There is history to this. Fergus says that in the 1970s when domestic violence first attracted serious attention, the feminist theorising about what caused it was just that, as much a political stance as an evidence-based one.

But she says the evidence is now firmer and, while public opinion may be lagging, tackling gender inequality is the key way to bring about big change. “While a lot of other issues also need attention, it’s crucial we put in the resources needed to transform gender relations if we are to have any hope of sustainably reducing future violence.”

The tension in all this is most obvious when it comes to alcohol. Michael Thorn is the chief executive of the Foundation for Alcohol Research and Education, and a former senior official in the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. He knows how policy works and how politics works.

The foundation’s mission is to reduce the harmful effects of alcohol in Australia. It has produced several papers on the role of alcohol in domestic and family violence, with detailed suggestions about how to reduce it through fairly straightforward legislative measures.

A few weeks ago Thorn was at a meeting in Canberra with public servants working with Lay and Batty on the Coag group advising Australian governments. “You can kind of see it in their eyes that after years and years of trying to get domestic violence on to the political agenda – not that I believe it was ever off the agenda – this is their historic opportunity to correct what they see as wrongs about gender equality in this country.”

Thorn believes the issue has been politicised by the dominance of the gender equality framework. He goes to endless meetings, makes submissions, has appeared before the royal commission, but so far, has had nil impact.

“Despite all our efforts over the past year none of the announcements that have been made by various governments, now adding up to probably half a billion dollars of investment, respond directly to alcohol’s contribution to family violence.”

Quentin Bryce’s Queensland report embraced the gender inequality argument, dismissing alcohol’s role in just a few lines. Thorn was at least heartened that Victoria’s royal commission devoted a full day to alcohol and other drugs, and appeared to be taking the issue seriously.

Thorn says alcohol can be considered a “cause” of violence in a public health sense but he avoids the word because it’s “like a red rag to a bull” to domestic violence groups. Yet, he says, alcohol is the “low-hanging fruit” that could reduce violence now, without having to wait for generational change that may or may not happen.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Empty beer cans lie strewn across the ground in Alice Springs. Northern Territory senator Nova Peris has said: ‘If you are not tackling alcohol, then you are not tackling domestic violence.’ Photograph: Tim Wimborne/Reuters

Alcohol’s link to violence of all kinds is undeniable, including violence in the home. It is involved in about half of domestic violence incidents attended by police, and violence incidents involving alcohol tend to be more frequent and severe. Almost 45% of intimate partner homicides are alcohol-related and that rises to 87% of Indigenous intimate partner homicides, which means alcohol had been consumed by the perpetrator, victim or both.

Thorn cites numerous studies that show reducing the availability of alcohol reduces violence. One example is NSW’s 2014 restrictions on alcohol in Sydney’s CBD and Kings Cross. It involves measures such as 10pm closing for bottle shops across the state and a 1.30am lockout. Assaults dropped 32% in Kings Cross and 26% throughout the CBD. The changes have proved controversial, yet the crime researcher Dr Don Weatherburn has said it was “one of the most dramatic effects I’ve seen in my time, of policy intervention to reduce crime”.

The impact of the law changes on domestic violence specifically are now being assessed.

In Victoria the alcohol researcher Michael Livingston has found that a higher density of alcohol outlets is associated with increases in reports of family violence. A 10% increase of takeaways, which are concentrated in disadvantaged areas, were associated with a more than 3% increase in domestic assaults. And in Western Australia the researcher Tanya Chikritzhs reported that for every 10,000 additional litres of pure alcohol sold by an off-site outlet such as a bottle shop, the risk of violence in homes increased by 26%.

Despite findings such as these, liquor outlets in Australia have soared in recent years. The Victorian premier, Daniel Andrews, is a champion of the gender equality thesis (“We must educate that sexist behaviour and gender inequality, if unaddressed, lead to sexual assault and family violence,” he says) but he never discusses the role of alcohol.

Thorn wants measures to reduce or cap the number of alcohol licences and to tighten trading hours: “The big one has got to be trading hours, that is the most cost-effective public policy intervention you can make. From a government perspective it costs very little, it’s a legislative move. There’s no multimillion [dollar] advertising campaign, you don’t need thousands of public servants, you just have to say closing times are whatever, 1am.”

Premier Daniel Andrews says system for dealing with family violence is broken Read more

So why won’t government do something so relatively cheap and effective? Thorn has no doubt: “The alcohol industry’s vested interests is extraordinary and the way it has managed to engineer a culture of fear in politicians is extraordinary. The [Victorian government] defunded our research centre, they’re reviewing the Liquor Act, they’ve got the liquor industry deeply involved in the policy discussions. What chance do we have?”

Thorn says many domestic violence groups, especially in Victoria, will barely speak to him, so furious are they that he dares to suggest alcohol is a causal factor in domestic violence in many cases.

There is acknowledgement that alcohol contributes to domestic violence but wariness about overplaying it. The fear, as Fergus puts it, is that focusing on alcohol “lets the guy off the hook … it’s actually saying, ‘OK it’s the alcohol that’s the problem, it wasn’t your controlling behaviour, it wasn’t the attitude towards the woman in your life, it was the fact that you got drunk and lost control.’”

Partridge also points out that those who focus on alcohol as a cause often criticise women for drinking because it may make them more vulnerable to assault. “There’s a lot of victim-blaming in that. There’s a lot of use of terms like ‘vulnerability’ and women’s use of alcohol and feminists just bristle at that.”

Yet Thorn remains sceptical that a long-term strategy to improve gender equality will reduce violence against women in any significant way. “I’ll probably end up beaten up, but I’m a little wary of it. I keep coming down to our argument that dealing with alcohol’s contribution will give you very significant gains now, whereas the gender equality issues are going to take a generation and as some of my colleagues say, ‘Good luck with that, changing the behaviour of teenage boys.’”

One suggestion has been for Australia to follow an experiment in South Dakota in the US. Since 2005 the state has required those arrested or convicted for repeat drink-driving to take two alcohol breath tests a day or wear an alcohol-monitoring bracelet. As well as as big reduction in drink-driving offences, the surprise result was a 9% reduction in arrests for intimate partner assaults.

Thorn wants something like that trialled in Australia, targeting repeat family violence offenders, who would have to show zero alcohol use to be allowed to remain in the community. Miller says he has put the idea to Lay, who raised resourcing problems.

Protecting the right to drink trumps the safety of Indigenous women in the NT | Nova Peris Read more

“One of the key messages around this is that when you take alcohol out of the picture for a very small group of the population who are obviously indicated as problem people, you get this huge reduction in domestic violence. We are a bit crazy not to have tried it already.”

There is one area where domestic violence groups are less adamant about the central role of gender equality – when applying it to Indigenous communities, particularly in remote areas. It is, perhaps, a reflection of the struggles feminism has had with “intersectionality”, the role of race, class and sexuality in women’s experiences.

So is the patriarchy, the dominant role of men in Aboriginal communities, the sexist assumptions from childhood, the root cause of horrific levels of partner and family violence in some communities, or not?

If we believe alcohol is a key reason for violence in some communities – the Northern Territory senator Nova Peris has said that “if you are not tackling alcohol, then you are not tackling domestic violence” – then why would it not be central in non-Indigenous communities?

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The grave of an Indigenous woman in the NSW town of Weilmoringle. Police allege she was killed by her boyfriend. Photograph: Mick Tsikas/AAP

Partridge won’t say gender inequality plays the same role in Indigenous communities’ experience of domestic violence, and she won’t say it doesn’t. She does insist, though, that “in most areas of social policy Indigenous communities are understood as a special case, because the history of colonisation means they are subject to a whole heap of circumstances and impacts and factors and drivers and influences that no other community in Australia is”.

“People find themselves pushed to one side or the other on this question, so there are some Indigenous people saying, ‘This white feminist model doesn’t apply at all because it’s colonisation and it’s racism, that’s what drives violence.

“And there are other Indigenous people saying, ‘It’s time we need to stop this discourse that allows our men to use colonisation and racism as an excuse for violence, it’s about gender, we need a black feminist analysis of violence.’

“I guess we’re somewhere in the middle, trying to acknowledge the nuances and the complexities of that. We wouldn’t say, ‘Oh, yes this [gender inequality] absolutely applies everywhere.’ But neither would we say, ‘We’re going to throw out our whole feminist analysis because we are trying to understand a remote Indigenous community.’”

For well over a year now, Australians have been told consistently and loudly that we need to fix gender inequality if we are ever to stop domestic violence, and not just to respond to it when it happens. Yet those most convinced know the public remains sceptical. Partridge wonders why.

“It’s interesting how much resistance [there is]. We’re not asking for people to be guinea pigs for this terrible experiment because we think it will work but we can’t quite prove it. It comes back to the idea that challenging gender is just fundamentally difficult for people to accept, there’s a backlash to it.

“A lot of that is that people don’t want to think about gender, they don’t want to challenge it, question it, so it becomes ‘there’s no evidence’. But it’s actually a resistance to talking about gender and that’s what we’re always up against.

“We’ve tried to counter that by saying, ‘OK, OK, OK, we’ll find the evidence.’ And we have.”

Evidence. It’s rarely conclusive. There are those who say what evidence there is points in all sorts of other directions if we are serious about ending violence against women. It’s a tussle – of politics, ideology and for scarce resources. A tussle that matters.