This month marks ten years since the Victorian Royal Commission into Family Violence handed down its landmark report and 227 recommendations. There has been great success, but there’s still serious work to do, with No to Violence CEO Phillip Ripper calling on policymakers to articulate a rewewed vision.
The Victorian Royal Commission into Family Violence was a watershed moment that reshaped how Victoria understands and responds to family violence.
It set in motion the most comprehensive overhaul of a family violence response system in Australia’s history. Significant investment followed, institutions were redesigned, and family violence was repositioned from a private tragedy to a core responsibility of government, with the Royal Commission establishing a clear imperative to pivot the system’s focus to perpetrators and embed accountability for people using violence.
But today, the state stands at a crossroads in the work to end family violence.
If success is measured by system transformation, Victoria achieved what once seemed impossible. Specialist courts and integrated access points known as The Orange Door strengthened safety, risk assessment and information sharing, while victim-survivor voices were elevated in policy development and a prevention architecture was established. Crucially, the system began shifting toward holding people who use violence to account.
The Victorian government often and loudly points to its success in implementing the Royal Commission’s recommendations and increasing investment. But if success is measured by the prevalence and severity of violence, the job is far from done. Tonight, tens of thousands of Victorian women and children will be living in fear of someone who says they love them. Hundreds of thousands of Victorian children are growing up in homes where they are not safe. The harm they experience compounds every day.
Family violence places a multi-billion-dollar burden on Victoria every year, with vast sums spent on policing, courts, child protection and hospitals responding to men’s use of violence as though it is inevitable. It is not.
Violence is preventable, but stopping it requires sustained investment from all levels of government to intervene earlier and tackle the problem at its source. Research from the Ten to Men study indicates around 35 per cent of Australian men aged 18 to 65 have used intimate partner violence, underscoring the scale and urgency of the task.
Victorians are proud to live in a state that has led the nation in responding to family violence. They would be far less proud of the strain now facing family violence services after years of chronic underfunding. Unless the next phase of reform pivots decisively toward prevention and earlier intervention, progress will stall. While initiatives such as The Orange Door provide an important entry point for women and children, too often there is insufficient capacity behind the door to engage men using violence, keep them in view, hold them accountable and support lasting behaviour change.
The numbers paint a clear picture. Last year, around 51,000 adults using family violence were referred to The Orange Door, yet only a small proportion (around one in ten) were connected to specialist services or behaviour change programs. Each victim-survivor who presents is linked to someone causing harm, meaning the number of people using violence interacting with the system is far higher. Too often these contacts lead nowhere. This represents a series of missed opportunities: many people using violence come into contact with the system, yet only a fraction progress to meaningful intervention or behaviour change.
When intervention fails, men often move from one relationship to the next using violence unabated. Creating a system failure that leaves wave after wave of women and children exposed to harm.
Because violence is patterned, progressive and predictable, systems that intervene earlier and hold men accountable for change are far more effective at preventing it.
Left unaddressed, harm and risk can escalate to the point where the costly (and often ineffective) police and legal systems become the only response. Government funding overwhelmingly flows to policing, courts and prisons, intervening only after violence has reached crisis point.
More than half of all frontline policing in Victoria is now devoted to family violence incidents. Victoria Police recorded more than 106,000 family violence incidents in 2024–25, the highest on record, and an increase of 16.7 per cent on the previous year. Yet even Victoria Police have acknowledged that policing alone cannot resolve the issue, with frontline officers often left responding to repeated incidents.
At the same time, courts remain clogged with family violence matters, with intervention orders routinely breached and too often carrying little immediate consequence.
In an election year, where political parties are promising ever tougher responses to crime, we must ask whether we are investing enough in the health, care and early intervention systems that actually prevent violence in the first place. That question becomes even more pressing as Victoria approaches a key policy turning point.
Victoria’s 10-year reform framework, Ending Family Violence: Victoria’s Plan for Change, is due to end next year and there is currently no clear succession plan. Unlike states such as Queensland and New South Wales, Victoria also lacks a dedicated whole-of-government strategy focused on people who perpetrate family violence.
Ten years after the Royal Commission reshaped Victoria’s response to family violence, political leaders must now articulate a renewed vision and long-term plan for the next phase of reform. A bipartisan commitment is urgently needed to ensure Victoria finishes the job it set out to do and builds on the gains of the past decade rather than allowing them to erode through political drift or the misguided belief that family violence reform is “done and dusted”. For the many women and children who have lost their lives since the government declared the Royal Commission recommendations complete, that claim rings tragically hollow.
The measure of success was never the number of recommendations implemented. It is the violence prevented, and that work is far from finished.