As I’ve written elsewhere, there is no way to reliably establish the facts about domestic abuse and its prevalence in Australia. The best we can do with the information we have is get some indication of how often it happens, and to whom. But it is no more than an indication.
There is only one source of robustly reliable information, and it is a terrible one. Homicide data. There is almost no chance of underreporting, and the thorough investigations conducted by police and coroner’s courts ensure that misreporting is ruled out as far as is humanly possible. Coroner’s Courts are particularly reliable source of data because they have no agenda other than to investigate and report on the facts and causes of death.
The NSW and Victorian Coroner’s Courts have both released reports about domestic violence related homicide that provide a stark picture of the gendered nature of violence at its worst.
The detailed statistics are all laid out below, but the basic outcome is that men are more often the victims of homicide outside the family (almost always at the hands of other men). Inside the family, women are the majority of victims, and men are overwhelmingly the perpetrators. Even when men are killed in a family violence context, subsequent investigation by police and coroners determined that in most cases, men are killed by their domestic violence victims.
This is important information to know and report, not because we need to vilify men, but because when we are acting to prevent homicides, we need to understand where to target frontline emergency services and where to target long-term preventative action.
It is worth noting that homicide in Australia is relatively rare, and the hundreds of thousands of people who live with domestic violence could well have a more varied experience of it, but murder is the ultimate violation, and preventable deaths should demand far greater attention and resources given to potentially life-saving services.
The NSW Coroner’s Court report is the one that provides the most detailed and cross referenced data, but the results are substantiated by the findings of the Victorian report. Both data sets cover homicides over a ten-year period, from 2000 to 2010. More recent data becomes difficult because some investigations take years to resolve.
I’ve written about the NSW report before, and as I said then, the statistics are horrific enough, reading the case studies is heartbreakingly tragic.
Unfortunately, you can’t simply add the numbers from the two reports together in a way that would be reliable. The figures are reported slightly differently and simple addition would be misleading. So this is a very long list of stats, but I’ve tried to break it down in a way that shows detailed information as plainly as possible without any messy graphs
New South Wales
Between 2000 and 2010 there were 877 homicides in NSW.
- 283 women (32%)
- 593 men (67%)
- 1 transgender person
283 homicides occurred where there was an identifiable history of domestic violence
- 137 women (58%)
- 101 men (42%)
143 homicides occurred between intimate partners
- 108 women (76%) were killed by their partners
- All 108 women (100%) were killed by men
- 105 of those women (97%) were identified as victims of domestic violence
- 3 of those women (3%)were killed where there was “evidence of violence and abuse used by both parties with no clear coercion and control”
35 men (24%) were killed by their partners
- 6 of those men (17%) were identified as victims of domestic violence. All 6 were killed by men.
- 25 of those men (71%) were identified as the perpetrator of domestic violence against the women who killed them
- 3 of those men (8%)were killed by a partner where there was “evidence of violence and abuse used by both parties with no clear coercion and control”.
- 1 of those men (2%) was the extramarital partner of a woman, and was killed by her and her abusive husband acting together.
There was not one single case in the entire ten years where a man was killed by an abusive female partner.
69 children were killed by their parents
- 52 of those children (75%) were identified as living with domestic violence
- 32 were killed by a male parent (62%)
- 18 were killed by a female parent (35%)
- 2 were killed by a male and female parent acting together (4%)
42 parents killed their children (some incidents were multiple homicides)
- 25 fathers killed their children (60%)
- 20 of those men (80%) were perpetrators of domestic violence
- 17 mothers killed their children (40%)
- 16 of those women (94%) were victims of domestic violence
There was not one single case where a child was killed by a male victim of domestic violence.
Victoria
There were 709 homicides in Victoria between 2000 and 2010
- 545 of those homicides occurred in the jurisdiction where the investigation was complete and an offender had been identified.
- 363 were men (67%)
- 182 were women (33%)
288 homicides identified a domestic violence context
- 150 women (52%) were killed in a domestic violence context
- 137 of those women (91%) were killed by men
- 10 of those women (7%) were killed by women
- 3 of those women (2%) were killed by a man and woman acting together
- 138 men (48%) were killed in a domestic violence context
- 81 of those men (59%) were killed by men
- 49 of those men (36%) were killed by women
- 8 of of those men (6%) were killed by a man and woman acting together
136 people were killed by intimate partners
- 103 were women (76%)
- Where the history of family violence could be determined, 90% of these women were victims of domestic violence
- 33 were men (33%)
- Where the history of family violence could be determined, 83% of these men were the perpetrators of family violence