Establishing a Domestic Violence Threat Assessment Centre could be a game-changing strategy to help prevent intimate partner homicide in Australia, the Australian Institute of Criminology has suggested.
Intimate partner homicide is one of the most common forms of homicide in Australia, and it remains the most common homicide threat for Australian women, who are the victims of three-quarters of incidents.
Since the early 1990s, there have been 1,667 female victims of intimate partner homicide , or an average of 49 women killed each year by their current or former intimate partner. Almost six in 10 women victims of homicide in Australia each year are killed by their intimate partner and this proportion has persisted as the overall homicide victimisation rate for women has decreased.
Despite these alarming risks towards women’s safety, relatively few programs have been specifically designed to prevent homicide.
The Australian Institute of Criminology’s (AIC) latest report suggests the government run a trial of a Domestic Violence Threat Assessment Centre to address the issue. The Centre would bring together police, mental health support and domestic violence experts to better gather intelligence, monitor individuals and intervene against those at high risk of carrying out a homicide.
Fixation and grievances
The AIC says intimate partner homicide perpetrators are often motivated by fixation and grievances, which is linked to coercive control and other forms of emotional or physical abuse.
Fixation refers to an intense preoccupation with an individual, place or cause pursued to an excessive or irrational degree. Research on fixated threats has established important behavioural risk factors that may signal escalating risk of violence, such as harassment, stalking, threats or aggression.
A grievance refers to an individual believing that they have been subject to an injustice, generating feelings of outrage, desperation and at times a sense they’ve been victimised.
The AIC cites research (Harden and colleagues, 2019) that found grievances played a role in intimate partner homicide , particularly when they emerged from the end, or anticipated end, of a relationship.
An example could be that a refusal to reconcile a relationship could arise as a standalone grievance, but it may also heighten other grievances and fuel intense emotions in the intimate partner homicide perpetrator.
Domestic Violence Threat Assessment Centre
To increase the visibility of DV perpetrators who engage in escalating fixated or grievance-motivated behaviours, the AIC’s proposal of a Domestic Violence Threat Assessment Centre would broaden existing referral pathways and establish new pathways. This would allow community services to assist victim-survivors to identify cases they believe to be high risk for violence.
The DVTAC is based on the existing Fixated Threat Assessment Centres that are used across the world and in Australia to manage threats from lone-actor fixated individuals and as part of a counter-terrorism response.
“Law enforcement or health agencies in isolation will rarely have the information needed to identify these perpetrators as they escalate toward violence … At present, indicators of escalating risk may only be visible to individual agencies,” the AIC report says.
While the DVTAC offers this much-needed multi-agency approach, the report also notes that the research in this area is exploratory and does not replace or supersede any existing approaches to addressing DV perpetration.
“Rather, the DVTAC offers a complementary and additional approach focusing on an important group of DV perpetrators who may escalate to IPH.”