Larissa Waters (Queensland, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

():  This month in Australia six women were murdered in just one week, five of them killed by men they knew. This is an epidemic, and we must do more as a nation and as a government to tackle men's violence against women and their children.

Today is day 4 of the UN's 16 days of activism campaign where every year the world recommits to ending sexual and physical violence against women. But how can we end domestic, family and sexual violence when we don't have the data needed to fully understand the scope of the problem—the how, why, where and when to address it for effective prevention, early intervention and violence reduction strategies? We need government to fund a repeatable national study of perpetrators of domestic, family and sexual violence to more fulsomely understand what drives their behaviour.

The Perpetration Project, a partnership between the Accountability Matters Project, QUT and the Equality Institute, is currently proposing a model for a national prevalence study that, if funded, would be a game changer in how we view the pernicious problem of violence against women and their children. It would take a proactive to stopping people using violence and shift the focus and burden off survivors and onto perpetrators, where it belongs.

We also need to understand what works in the prevention space if we are to eliminate violence against women. Respect Victoria is currently developing a pilot project that would evaluate prevention programs, respectful relationships education in schools, programs in sporting clubs and workplaces, and men's behaviour change programs, to help assess what's working best and help them be more tailored and targeted across communities.

Governments should be funding both these bodies of research as well as fully funding frontline services to match the urgency of the epidemic of men's violence against women. I urge the government to use all the levers they have to eliminate men's violence against women and their children.