Over the weekend there were numerous rallies in Australia against gendered violence, following a spate of murders in the first four months of the year (27 is the accepted number, although you will also see numbers in the 30s). I have a slight connection to one of these victims: she was the pre-school teacher of a close friend’s daughter.
I’m always slightly (i.e. highly) skeptical of media statistics on hot-button issues, so I decided to do a quick data analysis based on the information available (which is admittedly scant). I have the words Incident, Investigation and Learning in my job title, so I have some experience at looking for causal patterns across a range of events. I’m also VERY used to leaders/motivated individuals etc over-interpreting statistics and desperately trying to find causal commonality where none exists.
My data source included 27 murders of women so far in 2024.
Of those:
– 7 were killed by partners/ex partners
– 9 or 10 were due to mentally-ill perpetrators (including the 5 female Bondi victims and 4 cases where mothers were killed by their children – three sons and one daughter. One was a patient at a hospital randomly killing another patient and injuring a bunch of others). Note, some caveats in this stat because mental health status is often implied if not absolutely stated.
– In 7 of the cases, there was also a male victim (the 5 Bondi victims plus two others. In one of the others, there were two male victims).
– There are 5 where the relationship of the victim to the perpetrator is unknown or undisclosed, but for several of these the police have strongly implied or outright stated that DV was not the motivation. I assume they are drug related.
– 9 died by stabbing, 3 by house fire, 1 by gunshot and 6 by assault. The cause of death was not disclosed for the others.
– Previous criminal history of the DV offenders is unknown, apart from one who had been released two weeks earlier on bail from a rape/violent assault charge. I would take a punt that all of them were known to police.
– As best I could tell, only 1 of the murders was of an indigenous woman. Given the extreme rates of DV in indigenous communities, this surprised me.
So while the vast majority of messaging and sloganeering has been about violence from partners and ex-partners, that accounts for only a quarter of the cases. For the others, there is little evidence that the victims were targeted specifically because they were women.
None of this is to take away from the tragedies each of these murders represents. I’m just not sure what the value is of parading slogans stating “I’d Feel Safer With a Bear” and calling for femicide to be treated as a terror incident. It’s a little like the times at school that the headmaster would yell at the entire class because one person littered.
The other issue is actionability. Given what we know about these cases, what preventative action could we have taken if we had wound the timeline back on each incident? I think the issues of bail for violent offenders and the efficacy of DVOs are obvious points for focus, but that wouldn’t have made a difference for 75% of these victims (I’m assuming). For mental health, we’re back to a need for more ‘services’, the nebulous fix-all for social issues.
Anyway, no agenda here other than showing some of the complexity that sits behind hot-topic media stats. The first step in fixing a problem is having clarity about what the problem actually is, and I’m not sure we have that in this instance.
Interesting Pods. I wonder whether this year is an outlier. One would expect more women than men to be killed every year simply because cowards target who they perceive to be weaker.
I think including the Bondi murders in these stats is a mistake, as that is a mentally-ill spree killer, and if he targeted women it seems only due to the fact that they were less-threatening targets, as you say.
I wonder how much light gets cast if you include DVO/AVO in the stats, and then cases of assault or rape.
There’s a perception is that the justice system, and laws, are perhaps imbalanced and aimed at rehabilitation at the expense of punishment. Rehab is an integral part of the penal system, but punishment has to be adequate.
I don’t readily have stats to hand, but if my experience is anything to go by, I can understand frustration at the system. Punched, brain damage, and my perp got a $2k fine and no conviction recorded. If that leniency is common across all offences, I’m not surprised women feel unsafe. Jarry Hyne went down for 4 years 9 months, with a non parole period of 3 years.
I don’t live in Australia but have visited and my impression was that the indigenous population were and are deeply troubled. Not all obviously but enough to be noticeable. We have a problem in UK with knife crime which is scary and there is definitely a sense that women are more frequently targeted.
Our media is no better than yours when it comes to sensationalism but one murder is one too many.
The OP omits to explain the meaning of the abbreviation ‘DV’ or ‘DVO’. For the purposes of clarity, this is ‘Domestic Violence’ or ‘Domestic Violence Offence’.
Apologies. A DVO is a Domestic Violence Order, a piece of paper imposing various conditions on the offender and about as effective as it sounds.
Abuse committed within vulnerable communities is often not reported due to misplaced loyalty or anti-Police attitudes. So there is a large ‘dark figure’ of victims, as well as people who literally get away with murder. The “snitches get stitches” culture means the abusive intimidate anyone who might with to expose them.
I’m not sure that’s the whole picture there.
I can’t speak for other states, but around here justice will get meted out – it just won’t be whitefella justice. We’ve had more than one member of staff go on “leave” he transgressed in some way and was at high risk of getting speared – not to death, but enough to interfere with most life function for a while.
There are anti police attitudes, and with good reason. The community police are either fantastic on community, or it’s Fort Apache; there doesn’t appear to be a middle ground.
I think a lot of the polarised commentary around gendered violence stems from a lack of communication and socialisation between males and females in Australia. When I first came here 20-odd years ago I was surprised by the degree of segregation between males and females in our workplace. Kath and Kim’s Jane Turner did a great satire on it for the local comedy show Fast Foward back then.
It’s a cliche but Australia is still a blokey culture and there’s a lot of casual misogyny, and not just among the classic Anglo Aussies. It’s changing for the better, as I saw when my kids went through school, but beyond the inner cities there’s still a reluctance among blokes to even talk about stuff like relationships, anger, not to mention questioning their own masculinity. And it’s got a lot worse in recent time with young guys turning to people like Andrew Tate as role models. And of course the previous PM whose response to a womens’ protest was to say ‘think yourselves lucky you’re not met with bullets’.
So I guess my point is that I can understand the frustration of womens’ groups when they rage about gendered violence – because they’ve been trying to have this discussion for years and nobody is listening.
That is a bizarre and massively generalised statement. Segregation in the workplace?
It’s not something I’ve seen or felt in any workplace or social environment I’ve been in in Australia. I’m sure in some social groups that may be the case, but I doubt it is any different to similar communities and social groups in the UK, US etc.
But also, I think you’ve missed my point which is that the definition being used for ‘Gendered Violence’ is so loose that it is meaningless in the current conversation, and offers no causal value. They have included every instance where a woman had been killed through violence, regardless of the circumstance or whether gender was even a factor. In one of the cases that has been included in the data set a lady was killed by her daughter. Yet every single bit of commentary (including in this thread) makes the assumption that they are all domestic violence incident, when that appears to be true in less than a third of cases.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-04-30/act-sexual-assault-review-limited-police-investigations/103783232
tl;dr Police investigations stopping cases getting to court
I think the issue is more that police are reluctant to go through working a case up when they have little confidence it will amount to much in the courts.
Here is a much publicised case from Canberra last year where a man was found not-guilty of rape by using the defence that he never had sex with the woman (she had had consensual sex with his housemate). He was found guilty of strangling her (what?) and during the victim impact hearing fully admitted that he did actually have sex with her. He cannot be retried for rape as he has already been found not guilty, despite his admission.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-11-13/seti-moala-victim-speaks-about-traumatic-trial/103075114