Prologue: Violence against women is a bad thing, and it’s still bad even when, as the article below points out, it used to be far worse. We should be trying hard to lower rates of violence, by finding good solutions and implementing them with urgency. As part of this, we should understand just what we’re dealing with – which is what this series of posts tries to do.
This is my second post on Australian male violence against women. Back in early 2024, I posted here on Troppo about what some community groups argued was an “epidemic” of male violence. 2024 had seen a rise in the number of women killed in intimate partner violence, and 2023-24 was already shaping up to be worse. As community groups voiced their concern, news media focused on the issue for several weeks. South Australia called a Royal Commission.
Some 18 months on, it’s worth seeing what has happened to those statistics.
And the news is terrific. After two years of rises, 2024-25 brought a huge 35% fall in the rate of intimate partner homicide against women. This fall is shown at the right-hand bottom corner of the graph below. See an interactive version here.
In percentage terms, this is the biggest recorded single-year fall in intimate partner homicide against women in Australian history (the records go back to 1989-90). We’re now back down near the all-time lows of 2020-2022 – a period when COVID lockdowns may have been making the figures look misleadingly good (though we’ll probably never know for sure).
Did Australia celebrate that “historic fall”? Did community groups put out press releases congratulating Australia on slashing this most reliable and most awful of all domestic violence metrics? Did the media announce this biggest fall in the history of our figures?
No, there was no celebration; there were no press releases or media stories that I could find.
And here’s the thing: I would argue that this non-response was entirely appropriate – for two reasons:
Never mind that the 2022-2024 rises grabbed the attention of community groups and the media. Never mind even that the 2020-2022 figures may have been artificially depressed by the COVID lockdowns. Both the rise and the fall are likely to be blips in a bigger long-term change – that long drop in female partner homicides.
For 2024-25, the figures we’re looking at show 30 intimate partner homicides of women. The obvious and correct response is that this is still too many deaths. But in statistical terms, we can make another, more descriptive observation: when your numbers are in this territory, the statistics will bounce around a lot. They will bounce around even more than they did when the homicide rate was three times higher, at the start of the 1990s. In my original 2024 post, I quoted Ben Spivak at the Swinburne Centre for Forensic Behavioural Science making this point.
Due to the small statistical sizes, we need to take care in drawing conclusions about year-to-year changes in homicide. This will be true whatever we see in the 2025-26 figures.
One lesson from this episode is that in the 2020s, we are eager to infuse our talk about gender violence with huge moral significance. And that’s appropriate. We’re talking about people intentionally killing their partners, not only destroying those people’s futures but blighting the futures of people around them.
Indeed, while I came to this issue as a philosophical moral realist, I’ve noticed that even people who would normally not describe themselves that way tend to suddenly become moral realists on this issue. That is, thankfully, almost everyone says they think that intimate partner homicide against women is objectively a bad thing.
What we struggle to do is stop that legitimate moral impulse from infecting our analysis of what’s happening to Australian society. The result is that we end up depicting Australia as a sort of growing hellscape of male-on-female homicide. In fact, the opposite is the case: intimate partner homicide against women has dropped by two-thirds in the past 35 years. That’s a terrific achievement; other countries have done well too, but we seem to have done better than most.
But that picture is hard to make out amid the blizzard of condemnation. Reality gets overshadowed. Our morality pollutes our epistemology. The hellscape impulse just has too many forces on its side.
I’ve mentioned that concern over an epidemic of violence manifested most quickly in the statements of community groups and the media. But the concern reached much wider, into academia and government.
Take the example of Rick Sarre, emeritus professor of law and criminal justice at the University of South Australia, and possessed of a masters degree in criminology. Writing in The Conversation on the same day as my Club Troppo post, Sarre referred to “the seemingly unrelenting number of murders perpetrated by men against their intimate partners”. That might be considered a descriptive statement, a characterisation of the state of public worry. But Sarre also described the figures in normative terms, as “cause for mounting concern for all Australians”. And he concluded that Australia needed a “transformative” reallocation of resources to the problem.
I don’t want to pick on Sarre. He was far from the only academic to paint such a picture. Indeed, a few days after my initial Club Troppo post, he was quoted in the Australian Financial Review making very sensible observations: he noted falling long-term homicide rates and observed that “long-term trends are often ignored in the rush to analyse short-term crime rate fluctuations”. My worry is that Sarre’s Conversation piece suggests even sensible people may struggle to resist the hellscape impulse.
The pressures can be intense. A prominent anti-violence activist underlined this for me by ringing me one evening soon after I made my April 2024 post. She wasn’t subtle: I should take the whole post down, she said, because I simply didn’t know what I was talking about. Sadly, she rang off before I could ask her how often this sort of tactic worked on other people.
The result is that most people end up in, at best, a sort of epistemic fog about certain issues. This site’s own Nick Gruen reacted to my original 2024 post by disclosing he had been wanting that sort of statistical analysis, “as I’ve asked myself the obvious questions about whether this thing is worse or better than before”. Nick has degrees of various sorts in history, public policy, economics and law. At the time, if I had had to bet on anyone outside the criminal justice and social statistics fields understanding the long-term changes in homicide figures, I would have bet on Nick. But even he didn’t know what to think.
If Nick Gruen didn’t know what was going on with intimate partner homicide in 2024, I don’t have any faith that very many ordinary intelligent Australians understood it then, or understand it now.
When the concern about an “epidemic” of violence suddenly broke out in 2024, the federal government had only recently published its National Plan to End Violence against Women and Children 2022-2032. Nevertheless, it found itself required by political logic to act, no matter what its more careful minds may have thought of the underlying realities. The government pledged more than $925 million in new funding over five years to “address men’s violence towards women”. This included up to $5000 to support those escaping violent relationships.
You might well think that this $5000 in support money seems like a good idea, so there’s no point in complaining about how we got it. Heck, I think that $5000 is a good idea, even though I also think that I don’t know enough about the issue to be sure.
More broadly, though, I worry about the effects this sort of thing is having on government.
Australia is much better than it has been, and Australia can be much better than it is now. To encourage that betterment, we should remind Australians of how much it has happened already.
Comments: As usual, yes, I’m an idiot about a lot of things. I really will be grateful if you can point out in the comments specifically where my idiocy lies, and detail the huge mistake(s) I’m making.
About the author: I studied criminology at the University of Adelaide and have dealt with statistics and their presentation in various roles for more than 30 years.
I am the principal of Shorewalker DMS, an editorial advisory firm. Shorewalker DMS specialises in helping organisations make their reports clearer, more complete and more persuasive.
