The premier has signalled that a strengthening of measures against violent men who breach orders might come out of a new taskforce to address the killing of women.
Callaway said:“That could mean we take away that liberty if you don’t behave the way society expects you to.”
Victoria Police’s submission to the royal commission said the registration ofdomestic violence offenders as part of a disclosure scheme was needed,but this was not among the 227 recommendations. The submission said the register should be established within a year.
The register the police urged the commission to consider was based on a model used in Britain. A person can access it if they prove they are in a relationship with the individual whose record they are looking for and agree to keep the information they glean from the register confidential.
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At the time,police argued that women’s “right to ask” if a man posed a risk to them or the community “could break the all-too-common pattern of perpetrators harming successive partners,and avoid exposing unwitting adults and children to known perpetrators of family violence.”
Callaway,who was not in her role when the police made their submission to the royal commission,said there might be even more need for such a register today.
“The principles behind that probably haven’t changed today;in fact the numbers[supporting it] would be stronger,” she said.
“It bears consideration,because the history of certain perpetrators,where they’ve got a long pattern of violence,is a relevant risk factor to the propensity to commit violence in the future.”
After five women were allegedly murdered by men in nine days in late 2023,a proposal by Australian National University criminologist and violence researcher Hayley Boxall to closelytrack high-risk family violence offenders received support from prominent women’s safety advocates.
On Thursday,Boxall said responses to high-risk offenders were not being escalated to match the threat and there was a reluctance to try new things.
“This tracking model is a difficult one for[the women’s safety sector] to get on board with,because it’s not from the domestic violence sector,it’s from the countering violent extremism space,” she said.
Tracking fixated people emerged in England to protect high-profile people from obsessed stalkers.
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”One of the biggest gaps is that we don’t necessarily have systems with eyes on the perpetrator. These are guys who may never meet the threshold for a police intervention … and then they kill their partners,” Boxall said.
Violence researcher and chair of Respect Victoria Kate Fitz-Gibbon said the women’s deaths in Victoria in the past few weeks were “the fatal tip of a much larger iceberg” and no single reform would bring down the toll.
“We need to be looking at whole-of-system reform,” Professor Fitz-Gibbon said. “It’s about the whole system failing victims on a far too regular basis. We need ... to listen to survivors.”
Fitz-Gibbon said that two years into a decade-long federal government plan to end violence against women within a generation,“it is completely fair for Australians to be asking what progress is being made when we’re being confronted with the horrific fatalities of the last few months”.
Premier Jacinta Allan said the state government would soon establish a taskforce to investigate ways to curb the spate of violence.
She confirmed on Thursday that the attorney-general,minister for women and minister for the prevention of family violence – all women – had been tasked with bringing solutions to cabinet.
She said while Victoria had led the nation on funding for the prevention of family violence,more work needed to be done given 10 women had died due to violence in April alone.
“This has to stop,” Allan said.
“We need to look at our programs. We need to look at our policies. And we need to look at our legal system to understand what more we can do to protect women.
“But the truth is this:violence against women cannot and should not be solved by women alone. We talk a lot about women’s safety when,really,the conversation must be about men’s violence and how we all need to step up.”
One Labor minister,speaking toThe Ageon the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters,said the anger around the cabinet table was palpable and the government would definitely act.
“It’s completely f---ed. Scary dudes need to be put away before they kill,not after,” the minister said on Thursday.
Another Labor MP echoed those sentiments:“We’ve spent a shit-ton of money and it’s f--king worse. Everyone’s got to take some responsibility. Just one thing is not going to fix everything.”
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Meanwhile,just weeks out from what promises to be a tight state budget,the heads of several government departments are still waiting for funding re-commitments for at least six programs with direct links to family violence support and prevention.
Upper house Libertarian MP David Limbrick,whose girlfriend was one of three women killed by Paul Denyer in the early 1990s,said the government should change laws to allow women to carry pepper spray.
“I don’t think it’s radical. It’s quite normal in many parts of the world,” Limbrick said. “There are lots of women I know who’d like some means of self-defence. I don’t understand why the government won’t allow them to do that.”
Animal Justice Party crossbencher Georgie Purcell said she would be open to the idea if the pepper spray was for women identified by authorities as at risk.
“[But] it’s a proposed solution that puts responsibility on women when what we actually need is for men to stop being violent.”
Purcell,who regularly receives rape and death threats online,called on the government to capture such behaviour in the vilification reforms due to come before parliament this year.
“We know sexist comments escalate to physical violence,” she said.
The leader of the opposition in the Legislative Council,Georgie Crozier,said the government has had a royal commission and a decade in power to improve women’s safety.
“Rates of violence against women remain far too high,” Crozier said. “The government needs to face the fact its approaches are not working.”
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