TRANSCRIPT
Since July last year, a Royal Commission has been underway in South Australia with former federal Senator Natasha Stott-Despoja at the helm, exploring family and domestic violence.
“I want to identify ways to make the systems better, so that we can eliminate - reduce at least - the scourge that is domestic, family and sexual violence in South Australia and beyond.”
The Royal Commission was established after the high-profile deaths of four women in quick succession in the state, over the course of just one week.
After their deaths, rallies were held across the country as women expressed a collective national grief that domestic violence was at crisis levels.
Even the Prime Minister spoke to protesters outside Parliament House in Canberra.
“I'm proud to be here with women, men, boys and girls saying, we want violence against women and children to stop.”
At the rally, Anthony Albanese vowed to take stronger action.
“We're here today to demand that governments of all levels must do better including my own, including every state and territory government.”
But it's the actions of government and public agencies that advocates and academics say remains inconsistent and sometimes ineffective.
Kellie Watkins is a Chief Inspector with South Australian police, leading its family and domestic violence unit.
She says police are doing their best to confront domestic violence, responding to an average of 100 domestic incidents every day across the state.
“The reality is, things have escalated to a point where somebody has called police. So if you think about that happening in the community, the point at which a decision is made for police to be attending at an incident, things have (already) escalated to a point where there is a safety concern or there's a fear.”
The Chief Inspector says police in South Australia have asked for thousands of intervention orders as a way to protect victims of violence - court-ordered documents that impose conditions on people accused of abuse.
She says victims are also able to apply for protective orders.
“It's that circuit-breaker opportunity. So if the intervention order goes on it gives that person - and at that time they may not want to proceed, they may not want the order - but two days later they might. And it gives them that time and space to have that opportunity to think about their future and what they want to do.”
But Catherine Coleiro, from the South Australian Legal Services Commission, says there are concerns about how these orders are enforced.
“Women will often report 'well there's no point having this intervention order because the behaviour will continue'. And we do see that. The behaviour does continue, and again it's a lack of education and response, perhaps from the police or the judiciary.”
Professor Leah Bromfield is the director of the Australian Centre for Child Protection at the University of South Australia.
She's told the Royal Commission family violence is also increasingly dealt with by child protection workers and the Family Court system.
“Over the last several decades, we've seen the family law system implementing reforms which have diverted the majority of separating families to settle financial and child care arrangements outside of a court-adjudicated decision. I've been advised by family law experts and leaders that a consequence of some of their reforms that have made their system smaller is that now those cases that do come before the courts include a disproportionate number of cases where there are allegations of abuse and neglect. So it's become a primary part of the family law system.”
But Professor Bromfield says the systems designed to protect women and children from violence can actually work against each other.
“I observe a tendency for the Family Court to fail to recognise children's experience of family violence as a form of child abuse, and instead to see them as witnesses or unaffected bystanders. So they might find that mum experienced family and domestic violence, and that has no bearing on contact arrangements.”
The Professor says allegations of violence are also frequently assumed to be fictitious, just to hurt the other parent.
She says the assumption simply teaches women - and children - that it's not worth telling the truth.
“I've seen a bias within Child Protection to dismiss allegations in the context of family law proceedings as fictitious or malicious. This is part of that kind of bouncing (between family court and child protection) that I talk about. 'Oh, this is about trying to win your Family Court case so you're making fictitious allegations.'“
First Nations families are over-represented o/n issues within child protection.
Indigenous women over the age of 15 are at least 30 times more likely to be hospitalised because of family violence than non-Indigenous women.
But their alleged abusive partners are often non-Indigeous themselves.
Olive Bennell, from the Adelaide-based domestic violence crisis accommodation service Nunga Min-Minar, says that's been her observation.
“In terms of the data we collect, 78 percent of the families we work with, the intimate partner is not Aboriginal.”
Yet experts say First Nations women are also at higher risk of having their children removed if they ask for help and protection.
The Commissioner for Aboriginal Children and Young People, April Lawrie, released a report in 2024 that noted Indigenous child removals were at record levels.
“The Stolen Generations was never meant to happen again. Our nation and indeed this state was supposed to have learnt the lessons. And here we are, 50 years later, and it's continuing.”
Previous research has suggested many Aboriginal woman face an added burden: if they stay with the perpetrator they risk facing the accusation they are putting their children at risk of emotional or physical abuse.
If they leave but cannot find suitable housing, they risk allegations of neglect.
Rhiannon Pilkington is part of the BetterStart Child Health and Development research group at the University of Adelaide.
She's told the Royal Commission her long-term research into child removals suggests the system is increasingly punitive in its approach to such women.
“What we could see in those patterns is that for children born back in 1990 to 2000 - so that's 30 years now - actually the proportion of those children being born each year being removed into out-of-home care was going down. So we were removing less and less children as time went on. If we fast-forwarded a decade and we start looking at children born from 2001 up to 2010, the proportion of children being removed into out of home care was relatively stable. It wasn't really a consistent shift upward or downward. But then if we then focused on children born in more recent years - from 2011 onwards - we were starting to see the proportion of children being removed into out-of-home care increasing. So every new year, new children being born, we followed them over time and we saw more and more of those children being removed. So then we have to ask ourselves, unless we truly believe children born two years later, three years later, are different at a population level than those children born one year earlier, two years earlier, three years earlier, then what's changed? And the only conclusion I can draw from analysis such as that, is that the system response is changing.”
Beyond South Australia's Royal Commission, there's evidence of a grassroots approach in multiple Indigenous communities to address these traumas, and confront the reasons for family violence.
On the Tiwi Islands, north of Darwin, there have been meetings with service providers and police to confront what is among the highest rates of violence in the country.
Mantiyupwi Trust Chairperson Jennifer Ullungurra Clancy has told NITV she hopes for positive change.
“All of us - Tiwis and non-Tiwis - come together with the cops and Catholic Care. If you want to break the cycle, work together. Communicate (with) each other.”
Some advocates, like Mungin-Gal CEO Ashlee Donohue, says prevention programs and responses must come from communities themselves to be truly effective.
But she has told NITV News that is often not the case - and bias and discrimination are ever-present concerns in mainstream child protection responses to family violence.
“The reality is domestic violence doesn't discriminate, but the systems and services in place do. Everything - every policy, every program that is developed is developed through a white lens, and that lens does not see Aboriginal women. And until it does - until we start looking through our own lens and developing programs and policies for ourselves then the rates of Aboriginal women in domestic violence is simply not going to diminish in this country.”
Back at the Royal Commission, experts have said funding is a major stumbling block to real change.
Dr Bromfield has told the inquiry there is a desperate need for more money in early intervention services - including ones specifically for First Nations families - to assist women and prevent violence.
“You know, there's been a report to Child Protection. Child Protection have assessed it and taken some and said we'll respond to those, that needs statutory intervention. The majority they report to the family support system. And then the family support system says we'll see one third of you because we can't see the rest of you even though you have desperate needs to be seen. And then our families and our kids are left in that struggle. Problems escalate, they become more entrenched. And ultimately we remove parents and we blame them for the failure, even though we didn't help them when we could.”
Funding has also been identified as a key issue for housing.
The National Plan to End Violence Against Women says there is a critical link between access to safe, affordable and accessible housing, and achieving the ambition of ending violence against women and children in a decade.
Domestic and family violence is the leading cause of homelessness for women, with 45 per cent of all women and girls seeking homelessness assistance identifying such violence as a cause.
But Olive Bennell has told the Royal Commission the funding doesn't match the need.
She says there is sometimes just nowhere for people to go once their time is up at a crisis accommodation service.
“We find that three months is just enough time to stabilise someone... There's not much opportunity for our people to ever receive private rental. And like everybody else there's a bottleneck. You can't shift people out when there isn't an asset to shift them to.”
