Australia Faces Crisis of Male Violence Against Women

Last week alone, four women were allegedly killed by male violence in Australia. Two of these tragedies occurred in Victoria, and two of the victims were teenagers. Every single one of them should still be alive today.

These are not isolated tragedies. This year, nine women have died in Victoria, while across Australia, 37 women* have allegedly been killed by men. Shockingly, 17 children have died as a result of violence in 2026 – the youngest victim was an eight-week-old baby. With a woman dying on average every 11 days in Australia in 2024-25, we are left feeling that we are in a crisis we cannot escape.

Every death leaves children without mothers, parents without daughters, friends carrying grief that never quite leaves them, colleagues trying to fill impossible gaps, teachers supporting traumatised students, police, nurses and paramedics responding yet again. Countless reports prove that what happens in the home cannot be isolated from the rest of society; it penetrates every layer of our community and delivers a gut punch to the economy. Violence against women reaches far beyond the front door.

While we are in a crisis, it is neither insurmountable nor unrecognised. This epidemic is rooted in a long history that has treated women as lesser and as citizens undeserving of equal worth. So, we are in a time of reckoning and repair. A society will always struggle to heal when it allows violence against its own members – members vital to its survival and ability to thrive.

The work against family violence, hard-fought for decades, has already begun to yield progress. It has taken far too long to bring governments to the table and society has spent way too much time looking away, but we are finally here. Built upon this hard-won commitment and recognition, the work must continue.

On the frontlines of this crisis, specialist family violence services are doing extraordinary work, supporting women and children every single day to give back what has been taken away from them – safe and stable lives. However, these frontline workers are “working their guts out” because demand has vastly outpaced capacity. Critical services are overwhelmed, leaving them unable to meet the needs of everyone seeking safety.

Too often, we are responding after violence has reached a crisis point. We need to reach people at risk earlier: women experiencing escalating abuse, children living with violence, and people using violence who need to be held accountable and supported to change their behaviour. Prevention means moving beyond a crisis response model and building a system that can recognise risk and intervene early to stop violence before its effects become irreversible or fatal.

Australians are understandably asking how this can keep happening. The answer isn’t to lose heart and abandon the work we’ve begun. It’s that we continue with it. Specialist family violence services are saving lives every day, but they are stretched beyond capacity. Too many women still cannot get help early enough, and too many children continue to live with violence before anyone intervenes. If we are serious about reducing these deaths, we must invest in the services that prevent them and not just respond once tragedy has occurred.

Here in Victoria, we’re coming to an election in November. We’re thinking about what type of society we want and how governments can get us there. Among the many ideas and promises political parties can offer us, women’s, children’s and community safety should take pride of place. Victorians should expect every political party to answer one simple question: how will you make women safer? Not with slogans, but with practical commitments that strengthen policing, housing, family violence services, early intervention, mental health, schools and the justice system. Women’s safety cannot sit inside one portfolio. It is everyone’s responsibility because every part of government has a role to play.

This is not just a call to prevent the loss of lives – it is also a call on us as a society to be bold, brave and do what’s required to keep women and children safe. It is a call to understand and persevere in our reparative work to undo our historically entrenched views of women and children as lesser and as objects that can be mistreated.

Critically, as a society, we cannot continue to live like this. Every 11 days another woman is killed by someone she trusted. Keeping women safe is not a women’s issue. It is a measure of the kind of society we choose to be. Enough is enough. Whatever our politics, wherever we live and whatever our background, surely we can agree on this: every woman deserves to come home safely.