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At last year’s marking the 50th anniversary of Elsie, Australia’s first feminist refuge, numerous speakers reflected on the ultimate aim of the feminist refuge movement, back in the 1970s: that in the near future, domestic violence would no longer exist and their services would no longer be needed.

Half a century later, we’re in the middle of an ongoing “” – and our federal government has committed itself to ending family and domestic violence “”.

This year, have already been killed by violence according to Destroy the Joint, which has kept a Counting Dead Women tally since 2012. At the end of 2024, the tally stood at 78. In 2023, the sexual violence hit a 31-year high, bucking a wider decline in violent crimes.

And while there has been major social and economic progress for women over the last 50 years, a recent reveals a stark “employment gap” between women who have experienced domestic violence and those who have not.

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Review: Quarterly Essay 97: Losing It: Can We Stop Violence Against Women and Children? – Jess Hill (Black Inc.)

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From today’s standpoint, the aim of eradicating domestic violence may look rather utopian, even naïve. From a mid-1970s perspective, it is not hard to see why it seemed possible. As a historian who is on a , the 1970s and 1980s stand out as decades of possibility and fast change.

The problem had finally come out from “behind closed doors”. Feminists had unprecedented social and political influence. And governments had started to respond with legislation and funding for services and research. It was only a matter of time, right?

Now, ending domestic violence is once again a stated goal – of the government, no less. But are our prevention strategies up to the task? Journalist and anti-violence campaigner Jess Hill investigates this question in her important new Quarterly Essay.

Ending gendered violence ‘in one generation’

“No other country in the world has eradicated gendered violence,” writes Hill. “Australia is the only one that’s even promised to do that.” With this ambitious goal in mind, her essay is offered as a contribution and an intervention.

Hill describes herself as an “insider–outsider”. Since her award-winning, agenda-setting book (2019), she has been heavily involved in efforts to stop the gendered violence she has long reported on. She is deeply committed to the many victim–survivors who have shared their experiences with her.

To date, Hill has perhaps been most influential in educating the public about , “a collection of behaviours designed to strip someone of their sense of autonomy and self-worth”. She has been a champion for its criminalisation, including by making a to the New South Wales Joint Select Committee on coercive control in 2021.

From July 1 2024, NSW became the first state to make coercive control a . Support for the measure is by no means uniform – and has been heavily criticised by in particular, because it would likely result in further incarceration of Indigenous women rather than offer protection.

Less controversially, Hill has drawn crucial attention to the enduring failures of the family court system when it comes to prioritising the safety of women and children who have been victims of family violence.

In addition to her groundbreaking 2019 book, she has written a and hosted a three-part SBS series on consent and sexual violence in Australia, (2023).

How effective is promoting ‘gender equality’?

In her new essay, Hill applies her considerable knowledge of domestic, family and sexual violence to government-endorsed primary prevention efforts, as featured in , initiated by the Gillard Government in 2010, and now , launched in 2023.

“Governments would seek to prevent violence by raising awareness, improving gender equality, bettering community attitudes to violence, and teaching boys and girls how to think outside gender stereotypes and have more respectful relationships,” she writes.

This approach, combined with increased resourcing to frontline services, was intended to make Australia a “world leader in prevention”. But in 2019, Commonwealth, state and territory leaders “flew the white flag” and conceded there would be no substantial reduction in violence against women by 2022.

Hill questions whether promoting “gender equality” as the overarching, or primary, solution to eradicating gendered violence is the most effective use of government funds or sector expertise. (Though she doesn’t discount its importance.) If the government genuinely wishes to eradicate gendered violence within a generation, she suggests, the current prevention strategy is no longer fit for purpose – if it ever was.

Hill highlights grim statistics and trends, well aware they have lost some of their capacity to shock. In 2022–23, domestic homicides rose by 28%, reversing a 30-year downward trajectory. Police are called out to a family violence incident every minute, almost double the reported cases in 2016. Both victims and perpetrators of sexual abuse are getting younger, as revealed by the .

In evaluating this failure, Hill notes contributing factors such as a revolving door of ministers during the last Coalition government, which was handed the National Plan “like a hot potato”. Her main target, though, is , the national agency responsible for gender-based violence campaigns, and their primary prevention strategy.

Is Australia’s approach best practice?

As Hill describes it, Change the Story, with its overarching emphasis on the “gendered drivers” of violence against women and children, is out of kilter with other best-practice prevention frameworks around the world, such as those of the and the .

These evidence-based frameworks, Hill continues, stress “multiple intersecting risk factors” for gendered violence, “such as childhood mistreatment, substance abuse, a weak criminal system and a culture of parental dominance over children (to name a few) alongside gendered risk factors, like harmful attitudes and gender inequality”.

Our Watch’s education campaigns focused on encouraging (aimed at ) are not up to the task of tackling the competing influences of social media, the “manosphere” and online pornography.

On this point, Hill usefully pans out to survey the wider terrain, as Judith Butler did in her recent book (2024). (Hill does it in a necessarily pithier fashion.) She sketches out a global gender “backlash” network, with world leaders like Trump and Putin up top, anti-rights groups in the middle, and influencers like Andrew Tate “on the factory floor”.

At the local level, Hill draws on recent data from the Australian iteration of the survey to show that a “significant minority” of women were “very concerned about men being demonised” in the current climate. While many agreed gender equality is important, “there was a lot of confusion” over what the term means.

In questioning the Our Watch framework, Hill builds on a position paper she co-authored in 2024 with �����Ʊ professor : . It generated major media and sector interest.

Some rightly pointed out the authors presented a somewhat over-simplified (or “straw”) version of primary prevention, and of Our Watch in particular – and that they selectively spotlighted statistics and trends to make their case. But there was general appreciation of their call for a “re-think” of prevention efforts.

Holding governments to account

In the wake of the report and , Hill was appointed by the government in April 2024 to an expert panel of six to conduct a rapid review of prevention responses. (It was criticised – rightly, Hill agrees – for not appointing an Aboriginal woman.)

Their was delivered on August 23 2024. National Cabinet responded with increased funding and various commitments, Hill writes, but there has been “no response yet to many of the recommendations, including the one to review Change the Story”.

Hill is using her big platform to hold governments to account. As she shows in Losing It, she and Salter are hardly alone in advocating for more targeted approaches to prevention and more accountability for existing prevention work.

Her essay is at its strongest and most compelling when she showcases approaches that have been producing results, and when sharing insights from victim–survivors, frontline workers and researchers whose work is focused on specific areas, such as alcohol, gambling, and childhood trauma.

Victoria is the only state to make Respectful Relationships Education mandatory, Hill writes. Deanne Carson, CEO of , shares that when she goes into Victorian schools, in every classroom she enters:

I have children who have been raped. I have children who have sexually abused other children. I have children living with family violence.

Her “primary prevention” work also includes “early intervention and response work”, but more funding flows to the first.

Hill, along with others, such as leading researchers , is heartened that the now recognises children and young people as victims of domestic and family violence “in their own right”.

Yet, as they all agree, much more work remains to be done on multiple fronts. We need more dedicated services like , Australia’s first dedicated family violence program for unaccompanied children and young people. We need more early intervention to prevent intergenerational transmission of violence and to address childhood trauma.

And we need more recognition of specific and evolving forms of child abuse. As the revealed, for example, while sexual abuse of children by adults has dramatically declined, young Australians are still experiencing high rates of sexual abuse. What has changed, writes Hill, is that “their perpetrator” is “now more likely to be another child than an adult”.

Sobering, but galvanising

Most urgently of all, she emphasises, “no amount of money will ever be enough until governments are willing to end the violence of their own systems”, particularly family law, child protection and youth justice.

Rates of Indigenous child removal are so high, “it’s been labelled a second Stolen Generation”, Hill writes. In Victoria, the “progressive state that prides itself on leading the nation on gendered violence”, 2024 revealed more than 1 in 10 Aboriginal children had been removed from their families: twice the national average.

Hill points to the work of organisations such as , a wraparound support service for Aboriginal women headed by Antoinette Braybrook, and , a not-for-profit that works with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children and their carers “to improve their brain health and to help them heal” as vanguard initiatives.

As she acknowledges, “moving the dial on intractable social problems is outrageously difficult”. It doesn’t help that governments presently appear highly captive to alcohol and gambling lobbies.

This makes it extra hard to respond to that establishes links between substance abuse and all forms of gendered violence – or significant rises in family violence in areas with a high concentration of . Government-funded mental health services, as well as public education and public housing, are also in crisis and under unprecedented pressure.

Throughout Losing It, Hill reminds readers that violence against women and children is not a problem to be treated in isolation, with a one-size-fits-all approach: it demands an all-systems response. Her essay is most effective when focused on that bigger picture, and on the stories and initiatives on the ground, rather than on the “fifty-year-old turf war” between competing approaches to solving gendered violence.

With over 50 years of awareness and of government responses behind us, Hill is right to demand more, now our leaders have committed themselves to their boldest target yet. More solutions are available to us than ever before – but at the same time, as Hill shows, violence against women and children is also taking new forms and exhibiting new patterns.

Losing It is a sobering read. But most of all, it’s a galvanising one, inviting Australia to solve the “wicked problem” of violence against women and children within one generation.

, Associate Professor, School of Humanities and Languages,

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