How police could spot red flags for violent men who fly under the radar

Australia’s police ministers will investigate new ways to spot red flags for dangerous men, which could involve looking at their online activity, GPS and mental health data or involvement in family law disputes.

As state and federal governments escalate their efforts to tackle domestic violence, ministers are also examining how intervention orders and apprehended violence orders travel across state borders to ensure women escaping violent partners do not have to renew them if they move.

Men’s violence against women will dominate the agenda when Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus hosts police ministers in Canberra on Friday following weeks of public outrage demanding stronger action. A national cabinet meeting this week tasked the ministers and attorneys-general with improving how police respond to high-risk and serial offenders.

That will involve considering “fixated-threat” strategies targeted at offenders who are jealous, controlling and abusive in their relationships but may appear functional in other parts of their lives.

A research paper prepared by Australia’s National Research Organisation for Women’s Safety, which is helping to guide government thinking, said these were often “middle-class men who were well respected in their communities and had low levels of contact with the criminal justice system”.

“Their abusive behaviour often took the form of controlling, stalking and monitoring behaviours, which escalated in the context of the victim’s perceived withdrawal from the relationship,” it said. They then killed their partners as a way to re-establish control.

But the researchers said these offenders were hard to identify because their behaviours – such as stalking and emotional and verbal abuse – were often invisible to police. That meant new techniques to detect them were required, using information that traditional law enforcement agencies did not always collect.

”Developing innovative responses such as intelligence-led policing, delivered in partnership with representatives from the family law, mental health and domestic violence sectors, is a promising avenue for stopping this type of offender and, in turn, protecting high-risk victims and their families,” they said.

Useful information would include: GPS data, to determine when they might be following their victim; online activity data to show if they’ve been stalking the person online; mental health data to determine if the offender is seeking support for suicidal ideation, disturbed sleep or mood changes; and information about family law processes if there’s a separation.

The researchers said police should see a red flag for this type of offender if a woman sought a first-time protection order against him when they were separating.

“Once [these ‘fixated-threat’] offenders have been made visible, the subsequent response needs to be implemented quickly and intensively to manage the threat posed by these individuals to their partners and families,” the report said.

“This would necessarily involve close surveillance and monitoring of abusers, as well as safety planning with victims, including facilitating access to emergency housing and the replacement of technological devices that may have been compromised through the installation of monitoring software by the abuser.”

National cabinet also agreed that the ministers should probe a “focused deterrence” approach, which uses law enforcement while mobilising community voices that push strong moral standards about domestic violence to the offender. This is matched with social services and support for the victim.

The Australian Institute of Criminology describes this as a highly structured approach, modelled off interventions in the United States, which graduates responses based on a person’s recent history of violence and risk of reoffending.

In doing so, it creates an offender hierarchy that treats a persistent re-offender with a history of violence differently from someone who is the subject of a first-time domestic call-out that doesn’t lead to their arrest.

The most dangerous offenders would be targeted by any legal means possible, including through non-domestic violence actions that might be easier to prosecute or lead to stronger sanctions, such as a weapons offence. A victim would be assessed for emergency needs and offered all available support services.

At the other end of the spectrum, the offender could receive a letter from the police detailing how they would be closely monitored, the personal legal consequence they would face for re-offending, and a moral message from a community voice against domestic violence. Police would give the victim an explanation of all available services.

The researchers said this approach meant all offenders – even first-time or low-level ones– were the subject of some sanction, and all victims received a level of support, rather than the current system that often just dealt with the most dangerous perpetrators and vulnerable victims.

The two policy options will underpin months of discussion as state and territory leaders look to strengthen their justice responses.

Dreyfus said the ministers would also look to strengthen how the system of domestic violence prevention orders travelled across the country.

“We’ve been working for quite some time now on making sure that intervention orders, as they are called in Victoria, or apprehended violence orders, as they are called in other states, are properly recognised,” he said this week.

“So that a woman who’s escaping violence [and] gone to another state, [who] has already got an order against her abusive partner that she’s escaping from, doesn’t need to get the order re-registered in the next state. That ... is something that is not quite perfected. We need to work harder on that.”

Support is available from the National Sexual Assault, Domestic Family Violence Counselling Service at 1800RESPECT (1800 737 732).

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