Shocking data reveals that in the year to March ex-partners committed 30,223 acts of family violence – equal to 82 offences each day.

Alarmingly, the rate of family violence by former partners has surged by almost 50 per cent in the past five years and now dwarfs violence by current partners who in the past year were responsible for 27,349 acts of family violence.

Fifty two women and 13 children have been killed by family violence perpetrators in Victoria in the past five years.

Three-quarters of those women were killed by a current or former partner.

It comes as experts say women who flee violent relationships, are finding it harder, sometimes impossible, to fully escape, with easy-to-access technology such as stalking devices, spyware and social media fuelling the dangerous shift.

Assistant Commissioner for Family Violence Lauren Callaway said women were being monitored by covert technology at levels never seen before.

“Some women describe that they feel their perpetrator is everywhere. That no matter where they go, that person knows what they are doing,” she said.

“Right now you can go down to Sydney Rd and get a tracker device for $10.

“In the past, you needed to have skill to navigate technology but now children can do it. It’s easy.”

Ms Callaway said family violence was the leading cause of homicides of women in Victoria.

“When people think about family violence as a private matter or an unhappy relationship or toxic environment … no, it’s actually a murderous environment,” she said.

“The biggest reason that women are dying is because of relationships.”

Ju ‘Kelly’ Zhang, Elaine Pandilovski, Chen Cheng, Bekkie-Rae Curren-Trinca, Michelle Darragh, Samantha Fraser, Kate Bell and Caitlin O’Brien are among the long list of Victorian women killed by current and former partners in recent years.

Of the 52 women killed in Victoria in the past five years, 30 were in a relationship with their killer at the time of death.

Eight were killed after leaving the relationship.

Experts say escaping an abusive relationship can be a time of enormous risk, with the volume of violence committed by vengeful ex-partners reaching a point where they are now considered the state’s primary family violence perpetrators.

Technology has played a big role in the growing crime trend.

To combat this, Victoria Police has upgraded its defence arsenal with tools which can identify sinister technology stealthily uploaded onto victims’ devices such as mobile phones.

However the force conceded that protecting victims from technology-facilitated stalking, harassment and abuse is becoming harder, with advice they simply get offline or change their number no longer practical in our tech-dependent world.

“Perpetrators have become more clever at finding ways to constantly contact someone but skirt around the criminal threshold,” Ms Callaway said.

“We must constantly evolve policing techniques to keep up with how people live today.”

Data from the Crime Statistics Agency shows that the number of women killed by intimate partners in the five years to March is more than six times higher than the number of men killed by intimate partners.

In that time six men were killed by partners.

Tragically, the lives of 13 children – seven girls and six boys – were also been brutally ended by family violence perpetrators in the past five years.

This figure only accounts for children killed by their biological parent, with the true number of child deaths likely larger.

There have been many cases in Victoria where a child is killed as the ultimate act of violence toward a partner or ex-partner.

Ms Callaway said “these murders are last-resort type thinking designed by the perpetrators to make sure that if the women is still alive, she will never get over it”.

“It’s the most insidious form of abuse. There is no limit to how desperate a perpetrator can be to cause harm”.

The figures also show nine mothers and eight fathers were killed by their children and a further 10 people killed by offenders with another familial connection.

The rise in ex-partner offending is also driven by greater action by victim-survivors and police to take out intervention orders and hold offenders to account for breaches.

There were 93,091 acts of family violence committed across the state in the past year – 255 each day, the largest number ever recorded.

In that time, 58,117 breaches of family violence intervention orders and safety notices were recorded.

The state’s family violence epidemic is showing no signs of slowing and yet a significant portion of society still live with their heads in the sand.

The 2021 National Community Attitudes towards Violence against Women Survey released in May found that only 45 per cent of people agreed that violence against women occurred in their own suburb or town.

The survey also found many Australians do not understand that domestic violence is predominantly perpetrated by men against women.

Ms Callaway said attitudes must shift to protect women and children.

“Our society is hanging on very tightly to some ideas that do not play out from an evidence base,” she said.

“We now need to rethink what we think family violence is. It needs to shift to understand what abuse looks like today in 2023 because it can look like all sorts of things.”