Lethal lovers: National strategy needed to end domestic homicides

Horrendous media reports of deaths of women (and, sometimes, children too) at the hands of their current or former partners are seemingly so common they have led to the frequently repeated, but in fact erroneous, comment that one woman a week is killed in Australia.

Employers are pushing for publicly funded family and domestic violence leave.Credit: IStock

We recoil from reports of women being stabbed or gassed or burnt or otherwise having their lives cut short by a man who supposedly once loved them. In fact, the 33 women who were killed by an intimate partner in 2017-18 (the latest year for which official figures are available from the Australian Institute of Criminology) represents the lowest figure since the AIC began collecting these statistics in 1989-90. (You have to go back to 2007 when there were 61 such deaths, or 2001 when there were 73, to be able to support the “one a week” claim).

We should be relieved that this is one domestic violence marker that is showing improvement. The rate of partner physical violence has remained constant for almost 20 years but sexual assault, coercive control and other forms of abuse such as financial and technological manipulation are skyrocketing.

Nevertheless, 33 deaths are 33 too many and trying to understand how they happened, so future deaths can be prevented should be an urgent national priority. Two reports – released at the opening session of the ANROWS (Australia’s National Research Organisation for Women’s Safety) virtual annual conference – are an important and very welcome contribution to that task.

The Pathways to Intimate Partner Homicide project, by a team from the AIC, has sampled 199 intimate partner homicides between 2007 and 2018 to try to identify whether there is a distinct progression of characteristics that led to these murders. Their report is fascinating for its identifying three key pathways, which cover 181 of the 199 cases, that may serve as trigger points for intervention to prevent future murders.

Hannah Clarke and her three children were murdered by her estranged husband in 2020.

First, “fixated threat” accounted for 33 per cent of the murderers who “despite being jealous, controlling and abusive in their relationships … were relatively functional in other domains of their life”. These 59 murderers were “typically middle-class men who were well respected in their communities and had low levels of contact with the criminal justice system”. Often described as “a good bloke” in media reports of the slaughter.

Any relationship that exhibits domestic violence, whether physical or non-physical, is embedded with a risk of lethality.

Australian Domestic and Family Violence Death Review Network report.

Forty per cent (73) of the men were “persistent and disorderly”, who had significant histories of violence towards their intimate partner and others. Perhaps most disturbing were the 19 offenders (11 per cent) described as “deterioration/acute stressors” who were in long-term, “happy” and non-abusive relationships with the victim “until the onset or exacerbation of a significant life stressor”. The decision to kill by these men was not planned – unlike most other murders – but was “a nearly instantaneous decision” after which the man demonstrated remorse and pleaded guilty in court.

The second report Intimate Partner Violence Homicides 2010-2018 compiles previously unpublished data on 311 murders analysed by the Australian Domestic and Family Violence Death Review Network (a network of all states, except Tasmania, that reviews all domestic homicides using coronial, court and other records not available to other data sets).

It is almost impossible to exaggerate the importance of this data. Federalism is the great enemy of domestic violence research.

There are no common definitions of such violence, sometimes even within states and territories, making meaningful research difficult and concerted national action almost impossible. Remember, it took about 15 years to establish a national domestic violence order scheme, meaning that an AVO issued in one state had to be recognised nationally. This report shows there was a history of such orders in more than 40 per cent of the murders it analysed.

The rich information on the characteristics of the 199 murderers and their victims is too comprehensive to even summarise here, but it is welcome and necessary addition to our knowledge of intimate partner homicide.

Knowledge and understanding are two separate things, of course, and both reports stress that we still do not really understand what triggers a homicidal response in one person but not in another.

Lots more work needs to be done. Meanwhile, as the Death Review Network report cautions: “The diverse range of abusive tactics identified in this dataset, including physical, emotional, social, financial and sexual violence and stalking, suggests that any relationship that exhibits domestic violence, whether physical or non-physical, is embedded with a risk of lethality.”

Pity we don’t have a national plan of the calibre of these two reports that sets out a strategy and goals for reducing such violence.

Anne Summers is an author and columnist. @SummersAnne