By Hayden Sinclair
*Trigger warning: Sexual assault, intimate partner violence, murder*
On average, a woman in Australia is killed by her partner every week.
One in three women have experienced physical violence at some point in their lives, while one in five have been sexually assaulted.
These haunting statistics have only grown since the mid 2000’s, showing that our current attempts to curb this horrifying trend are not working, and something needs to change.
Some have suggested harsher prison sentences for offenders, and although this idea sounds good on paper, this doesn’t even begin to solve the issue.
By the time the domestic violence offender has been caught, processed, sentenced, and put in jail, their victim has been dead for months, if not years.
This ‘solution’ does nothing to prevent these crimes from happening, it just makes people feel a little bit better about themselves until the next woman is murdered, on average just seven days later.
One way of combating future abusers is better education in schools, which is already underway all over Australia.
But before these young people grow up, we need immediate action, in the form of allowing victims to escape their abusers without risking being homeless or worse – being tracked down by the person they are fleeing from.
One of the hardest parts of removing people from abusive relationships are breaking through the manipulative barrier that surrounds the victim.
Often in abusive intimate relationships, the abuser has control over the victim’s finances, their car, has cut them off from their families, their friends, even their religion and community.
It’s here that the inherent problem with our persecution system lies.
How can you call the police or testify against the person who has control over all of your money or your only mode of transport?
Many victims are faced with an impossible choice; being abused with a roof over their (and their children’s) heads, or being homeless, often forcing their children onto the street with them.
We need to create a proactive approach to this problem by establishing domestic violence safehouses so that victims can leave their abusive households without fear of losing their jobs or living on the street.
These safehouses would include food, a place for them and their children to sleep, electricity, a temporary car, and security for the victims.
This way, domestic violence victims could safely escape their dangerous situations and have a place to live until they are able to acquire their own housing.
Safehouses like these could be set up across Australia and go a long way toward addressing the current problem facing over two million Australians.
As well as protecting innocent women and children, the police could properly prosecute the abusers, now they don’t have control over their victim’s finances.
Currently, Australia has women’s shelters scattered around major cities and other areas but these shelters are unsafe and overcrowded, forcing many women to seek refuge in motels, which can be expensive as well as unsafe.
This is why more funding needs to come from the government to create more safehouses and improve upon the currently established ones, due to the overwhelming number of women and children escaping violent households.
Many people have asked how this would get funded, but this is a ridiculous question, considering how big a problem domestic violence is in Australia, and how much the government spends in other areas.
In recent years, the Australian government pledged $368 billion (that’s Billion, with a B) to buying nuclear submarines from the USA through the AUKUS deal.
The government could potentially allocate one to two ‘submarine periscopes’ worth of funding into these safehouses to help save the lives of over 50 women per year, an issue that 91% of Australians consider a major problem.
The federal government should begin the process of setting up these safehouses in order to proactively curb the increasingly prevalent issue of domestic violence in our country and protect those who have already suffered enough.
Hayden is a Meanjin (Brisbane) based journalist currently undergoing a double bachelor’s degree in Communications Journalism and Business Marketing at QUT. He has a particular interest in sports and politics, and is especially enthusiastic about public transport. He writes about the topics he feels most passionate about, while using data to inform both his opinions and readers.
