[Anglican Media Melbourne] Investment in women’s services could double or even triple, but Australia would still require a major attitude shift in order to stem the increasing rate of domestic violence, say anti-domestic violence advocates.

Speaking at a forum hosted by Archbishop of Melbourne & Primate of Australia Philip Freier on 22 April, Paul Linossier, CEO of Our Watch, formerly the Foundation to Prevent Violence Against Women and their Children, said the community needed to tackle the two key drivers of domestic violence, gender inequality and cultural circumstances, for any lasting gains to be made.

“In a sense we’re all perpetrators because we’re transmitting from one generation to another this continuing position of inequality between men and women. We do that through a million interactions every day.”

He said even after his decades in the sector he has been guilty of it, recently realising that he had referred to fixing his fence and setting a new path down as “a blokey weekend”.

“What I had done was associate activities I liked with a specific gender, and say that was that gender’s domain,” he said.

In order to undo “thousands of years of socialisation”, he suggested that every individual in the community reflect on their role in perpetuating gender stereotypes and imbalance, be it conceptions of “boys’ work” and “girls’ work”, relationship roles, or what we don’t confront in our interchanges with friends and family.

“We’ll know we’ve made a difference,” he said, “when the phrase ‘you’re playing like a girl’ is considered a compliment.”

Archbishop Freier agreed, welcoming a recent proposal by the Anglican Church to self-reflect on whether its messages inhibited or enabled abusers. He said that all organisations, faith-based or otherwise, should consider the message they’re sending to their members and the wider community.

“[I]n most of our societal organisations, churches amongst them, there are many things that need examining,” he said.

Joanna Fletcher, CEO of Women’s Legal Service Victoria, said we also needed to turn “the current system on its head so that we’re holding perpetrators accountable for their actions rather than having victims manage and moderate their own safety.”

“The way the system works right now requires a victim to keep themselves safe,” she said. She argued that greater resources and initiatives need to be available to women at an early stage, and that the community should recognise the need for courts and police to take intervening action before violence occurs.

Thirty-one women have died in violent incidents in Australia so far this year, and currently around 27 per cent of Australian women will experience domestic violence at least once in their lives. Fletcher said incidents of family violence were increasing across Australia, even taking into account increased reporting rates. She said this upward trend was particularly concerning as resources for domestic violence victims are already strained.

“We have a service system that does have significant service gaps,” she said, noting that women across the country are being put up in motels instead of high security refuges because there simply aren’t enough beds. She also highlighted a lack of alternative accommodation for families after seeking refuge and limited availability of legal assistance for victims as key examples of current shortcomings.

“The service system across the country is greatly stressed and facing rising demand,” agreed Linossier. He said service providers often needed to make difficult decisions about which women they could assist or what level of support they could provide, as there weren’t enough resources for everyone.

Fletcher warned that it was likely that this demand for services would increase as more women felt able to seek help. This made bipartisan support for initiatives tackling domestic violence essential as it would take time and continued investment before the numbers of women seeking help would start to fall.

“The problem with that is that it’s not going to happen in an election cycle,” she said. “It’s going to be a two to three generation project to see those community attitudes change.”

She says that the current monetary cost alone of domestic violence is estimated to be some $14.7 billion, while total investment in anti-domestic violence initiatives is somewhere around $500 million, a number she would like to see doubled or tripled. Recent funding announcements were welcome, but much more needed to be done.

“Short term funding agreements [and] reversal of funding cuts are somehow almost put forward as a win, whereas we’re actually staying still, if not going backwards,” she said.

Nonetheless, neither expert thought that better funding for women’s services would be enough.

“There is no magic response or solution,” Linossier said. “We need a sustained and growing investment by all governments, and real, meaningful engagement by civil society… if we are the generation to fundamentally change men’s violence against women.”

Linossier argued that the news media could be a powerful tool to shape public attitudes, but that it was critical that news reports provided information to women about where they could get support.

“In Victoria, research has shown that less than two per cent of media reporting provides advice to women about where to get support,” he said. “Mentioning 1800 RESPECT in every television, radio and print bit of reporting would have a profound impact on enabling women to take action.”

He also said engaging children and young people in respectful relationships education was an intervention area that been successful internationally.

“The values that inform and shape relationships are formed in early childhood,” he said. “We need to establish national standards for those programs, and we need to be able to provide informed advice to principals.”

Both experts agreed that while social media and new technologies could help spread positive changes to younger generations, they could also be hotbeds of misogyny and negative stereotyping. Fletcher pointed to the disturbing trend of female journalists being the target of sexist and violent tweets on Twitter, while Linossier noted that many video games used women as “wallpaper, victims pleading for mercy or the subject of player’s immense violence”.

“The adult world and informed campaigns are nowhere near confident enough in that space to balance that influence,” he said.

Archbishop Freier said he was optimistic about the role young people could have in lasting change. “I think there’s great opportunity, especially if we can find some of the community narratives that young people can engage in.”