When we began exploring the scope and impact of current criminal justice responses, people experiencing domestic, family and sexual violence – and the organisations that support them – were pivotal voices in shaping the conversation. Our position paper examined the key shortcomings of the current default police-first response and spotlighted the community organisations providing wrap-around support for people and families, particularly in rural, regional, and remote areas.
Many of our coalition partners have been advocating for change for a long time, and we wanted to listen deeply, to understand the real barriers people and families face when trying to access support, and where they are turning to when police aren’t the right or safe option. We also asked: how can alternatives be better supported so that we’re truly meeting people with the right response, at the right time? This interview with the Central Tablelands and Blue Mountains Community Legal Centre (CTBMCLC) and the Central Australian Aboriginal Family Legal Unit (CAAFLU) offers incredibly insightful perspectives from the front line across different corners of the nation.
Domestic, family and sexual violence (DFSV) is a serious and systemic issue in Australia. At the heart of the growing conversation about addressing its root causes is the question of how we provide the right response—by investing in the services that people and families turn to in times of distress. We must be courageous in acknowledging the limitations of our current criminal justice approach and the ways it falls short.
CTBMCLC: In our work with victim-survivors we see limited options for accountability and healing. Lack of services in regional areas is a huge issue, ranging from legal assistance, counselling support and men’s behaviour change. There are few options for people to access services that will work with the whole family, friends and community who are affected by violence. Men who are worried about their own behaviour have nowhere to turn besides private psychology which is inaccessible to many without the funds to afford it and so the emphasis is on women to access services and keep themselves and their children safe, rather than on men to address their violence.
We have also seen an increase in women being misidentified [1] by police as the primary aggressor when in fact they have endured years of violence and abuse. Current punitive responses are not working for victim-survivors. Police taking out apprehended violence orders (AVOs) regardless of victim-survivors views, while purportedly well-meaning, is in fact, paternalistic. And despite a Police policy that seeks to prohibit cross-ADVOs we still see those applications being made, because Police can’t decide who is the victim and perpetrator. Criminal proceedings relegate the victim-survivor to a role as the witness in the matter, further entrenching power and control over women’s lives, rather than promoting meaningful accountability.
AFR: There are an increasing number of organisations that have identified this same issue – of misidentification, dismissal or punitive measures – which raises concern over the role of police in responding to domestic violence. Queensland’s Acting Police Commissioner recently acknowledged that law enforcement as the first responder in DFV case management is not a sustainable or effective solution [2], echoing the findings of multiple inquiries and reports that point to systemic issues in how frontline officers respond to intimate partner violence.
CAAFLU: Here in Central Australia and the Barkly Region, we work alongside Aboriginal women and children who face some of the most extreme and overlapping forms of violence, disadvantage, and systemic racism in Australia. The Northern Territory (NT) is one of the most dangerous places in Australia for Aboriginal women experiencing domestic and family violence. Here, Aboriginal women are seven times more likely to be murdered by an intimate partner than anywhere else in the country.
The barriers to safety are deeply engrained in the systems that are meant to protect Aboriginal people. In addition to the general drivers of violence such as poverty, intergenerational trauma, and substance abuse, Aboriginal women in the NT must also navigate mandatory reporting laws, a child protection system that disproportionately removes Aboriginal children, and a criminal justice system that enforces mandatory sentencing. A further compounding complexity is our geographical remoteness, women often must travel hundreds of kilometres to access services (which is only possible if they have access to a car or can purchase a bush bus ticket), and many remote communities do not have a local police station. Often there is simply no safe place to go.
CTBMCLC: DFSV is complex, and it can be hard to explain, Police are simply members of the community (some of whom are perpetrators themselves [3]. Women often do not want to call police, for many reasons not least of all a fear of not being believed, and fear of retaliation and escalation. This is particularly so for women living in regional, remote and rural areas. For some women who have had negative experiences of police there is an inherent mistrust.
Often women do not wish for the person who has used violence to be removed from the home, or from the community, they simply want to violence to stop. Removal of people who use violence from community is not a long-term solution and often causes more harm, as financial and other support for families may cease. Fear of child protection involvement, deaths in custody, deportation or visa issues and systemic racism all impact on not wanting to involve police. Many people view AVOs as simply a piece of paper, because while they are an order of a court they are not leading to meaningful protection or justice and people who use violence are not being held accountable in meaningful ways.
CAAFLU: Even as a specialist Aboriginal-led Family, domestic and sexual violence legal service, we are forced to comply with mandatory reporting laws that override client privilege. If a woman discloses violence, we are legally required to make a mandatory report about the suspected harm to police, and if her child was present, a second mandatory report must be made to child protection. This places women in an impossible position, forced to choose between silence, or the very real risk of criminalising their partner, having their children removed, or being misidentified as the perpetrator themselves. We know that mandatory reporting creates fear, not safety. It drives Aboriginal women away from seeking support, because the risks to their families are simply too great. Instead of opening the door to protection, these laws often close it, leaving women alone, silent, and unsafe.
These systems are retraumatising. They do not build safety, they drive silence. The reality is that Aboriginal child removal rates in the NT are now higher than during the Stolen Generation. The NT has double the national rate of removals, and 90% of children in care are Aboriginal. Since the 2007 Intervention, rates have risen by around 80%, and the Aboriginal Child Placement Principle is routinely bypassed, with over 70% of Aboriginal children placed with non-Indigenous carers. This is a system that continues to break families apart.
Our mission is to keep families strong, but that becomes incredibly difficult when the very systems designed to offer protection end up creating more harm. In Alice Springs, there is only one crisis shelter, and women with sons aged 10 or older are turned away, because boys of this age are not permitted to enter. This forces women into an unimaginable situation: do they stay in a violent situation to keep the family together, seek safety and leave their son behind to face the violence, or let him roam the streets at night with nowhere safe to go? Each option carries serious risk. In a town where the age of criminal responsibility has just been lowered to 10 years, a child seeking safety could easily become a child criminalised by the system. This is not what safety looks like. These are not real choices. Aboriginal women and their children deserve better.
CTBMCLC: Yes, retaliation is common, and coercive control can intensify because the criminal legal system fails to deter intimate partner violence. There is a huge increase in technology facilitated abuse that the Police and legal system more broadly do not deal with well.
The risk of being misidentified as the primary aggressor is higher for women with disabilities, with mental health issues and for First Nations women and is due to an inherent bias against women. Women are often blamed for ‘failure to protect’ as police often believe that women should ‘just leave’ – this belief fails to acknowledge the complexity of violence and that people who have children together are intrinsically connected. Police (and the legal system) focus on incidents or events – which ignores patterns of behaviour over time that impacts women, children, and the community. Many women who have been murdered by their partners had sought police assistance. Whichever way you look at it, clearly police intervention is not keeping women safe.
CAAFLU: The recent reintroduction of mandatory sentencing for breaches of Domestic Violence Orders adds further harm. Despite 21 of the 22 public submissions opposing mandatory sentencing, it passed and is now legislated[4]. Now, instead of being referred to behaviour change programs in the first instance, people are sent to prison. And because Aboriginal women are often misidentified as aggressors, they are disproportionately impacted. Many victim-survivors present as angry or fearful after domestic violence incidents, and often misidentified and charged, even when they are the victim-survivor.
The court backlog in the NT means it can take up to 400 days to reach trial. Faced with 400 days on remand, often Aboriginal women plead guilty just to get out of prison. Resulting in being forever recorded on court and police systems as a domestic violence perpetrator, when they never had a genuine opportunity to tell their story in court.
CTBMCLC: Governments really need to start investing properly in building communities and resourcing self-determination instead of individuals having to rely on state intervention. DFSV is an economic, public health, community and human rights issue, and when looked at through those lenses we can see that there needs to be greater investment in interventions that foster prevention, rehabilitation, accountability and healing, rather than the current emphasis on the criminal legal system. Looking around the country and overseas there are alternative interventions that focus on restorative or transformative justice. One such initiative is the ACT RJ scheme was recently reviewed and found that “victim-survivors of domestic, family and sexual violence who participated in restorative justice in the ACT felt safer, better supported and more in control.”[5]
CAAFLU: The barriers to safety and services in the NT feel at times insurmountable, almost impossible. Aboriginal women in the NT are not just trying to seek safety in their personal lives; they are forced to navigate systems that misidentify, criminalise and silence them at every turn. Despite these impossibilities, CAAFLU has been walking alongside our community for 25 years. Every day we work hard to keep Aboriginal families safe and strong. We will always be here to protect our back yard, because our clients deserve safety and choice.
AFR: There are a growing number of community-based programs and organisations, often established and run by people with lived experience of domestic and family violence, that seek to fill the gap in appropriate first responses and care options. Earlier this year, the Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC) delivered the ‘Safe, Informed and Support: Reforming Justice Responses to Sexual Violence’ Report. Recommendation 1 called for federal, state and territory governments to fund relevant organisations to provide the follow three SIS (safe, informed and supported) services: independent legal services, justice system navigators and safe places to disclose. Underpinning this recommendation is providing services where people can make informed decisions if they want to continue with a law enforcement response, giving women agency and full consent over what they are agreeing to when they engage with law enforcement.[6]
The AFR campaign calls on policy-makers to direct investments toward these community-based services and programs, recognising them not as peripheral, but as central pillars in a more trauma-informed and culturally aware safety net for women and families. To achieve this, we need policy courage in funding pathways that reflect where women actually go to seek help and ensuring those spaces are resourced to respond with care. ‘Community drop-in centres respond to the needs of women, children and gender-diverse individuals in crisis through trauma-informed, person-centred and culturally safe approaches, without involving law enforcement. Drop-in centres such as the First Nations women-run Mudgin-Gal Women’s Place, Lou’s Place, Family Violence Prevention Legal Services across Australia, and the Ruah Centre for Women and Children often provide additional supports, recognising the many needs of people leaving abusive relationships. Services can include temporary shelter and housing assistance, peer-to-peer support, mental health counselling, case management and legal assistance.’ [7]
To end domestic, family and sexual violence, we need to radically change the approach across multiple systems to look beyond individual behaviour to examine the broader social, cultural, economic and political factors that drive violence against women and children [8]
‘[Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander] women and girls have emphasised that effective resolution of systemic issues will demand large-scale prevention strategies grounded in our self-determination and oriented toward healing and restoration of our social and cultural values.’ — June Oscar, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner.
Links to support
This article relates to domestic, family and sexual violence, which may be confronting or cause distress to some readers. Please be aware that free and confidential support is available through:
- 1800 RESPECT, call 1800 737 732 or visit www.1800Respect.org.au
- Full Stop Australia, call 1800 385 578 or visit www.fullstop.org.au
- Lifeline, call 13 11 14 or visit www.lifeline.org.au
- 13YARN, call 13 92 76 or visit www.13yarn.org.au
- Kids Helpline, call 1800 55 1800 or visit www.kidshelpline.com.au
- Compass, call 1800 353 374 or visit www.compass.info
- Rainbow Sexual, Domestic and Family Violence Helpline, call 1800 497 212
If you are deaf and/or find it hard hearing or speaking with people on the phone, the National Relay Service (NRS) can help. Contact via your preferred option or call 1800 555 660
References
[1] Cohen, H. (2024) Rosie told police she was a victim of domestic violence. She was arrested. ABC [online]
[2] Messenger, A. (2025) Domestic violence case management, not core business of police. The Guardian [online]
[3] Gleeson, H. (2024) Australian police force has a festering domestic violence problem, ABC [online]
[4] Hislop, J. (2025) Mandatory sentencing reinstated for DVO breaches in NT, ABC [online]
[5]ACT Government.(2025) How restorative justice helps victims of crime, ACT Government (online)
[6] Australian law Reform Commission (ALRC). (2025) Safe, Informed, Supported: Reforming justice responses to sexual violence report Australian law Reform Commission, Chapter 3 pp15 [online]
[7] Alternative First Responders. (2024) Alternative First Responders Position Paper, National Justice Project [online]
[8] Our Watch, (2021). Change the story: A shared framework for the primary prevention of violence against women in Australia – Summary (2nd ed.). Melbourne, Australia: Our Watch.
