From the Margins to the Mainstream

The Domestic Violence Services Movement in Victoria, Australia, 1974-2016

Jacqui Theobald, Suellen Murray, Judith Smart

• Publisher: MUP Academic Digital
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780522871654
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Violence dans la société

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

[T]he politicisation of the women’s refuge was a really important process … what was happening here was that in fact a long-standing social problem, one of the most significant kind of residual problems in Australian gender relationships, violence to women … was being unlocked.

David Green, interviewed by Jacqui Theobald, 28 March 2008¹

In Victoria in 2015, the newly elected state Labor government, headed by Premier Daniel Andrews, established a royal commission into family violence. This commitment was made in the lead-up to the 2014 state government election, when, as opposition leader, Andrews announced to the state Labor Party conference that a royal commission was urgently needed to ‘get to the heart of the problem’ because it had become a ‘national emergency’.² The catalyst for a public inquiry at this level was influenced by the courageous actions of domestic violence campaigner and survivor Rosie Batty. Following the murder of her son by her former partner in early 2014, Batty articulately and tirelessly advocated the need for greater awareness of, and improved responses to, women and children experiencing domestic violence in Australia. She garnered public acceptance and recognition for her endeavours, and was appointed Australian of the Year for 2015. In her acceptance speech, Batty appealed for domestic violence to be ‘brought out from the shadows and into broad daylight’.³ These events were unimaginable forty years earlier when feminists in Victoria and across Australia first established women’s refuges. At that time, domestic violence was not publicly acknowledged or tackled in any coherent way at either a Commonwealth or state government policy level. What happened to sanction public recognition of domestic violence, and to make it the centrepiece of the Victorian government’s social policy agenda in 2015?

In the mid-1970s, feminists in Victoria and across Australia initiated the process that Batty and other activists continue today of making public what had previously been considered a private issue by identifying the ‘intolerable circumstances’ facing large numbers of women and children seeking emergency accommodation. Although services that provided accommodation to women and children in crisis had certainly existed for a long time, the refuge movement of the 1970s made explicit the link between domestic violence and the need for refuge. They sought to ‘get to the heart of the problem’, as they saw it, by redefining domestic violence according to radical feminist understandings of all forms of women’s oppression—gender inequality. Movement members soon realised, however, that exposing the problem was not, in and of itself, enough to eliminate it. Consequently, they have continued to demand that the government and wider community take responsibility for tackling it. In Victoria and nationally, this has resulted in an abundance of services (including outreach and other specialist women’s domestic violence services), programs, legislation, and financial investment designed to deal with domestic violence. At the same time, organisations have become increasingly responsive to the diverse requirements and subjectivities of women and children.

Since the 1980s, Australian federal, state and territory governments have pursued policy in relation to domestic violence and violence against women more broadly and, over the years, have formed task force investigations, created domestic violence units within police forces, and established other government inquiries.⁴ These developments have had tangible effects on the everyday lives of innumerable women and children. Since the mid-2000s Victoria has attempted a concerted whole-of-government response to domestic violence involving an integrated family violence service system, which includes interservice collaboration with specialist courts and police. These achievements have been recognised as models of best practice both nationally and internationally, and point to the significance of Victoria to the overall Australian movement.

What has happened in the forty years since the refuge movement began that enabled change of this magnitude to occur? How have movement members continued to publicise, respond to and make sense of the problems facing women in their services? The central purpose of this book is to answer these questions by analysing the shifting trajectory of the Victorian domestic violence services movement and documenting the efforts of activists over a forty-year period to have the problem redressed. The book traces the movement primarily from the viewpoint of those who have worked in its services from its beginning in 1974 until 2016. It does not provide a history of individual domestic and family violence service providers in Victoria but, rather, examines the development of the Victorian movement within the wider sociopolitical and institutional Australian context.

Despite the gains made by the domestic violence services movement both in service development and in social policy, there has been no comprehensive full-length history of any state-based refuge movement in Australia. For this reason, it is not possible to undertake a detailed comparison with other states. However, this book partially fills a substantial gap by documenting and contextualising the history of the refuge movement in Victoria within the wider Australian context. Our analysis makes evident the influence of feminism and the contributions of women’s organisations to service delivery, social policy and legislation concerning domestic violence in Victoria and Australia. In doing so, it emphasises the unequivocally political nature of women’s activism and achievements in this area and considers ways in which women’s organisations have worked together to achieve social change.

The topic of this book is significant in the contemporary context because violence against women continues at disturbingly high levels. In 2004 it was found to be the leading cause of death, disability and disease among Australian women aged between 15 and 44 years.⁵ For the same age group in 2011, 5.1 per cent of the entire disease burden experienced by women was due to interpersonal violence.⁶ The extent and severity of domestic violence have been revealed in reports such as the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ Women’s Safety Australia (1996), which documented that one in five women report experiencing violence at some time during their adult lives.⁷ A decade later, 40 per cent of Australian women reported at least one incident of physical or sexual violence since the age of 15, with most being perpetrated by a current or former partner or family member, and there were similar findings when the research was repeated in 2012.⁸ Domestic violence affects not only those directly involved but also the broader community. The annual cost of domestic violence to the Australian community was estimated at $13.6 billion in 2009.⁹

Recognition, documentation and analysis of the domestic violence services movement is important because the legitimacy of feminist organisations has been challenged by conservative governments. At times federal and state government policy has worked to undermine the equality of women.¹⁰ As political scientist Marian Sawer notes, from 2004 until 2010, national leaders of the Australian Labor Party campaigned without so much as a reference to women, and, despite policy initiatives designed to tackle violence against women, they lacked ‘a coherent plan for addressing gender inequality’.¹¹ The release of the Gillard Labor government’s National Plan to Reduce Violence against Women and Their Children in 2011,¹² together with the announcement of its policy framework, Equality for Women, in 2010, signalled improvements. Of concern, however, is the ‘state of play’ since the 2013 federal election, which saw the installation of a conservative and neoliberal Coalition government. Of particular consequence for women and children experiencing domestic violence have been funding cuts to social security payments and community service organisations, including legal aid, social housing and homelessness services. More broadly, the period since 2013 has been characterised by the dismantling of essential social welfare infrastructure and institutions, generating ‘negative impacts on women and their vulnerability to violence’.¹³

Following the appointment of Malcolm Turnbull as prime minister in 2015, and in the aftermath of several egregious deaths of women and children from domestic violence, the Coalition government reaffirmed its commitment to tackling domestic violence. Turnbull labelled the problem a ‘national disgrace’ and announced an additional $100 million in funding to tackle it.¹⁴ Although these rhetorical and material commitments are encouraging, it remains a matter of concern that the conditions required for gender equality, and by extension the prevention of domestic violence, are being simultaneously eroded. By contrast, in Victoria recently, there have been promising developments. At the end of 2014, the newly elected Labor government appointed the first minister for the prevention of family violence in Victoria and Australia, Fiona Richardson. It also agreed to implement all 227 recommendations of the Royal Commission into Family Violence, which reported in March 2016, and, in the following November, Minister Richardson released Victoria’s first ‘Gender Equality Strategy’, Safe and Strong. It will form a key component of the government’s plan to tackle violence against women. As the minister makes clear, ‘societies with greater gender equality have lower levels of violence against women’.¹⁵

The longer history of domestic violence and women’s refuges

When women’s refuges began in the 1970s, they were responding to an ‘almost invisible issue’.¹⁶ Domestic violence did not exist as a named social issue, let alone as part of a public policy platform, framed as a problem of gender inequality. The refuge movement engaged in a process of defining the problem of domestic violence as a feminist issue, and radical feminism fashioned members’ ideas. What became known as domestic violence was commonly referred to at this time as ‘cruelty’ within the context of the law, and was one of the grounds on which women could seek divorce.¹⁷ Although legal remedies were available, in reality most women did not benefit from them because of the legal costs involved, lack of financial independence, fear of retaliation, and shame that their marriage had failed.¹⁸ Domestic violence had long been silenced throughout the preceding years for a number of reasons relating to the traditional rights of men to discipline their wives, the confinement of women to the home and the limitations of legal redress. However, during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, cruelty became increasingly unacceptable within marriage, and legislation came to reflect changing attitudes to violence.¹⁹ Nevertheless, domestic violence was not discussed widely and publicly.

Problems facing women, including what came to be known as domestic violence, had been of concern to feminist activists from the late nineteenth century onwards, and historian Marilyn Lake has documented five overlapping periods of Australian feminism, arguing that they ‘constitute an organised political movement’.²⁰ However, until the women’s liberation movement, feminist activism, including that relating to domestic violence, had maintained as its cornerstone the moral and caring role of women, a kind of public maternalism based on the view that the ideal family home should constitute the model for the nation as a whole. Domestic violence as a specific problem had remained mostly hidden in ‘the codes and limited strategies of the temperance movement’ and philanthropic societies.²¹ This meant that feminists from the women’s liberation movement ‘did not at once identify the violence of male partners as a key issue’ because, as historian Janet Ramsay argues, ‘they had become detached from the clear knowledge and subtle political placing of such violence by their feminist forebears’.²² As a result, many felt that domestic violence was a newly ‘discovered’ issue.²³ Although earlier feminists framed the problem and measures to deal with it in ways that were different from those of their late twentieth-century successors, they were nonetheless aware of and active in response to such violence.

Women’s refuges developed within the context of charity-based emergency accommodation for women. Religious organisations had provided some limited accommodation services for homeless women for a long time. Although it was not publicly recognised and debated, women who experienced domestic violence would have accessed such services. Mary Anderson Lodge was one such place operated by the Salvation Army. It loosely aligned itself with the refuge movement after 1975 by accepting government funding, although it continued to operate relatively independently until more recent years. Catholic organisations such as the Good Shepherd sisters’ convent in Abbotsford and the Missionaries of Charity Women’s Shelter in Fitzroy also provided crisis accommodation for women, and the latter continues to operate today. But neither was aligned with the refuge movement, and they generally saw their work as an extension of Christian duty, focusing on restoring families and defending women’s morality. Other non-denominational organisations such as Hanover Welfare Services identified the problems facing women as ‘human distress’ and argued that it was common to all those experiencing homelessness.²⁴ None of these groups were in the business of critiquing the social structures within which women became homeless. Only after the beginnings of the refuge movement did some sections of the community begin publicly to acknowledge that ‘the battered wife is a tremendous and very common problem’.²⁵

The issue of homeless men dominated public discourse at this time, and the main welfare services in Melbourne responded with large accommodation facilities. These included ‘The Gill’ run by the Salvation Army, and ‘Ozanam House’ auspiced by St Vincent de Paul. The Commonwealth government played no formal role in the provision of these services until people from Victorian homelessness services successfully pressured both political parties to establish a working party to investigate ‘the needs of homeless men and women’.²⁶ This was set up following the election in 1972 of the Whitlam Labor government.²⁷ The working party’s recommendations formed the basis of the first Commonwealth legislation providing for homeless people passed in December 1974, the Homeless Persons Assistance Act (1974), and most of the recommendations were implemented under the national Homeless Persons Assistance Program in 1975. Notably, the working party had concluded that ‘women were not a significant part of the homeless population’,²⁸ and argued that the government’s response to the problem should ‘give consideration to not segregating the sexes’.²⁹ Thus the extent of women’s homelessness and its relationship to domestic violence remained unacknowledged. It was not until the development of feminist refuges that women’s homelessness was publicly an...