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“They are controlling, manipulative, emotionally abusive,” she says. And she says that one of the problems of interviewing perpetrators is that there is a chance they will lie.
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George Karystianis, a research fellow and Tony Butler, a professor in medicine and health, both at the University of New South Wales, have analysed nearly half a million domestic violence police event narratives from 2005 to 2016. Domestic violence perpetrators are usually between 25 to 44 years old, and they exercise a combination of physical and psychological violence, mostly at home. Just over one in ten domestic violence events recorded a mention of mental illness linked to a perpetrator ranging from mood disorders to substance abuse. Police data represent a powerful opportunity to fill in knowledge gaps in domestic violence surveillance from a perpetrator perspective, and Karystianis and Butler have been working with several police state agencies on establishing a national surveillance system, DVWatch. I ask Karystianis what he knows about social class. He says the team has postcode data but is yet to analyse it.
In 2019 in the Journal of Family Violencemy wonderful colleagues and I found previous family violence, mental health issues, anti-social behaviour and prior contact with the justice system were all missed opportunities for intervention. Five years later, those opportunities for intervention are still missed. That’s another 300 dead women.
In the first week of June, ANROWS, which researches women’s safety in Australia, will announce the successful applicants for $2 million worth of grants for research into perpetration. It’s done over a decade of work in the area, but my best advice to politicians is this – act on what we know already. It’s one thing to have research findings – it’s another to fund frontline services and to fund findings.
We know so much already – if only we acted on what we knew.
Jenna Price is a regular columnist and a visiting fellow at the Australian National University. She has been writing about violence against women for 45 years.
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