Recording: International Women's Day 2021

Descriptive transcript

Thank you, everyone, for joining us for today's event. Before we begin, I'd like to acknowledge that wherever we are in Australia, we are on the traditional lands of First Nations peoples. Here at UTS, we're on the land of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, and I want to pay my respects to Elders past, present and emerging of the Gadigal people, and also recognise their role as the traditional custodians of knowledge for the land upon which this university is built.

My name is Verity Firth. I'm the Executive Director of Social Justice here at UTS, and I also lead our Centre for Social Justice and Inclusion. I'm very excited to be joined today by some very distinguished guests: Dr Anne Summers, Dixie Link-Gordon and Catherine Gander. I'll introduce them properly in just a minute, but before I do that, there's a couple of pieces of housekeeping and then I'll introduce our Vice-Chancellor.

Firstly, today's event is live captioned. If you need to use the captions or would like to view them, click on the link in the chat, which you can find at the bottom of your screen in the Zoom control panel. The captions will then open in a separate window. If you have any questions during today's event, we are allowing Q&A from the audience, but we do it in a moderated way. Type your questions into the Q&A box, which you can also find in your Zoom control panel. The good thing about the Q&A box is you can upvote questions, so you can vote for other people's questions, and I tend to err on the side of the most popular questions because they're the ones people most want answered. Please try to keep your questions relevant to the topics we're discussing today.

I also want to acknowledge that today's discussion will include topics that can be upsetting and may cause distress or be triggering. If at any time you feel yourself becoming overwhelmed or distressed, please take a break from the webinar. You can always rejoin us when you feel better, but don't force yourself to sit here in distress. If you do feel overwhelmed or distressed in any way, speak to somebody you trust or contact 1800RESPECT. We're posting those contact details in the chat box as well, so you can find them in your Zoom control panel.

To begin today's event and officially welcome you all, it's my real pleasure to welcome Professor Attila Brungs, who's the Vice-Chancellor of UTS.

Attila leads UTS in its social justice agenda, ensuring that public purpose and positive social impact is at the heart of everything we do as a university. Over to you, Attila.

Thank you kindly, Verity, and a very warm welcome to everybody. I really appreciate everyone taking the time to join us today.

Before we continue, I too would like to pay respects to the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, particularly acknowledging Elders past and present as traditional custodians of knowledge for this place. As I say frequently, knowledge is at the heart of what we are as a university. Knowledge, the use of knowledge, to solve societal problems, to make the world a better place, is at the heart of what we try to achieve.

It is an absolute privilege to be here today and to officially welcome you all to this International Women's Day livestream event. I'd like to give a very warm welcome to Dr Anne Summers, Dixie Link-Gordon and Catherine Gander, who will be taking part in today's important discussion. Thank you very much.

In 2020, a new term was coined, the "shadow pandemic". It was capturing how severe domestic violence is in our society, and how much of it has increased and intensified under the conditions and restrictions of COVID-19.

Violence against women and children is pervasive, as you all know, in Australian society. It's in our homes, in our institutions, in our parliaments, and right to our high schools.

The media attention over the last few weeks has only reinforced the terrible impact on survivors and the difficulties women face in seeking and achieving justice.

Today's speakers have decades of experience working to end domestic and family violence. But as they more than any would know, it is an endemic problem.

We all have a role to play to understand what domestic and family violence looks like, how to address the underlying causes that put women at risk and confine men to toxic ideas of masculinity.

Like many fundamental societal challenges, universities have a critical role to play. Universities must contribute our support, our resources, and work alongside experts in the community and frontline practitioners to challenge and tackle particularly this critical issue.

At UTS, our vision is to be a leading public university of technology, not just for those we teach, not just for those people we work with directly, but for all society. That is what it means to be a public university.

We know we can only achieve that vision if at the heart of everything we do is positive social change. This means challenging stereotypes, fighting bias, broadening perceptions and solving injustices wherever we see them.

I am particularly delighted that the brilliant minds at UTS are working in this space. From the appointment of investigative reporter Jess Hill as the inaugural journalist-in-residence at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, to the wonderful work Dr Anne Summers has joined us to do, to the work that our students do in community groups right across and around our community, to the fantastic research being done in each and every part of UTS to make the world a place where women can be safe and thrive.

UTS is also a proud and active part of the Respect.Now.Always campaign. This is a campaign across all Australian universities that aims to eliminate sexual assault and sexual harassment on all Australian university campuses because everybody has a right to live, study and work in safety.

So, in concluding, again, I'd like to acknowledge and thank everybody joining us today. It is now my very great pleasure to hand over to Professor Shirley Alexander, the Deputy Vice-Chancellor of Education and Students at UTS.

Shirley has worked tirelessly for many years at UTS and beyond to uncover, address and solve issues on the topic today. Over to you, Shirley.

Thank you, Attila. When I was asked to introduce Anne, I thought long and hard about how to introduce someone who is not only a household name, but is someone who is so revered.

Her public achievements are widely known. The fact that in 1970 she and a couple of others squatted in two rundown houses and turned those into the Elsie Women's Refuge to provide shelter to women and children who were victims of domestic violence.

Her career alternated between being a journalist, including winning a Walkley Award for her investigation into New South Wales prisons, which resulted in a Royal Commission, and politics, which included being an advisor to two Prime Ministers, Bob Hawke and Paul Keating, and was head of the Office for the Status of Women. Then back to journalism as Editor-in-Chief of Ms, America's landmark feminist magazine.

All of those achievements are on the public record. I had the privilege of getting to know Anne when we were both on the board of the Powerhouse Museum, and from that experience and having read three out of her eight books, as well as countless other essays and articles, has given me a little bit of an insight into how she has achieved so much.

For me, Anne is one of the most courageous and resilient people I have ever known. She has faced extraordinary challenges, but has always found a way to move on. It's again a matter of public record that her childhood was far from idyllic, but Anne moved on and found a way to forgive. When she encountered challenge after challenge in her career, she simply found a new pathway.

Another interesting thing about Anne is that at a time when everyone was encouraged to have a five-year plan, Anne did not, or not that I could see anyway in what I've read. She was very comfortable in her own skin. She knew what her interests and skills were and was just fearless in giving any opportunity to make use of those a go. And if that meant moving careers, moving countries, she was happy to do so.

And finally, she's never been a bystander. She has called out and documented, for example, the extraordinary treatment of Julia Gillard and the way in which it incited violence, produced explicit cartooning. It was hard to believe at that time that this was happening to our first female Prime Minister, and Anne called it out in a very public way and one that I hope caused the bullies to take a long, hard look at themselves.

If you look at her website, there's a prominent quote that says, "I was born into a world that expected very little of women like me. We were meant to tread lightly on the earth, influencing events through our husbands and children, if at all." Anne has done anything but travel lightly on the earth, and we're all very grateful for that. She's had an enormous influence in multiple spheres of public life, ultimately impacting on all of our lives.

I'm very pleased to introduce Adjunct Professor Anne Summers, who is now the recipient of a Paul Ramsay Foundation Fellowship to use transdisciplinary methods to reimagine the end of domestic and family violence. Thanks, Anne.

Thank you for that, Shirley. Thank you for that wonderfully generous introduction, and thank you also, Verity, for inviting me to do this keynote today. I also start by acknowledging that UTS stands on the land of the Eora people of the Gadigal Nation and pay my respects to Elders past, present and emerging.

May I wish everybody a happy International Women's Day. As we all know, this is the day on which we acknowledge and celebrate the progress we've made towards gender equality and take stock of what still needs to be done. Some years, the balance is more skewed towards what remains to be done than what we've accomplished so far. Some years, it even feels like we're sliding backwards. This year seems like one of those years.

This is my first public appearance as a Paul Ramsay Foundation Fellowship holder. I'm grateful to the foundation for awarding me the fellowship to do research into domestic and family violence, to UTS for sponsoring me, and particularly to both organisations for allowing me to do this work remotely.

I've only just begun the project, so it's too early to be able to present any results, but I hope that I can do so at a later date, perhaps at a forum such as this.

Instead, today, while my sister panellists Dixie and Kat will be sharing their experiences from the frontline of dealing with domestic and family violence, I want to address the broader question of whether we as a country are succeeding in reducing domestic and family violence against women. As I scarcely need to spell out for this audience, the short answer is no, we are not.

A 2019 report from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, which was based on the surveys done every few years by the Personal Safety Surveys of the ABS, tells us that levels of partner violence and sexual violence have remained stable since 2005.

This is at a time when all other crimes, especially violent crimes, are declining. For example, in New South Wales, armed robberies, break and enters, muggings, shoplifting and car thefts have declined by significant amounts—muggings down by 36%, car thefts down by 22%—yet domestic and family violence remains stable.

What is especially disappointing about this is that the National Plan to Reduce Violence Against Women and Their Children 2010–2022 has been in place for 11 years. It has just one year to go and it appears to have failed.

As I'm sure everybody remembers, the National Plan was launched with great promise and huge expectations. It was the brainchild of the brilliant Tanya Plibersek, who was Minister for the Status of Women at the time. It was launched by Julia Gillard, who was Prime Minister, and Jenny Macklin, who had just got the first paid parental leave legislation through the Parliament, was the Minister given responsibility for presiding over its implementation. It was launched at a time of optimism and activism, when wrongs were being righted, with long-awaited reforms finally coming into effect. Finally, we thought, we're going to address the appalling prevalence of violence against women and their children in a planned and systemic way.

The National Plan was hugely ambitious, with a vision that Australian women and their children live free from violence in safe communities. That was the plan. It was a bipartisan exercise and distinguished by the fact that it was long-term, designed to run from 2010–2022, based on evidence gleaned from research and community consultations, coordinated across jurisdictions, thus attempting to circumvent the state-definitional silos and turf battles that have beset every reform in this country since Federation. It was designed to focus on prevention and to make perpetrators accountable and encourage behavioural change.

To achieve this vision, an unambiguous target was set: to achieve a significant and sustained reduction in violence against women during the next 12 years, 2010–2022. Eleven years later, in 2021, family, domestic and sexual violence is not reduced at all, let alone in a significant and sustained way.

The 2016 Public Safety Survey tells us that more than a quarter of a million women—255,600, to be precise—experienced partner violence in the last two years. And we can be pretty sure that those figures are on the low side, that they are not taking into account some forms of violence such as technological and financial abuse and other aspects of coercive control that we have a better understanding of now than when the Public Safety Survey was first designed.

So it would seem that the National Plan has had zero impact on levels of violence against women. If anything, given the likely undercounting, violence against women and their children has actually increased. So we have to ask: what went wrong? I so hope that someone is working on a history of the National Plan, because we need to know in granular detail how it went awry. In the time available to me today, I can provide only the briefest account of my view of how it went off the rails. There are two basic reasons: political failure and bureaucratic ineptitude, manifested in the absence of any indicators to measure progress towards achieving the target. They're linked, of course—had the political will been there, the bureaucracy would have been required to do things differently.

Let's look first at the politics. In 2013, just two years after the National Plan was officially launched, the Federal Labor Government was defeated, ushering in what so far has been eight years of Liberal National Party rule.

One measure of the Government's commitment to the National Plan is the amount of money it has been prepared to spend on women's safety. The total Federal Government investment for the current and final action plan—that is, the one that runs from 2019 to 2022—is $340 million over three years.

To put that figure into perspective, that same Federal Government announced in 2020 that it would spend $500 million to redevelop and expand the Australian War Memorial. So $500 million to memorialise overseas wars, but only $340 million to save Australia's women and children from violence on the home front.

Another measure of political commitment is who is put in charge. Since 2013, there have been six different ministers—six. So not much continuity or long-term vision, and that wasn't the only problem. The brilliant Jenny Macklin was succeeded by Kevin Andrews. He was followed by Scott Morrison, who was succeeded by Christian Porter, followed by Dan Tehan, and finally Paul Fletcher—five men. You have to wonder how committed to or even interested in the plan most of these men were. At least some of them hacked away at it. Christian Porter, for example, moved the national crisis hotline 1800RESPECT from the women-run Rape and Domestic Violence Services Australia to Medibank Private. It was not until 2019, and the federal election, that a woman was once again put in charge, Liberal Senator Anne Ruston.

The second big problem with the National Plan is that it has never had clear, measurable targets. Instead, it promises vaguely worded outcomes. In 2019, the Auditor-General released a scathing assessment of the department's lack of attention to implementation planning and performance measurement. He expressed doubt that the National Plan was on track or even had the tools in place to achieve its basic objectives. For instance, he reported the measure of success for outcome number one—communities are safe and free from violence—does not consider actual levels of violence or broader community safety. You have to wonder what it was measuring. One reason for this is that, apart from the Personal Safety Survey, we have no consistent and thus comparable data measurements.

Creating a national data and reporting framework to address this was an early action point in the National Plan, but 11 years later, it has not happened. The Australian Bureau of Statistics was asked in 2014 to develop the foundation for such a framework, but the Auditor-General found it never happened. He also said that, in addition, no outcomes or measures of success have been established for each three-year action plan that sits under the National Plan. The data sources currently used are surveys run every four to six years—he's referring to the Personal Safety Survey. There are other sources that could be used, he said, but are not. So in other words, there's nothing much to measure because there's no data there. You have to wonder why this is so.

You also have to wonder why the National Plan hasn't, for example, made use of the Australian Institute of Criminology's National Homicide Monitoring Program, because it would actually have some good news to report if it did. Overall, murders in Australia have declined by 39% since they started measuring them in 1989. And although it doesn't seem like it—as we learn almost every week, it seems that another woman has been murdered by her former or current partner—the actual number is the lowest on record. In 2017–18, the latest year for which we have figures, 33 women were murdered by an intimate partner. Now, that's 33 too many, but it is down from 59 such murders in 1989 and 73 in the very bad year of 2001.

The current Minister, Senator Ruston, has promised to take account of the Auditor-General's complaints and to develop some quantifiable metrics. She said that in 2019. Let's hope she does, because we've got one year to go and so far we haven't seen any.

So to conclude, I would just like to say that the National Plan has not been totally ineffective—it's achieved some important reforms. For example, in 2017, the National Apprehended Violence Order Scheme—finally, only took 20 years. It created 1800RESPECT, it created ANROWS, it created Our Watch. A lot of good and important work has been done by these organisations. But the National Plan is due to end next year. The Government is indicating privately that it will be extended, but I think we should be asking whether we want it to continue in its present form. I would argue we need a total overhaul of its design.

We might benefit from the example of Closing the Gap, the framework that charts outcomes between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. The targets for Closing the Gap are backed by hard data, as are the measurements of progress or lack thereof, and we know the progress in Closing the Gap has been pretty poor in most areas. But the point is, we have data, so we know. We know we can measure failure, and we know where we're putting our efforts in order to succeed.

I believe we need comparable targets based on hard data for reducing and ultimately eradicating domestic and sexual violence against women. And to be able to do this, we need to adjust some of our thinking. It's no longer enough to say we need gender equality in order to reduce violence. Rather, we should be measuring reductions in violence as a performance indicator of our progress towards achieving gender equality. So finally, I hope that today I've at least encouraged you to think about the need for realistic targets and ways to measure how to perform against them if we're to have any hope of eliminating violence against women. Thank you.

Thanks for that, Anne. That's truly thought-provoking. Just a reminder that we're recording this session, so we'll be able to share this link afterwards so that people can listen again. I've been scribbling notes and definitely want to plough into that speech again later.

Now it's my pleasure to welcome today's panellists. We're going to have a panel session now, and as I said, there'll be an opportunity to ask questions. Dixie Link-Gordon and Catherine Gander are joining us on the panel. Dixie Link-Gordon is a prominent First Nations sexual assault and family violence advocate. She established Breaking Silent Codes, a safe environment for First Nations women to share their deeply personal stories. Dixie has extensive knowledge and experience, having worked for more than 30 years in the human service sector, specialising in sexual assault and family violence. She brings invaluable insight into this critical issue facing First Nations women. Dixie is also the founder of Breaking Silent Codes, Senior Community Access, Women's Legal Service NSW, and also an Adjunct Senior Lecturer at the University of New South Wales. Welcome, Dixie.

Catherine is the CEO of DV West, which provides crisis accommodation, transitional housing and outreach support to women and children in the Nepean, Blue Mountains, Blacktown/Hills and Hawkesbury districts. She has worked in an advisory capacity to government and as an expert representative for the sector at both state and national levels. She welcomes the increased community engagement and awareness of violence against women as an urgent gendered issue and the focus on its prevention. Thank you, Catherine, for being here.

I'm going to start with you, Dixie. Could you please give us some more detail into your work with the Breaking Silent Codes movement?

Okay, the original conversation that came about with Breaking Silent Codes was with my friend and colleague from Aotearoa/New Zealand at one of the CSW UN gatherings. We talked about—my friend as a Maori woman and myself as a First Nations Australian—what were the codes that were keeping us quiet about violence and sexual abuse happening in our communities? What's preventing women from talking more? What can we do to bring a movement of us Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander and Pacifica women together? The first topics we wanted to talk about were around religion, family, community and authority—the bad relations with police, community not feeling confident to report family, and the impact of religion on us as women having a voice.

So from there, that was like 2016–17, we'd had these conversations. I approached Professor Megan Davis, said we want to do something, we want to create something, and I was put in the direction of the Gender Violence Research Network at UNSW and the wonderful Professor Jan Breckenridge and Mailin Suchting. Both of these deadly women helped resource and support us to have our first gathering. So 42 women—First Nations women across Australia, Torres Strait and Pacifica—we all came together. That's where we started talking about those codes that kept us silent—the code that you don't report to the police, the code that you don't even talk about it in your family. That went on for us. It just grew legs, really. We never ever had a cent for this, so it was people's commitment to supporting us as First Nations women having our own voice and determining how we were going to address these issues.

We had our first conference in 2018, opened at UNSW in July because of NAIDOC Week. Then in September, Fiji ran one in Nadi. In 2019, New Zealand ran one in Wellington. We did a trip over to the CSW in 2020—of course, it was cancelled, but we were able to network up with First Nations women there. We had a beautiful book of photography and stories taken by photographer Belinda Mason that showed the stories, the visual of what it looked like for us to gather together and talk. That's where we were hooked up with Anne over in New York, which was a very good meeting and gathering together.

Now, where are we now? Well, we're hoping to go to the Torres Strait this year in September. It's really about us coming together and not being afraid to talk together as a group and gather. I feel very confident that younger women are taking up this and that we are a voice for ourselves, and we can be that to each other as sisters. And of course, all the sisters—all Australian women—who I've worked with over the years, their support has been very welcome.

Wonderful, Dixie. We'll talk a bit more about Breaking Silent Codes in a minute. Catherine, can you tell us about the demand for your services at DV West?

Yes. First of all, I'd like to acknowledge the different Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander lands and waters that we come together on today and pay my respects to Elders past, present and recognise this land was never ceded. I'd also like to acknowledge the women who are here today or joining us who have experienced violence and the courage they show in speaking out.

I currently work for DV West, which provides specialist domestic violence services in the Nepean, Blue Mountains, Blacktown/Hills and Hawkesbury districts. It's a large area with high rates of violence against women. In the last financial year, we supported close to 1,300 women and children from diverse backgrounds and circumstances. DV West staff—I've never worked with such a dedicated team. However, the uneasy fact is that in the same year we supported those 1,300 women and children, we were forced to turn away 1,376 because we had no capacity or crisis accommodation was full. 87% of those women and children that were turned away did not want to take up outreach support or temporary accommodation, as they didn't see it as a suitable or safe option for them.

So the rate of unmet demand often means these women are returning—they can't leave, they continue to live in violence. It's shared with like services across Australia; we're not unique. I think that level of demand would be consistent. Their voices are rarely heard because it's not safe for them to speak publicly, and also no data is kept on what happens to them when they're unable to receive help at the time they request it. We are talking about large numbers of women across Australia every day who do not get the help they need. So the demand is completely outstripping what's available, and at times we can see it across the system as well, that it's not just that we haven't got a vacancy—we can look across our state, for example, and see that there are no vacancies anywhere else.

While changing attitudes and behaviour takes time—possibly generations to fully be effective—in the meantime, we need to maintain investment and resources in crisis services while we invest in the prevention area. Specialist services like domestic violence refuges save lives, and the safety and homicide prevention is at the forefront of our thinking and our work. To turn women away is not acceptable.

No, it's terrible. Anne, I'm thinking of the keynote you just gave us, where you pointed out that the total Federal Government investment is $340 million over three years, at the same time the Government spent $500 million for the War Memorial. That's the stark difference in terms of what Cat is talking about and the amount of investment.

You also talked in your speech—so investment, yes, but also the need for clear and achievable goals and targets, which again is pointing to Cat's thing about the data and being able to track this. How do we go about—everything you said is absolutely correct—how do we go about actually achieving this and influencing this political agenda at this time?

Well, it's obviously a huge task, and what I find so frustrating—it makes me very angry to think we've wasted 11 years when it should have been being done, and we should be much, much further along this road now than we are. But we've got to basically start from scratch, I think, and that is—we being probably the women's movement, unless we can get some agencies interested in this, because the Government doesn't seem to be interested unless they undergo a big change of heart as a result of some of the issues that are currently occupying the spotlight. It would be nice to think there might be some longer-term and differential impacts. But we have to decide, okay, what do we mean by ending violence? Let's make some clear targets. Instead of saying, "We want all women to be safe"—well, of course we do—but let's break that down into bits, achievable bits. Maybe we do it by region, maybe we do it by different groups of vulnerable people, maybe we decide what the targets are, what the groups are—whether they're population groups, geographical groups, economic groups, single parents, whatever—and then we set realistic targets.

The thing about this way of thinking is that it makes you plan properly. If you have a target—it's like KPIs at work—if you have to achieve something to get paid, you damn well do it, you find ways to do it. That's what we need to be doing. I think the whole area of data collection around domestic and family violence, as Cat was saying, and the fact we know so little about refuge populations, or worse, those that try to come to shelters and can't get in—what happens to them? We don't know whether they have to go back home, what happens to them. The fact that we have such poor knowledge means that we can't do the sort of prevention work that we need to do. And I think to say, "Okay, we're teaching kids to be respectful of each other at school"—well, great, but we have a crisis on our hands. We need to be acting in more ways than that as well.

Yes. And Dixie, in light of all of that and in the work you've been doing with Breaking Silent Codes, are there particular issues in the First Nations communities that need to be taken into account, particularly as we set these targets and go for further investment?

I can honestly say it's around education—education that we have with each other as First Nations people, and also around authority. If you don't trust the police, you're not going to go and report to the police. It's as simple as that. People are going to stay locked in within their communities, locked in within their homes, locked in with self, and have these horrifying experiences of abuse happen to them. So there has to be a lot of trust going on and a lot of genuine progress with policing of domestic violence, with First Nations women being supported when they do go and report. That only comes with education—appropriate education where people are culturally aware of what's happening. For us as First Nations women, we do have the right to have safe homes, we do have the right to have safe lives within our communities, our schools, and our communities, and we can report abuse. Community education is very important for us, for everybody. We all should have easy access to education around safety and our human right to be safe in this country and across the Pacific.

Yes. And Catherine, what do you think we need to change to better support victims and survivors of violence?

Look, sometimes I think we've got to start all over again, but you've got to start somewhere. I guess we just need to stop covering up. I think there's so much cover-up about what's actually out there when it isn't, and accept that we have a culture of not believing women when they disclose violence. It's really downplayed and not given the importance that it needs to be given.

If we take sexual assault, for example, we know that the false reporting of rape is very low. Yet in New South Wales, between 2008 and 2018, there were 52,000 reports of sexual assault to police in New South Wales. Aft