Recording: The Choice: Violence or Poverty

Descriptive transcript

This land was never ceded, and we want to pay respects to Elders past and present for their continuing ownership and custodianship of the land upon which this university is built.

My name's Verity Firth. I'm the Pro-Vice-Chancellor of Social Justice and Inclusion here at UTS. I'm also at that stage of life where I can never work out whether I need to keep my glasses on or not. Maybe I should just perch them on my nose like this. It's my real pleasure to have you all here today. We're also live streaming this event, so we've got all of you in the room, but also some people online who were really keen to access the event.

It's my pleasure today to be joined by Professor Carl Rhodes, Dean of the UTS Business School, a panel of speakers Anna Bligh and Leanne Ho, and of course our keynote speaker, Professor Anne Summers AO, whom I will introduce properly shortly.

There are a couple of housekeeping matters to go through. Today we're going to be talking about the implications of Professor Summers' findings in her report, "The Choice: Violence or Poverty," revealing the stark choices and consequences for women wanting to escape domestic violence. We'll discuss how to remove barriers facing women looking to escape partner violence, and the National Plan to Reduce Violence Against Women and Their Children, and how it seeks to encourage and support women to leave violent relationships.

But of course, there's no point encouraging women to leave violent relationships if there's absolutely nowhere for them to go. This is what Anne's report points out so well. The truth is that Australian welfare measures ensure that as many as half the women who choose to leave violent partners will end up in poverty.

As Professor Summers writes, the government may not be able to immediately stop domestic violence, but it could stop poverty, and it chooses not to. I urge everyone to read Anne's compelling and powerful report. Not only does she painstakingly comb through ABS data to discover the truth about the link between violence and single motherhood, she also outlines the shifts in discourse around single motherhood. In her words, "Single mothers have been transformed in the eyes of the federal government from being mothers to being seen as economic units, to be forcibly funneled into the workforce as soon as possible."

When I read the report, I really want you to read it because it's deep in data. She's looked at the ABS stats, and the proof is there. But she has such a compelling narrative style that you get swept up in the power of her argument. The most powerful for me was the final chapter, which talked about the history of parenting payments in Australia and how far we thought we had come, and yet how far we have now fallen, and the way that single mothers have been increasingly demonised rather than supported, particularly since the 90s. But I'll leave it to Anne to elaborate further.

I'd also like to acknowledge that today's discussion will include topics that may distress some people, it may be triggering. If at any time you feel uncomfortable or overwhelmed, just leave, it's fine. Don't force yourself to sit through distress, and you can always join us again later.

To officially begin today's event, I am now going to introduce Professor Anne Summers. She has just joined the UTS Business School and we're extremely excited to have her as part of UTS. It's a huge coup for us. Professor Summers is a leading feminist and renowned journalist and researcher. In 2021, she began work with us as a Paul Ramsay Foundation Fellow, where she undertook original database research that informed her groundbreaking report, "The Choice: Violence or Poverty." So I'd now like to welcome Professor Summers to give us a keynote before the panel discussion. Thank you.

Thank you so much for that terrific introduction. I'm still not used to hearing the word "Professor" in front of my name. Who are they talking about? I haven't quite got used to this honour. Before I begin, I too would like to acknowledge that we are meeting on unceded Aboriginal land, the land of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, and wish to pay my respects to Elders past, present and emerging.

You've no doubt already heard the headline findings of my research—disturbing data about the extent and consequences of domestic violence in Australia today. Tonight, I'll summarise the main findings and add a couple of new observations that I think are especially relevant for business, so that we have plenty of time for questions and discussion.

Before I do, let me remind you that these findings are based on never-before-published data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the ABS. The data has been customised for my report by the ABS in response to my request for information about single mothers and their experience of violence. I was surprised to discover that the ABS does not identify single mothers as a specific data set. In its Personal Safety Survey, the PSS, which is conducted every four years into violence in Australia—including partner violence, which is the term the ABS uses to designate domestic violence inflicted by a cohabiting partner—in response to my request, they were able to extract from the PSS 2016, which is the most recent one available, a data set that comprised 311,000 women in single parent families or with children aged under 18.

This data set is amazingly comprehensive, providing a massive amount of data on the experiences of violence of these women and its consequences, which is able to be compared with women in other household formations who did or did not experience partner violence. The data is available for you to look at yourselves, if you wish, as it is linked to the appendix of my report. There's a lot more information there than I used in the report because it dealt with a huge range of matters that were not directly relevant to my purpose, but may be of interest to you.

My purpose was to measure the prevalence of domestic violence in Australia today and to examine at least some of the consequences for the women and children affected. I present my overall findings in the form of a proposition, which is also the title of the report. That proposition is this: Australian women who are experiencing violence have two choices. One is to stay and live with the violence. The other is to leave.

Now, this might sound like a statement of the bleeding obvious, but it has, in fact, never before been measured with authoritative data as to its prevalence and the consequences of each of these choices. In 2016, an estimated 275,000 Australian women suffered physical and/or sexual violence from their current partner. These women were currently living with violence. To give this number context, the combined populations of Hobart and Launceston in 2016 was 287,013 people. Of these 275,000 women, 81,700 made at least one effort to leave the relationship but subsequently returned. They returned for various reasons: they loved their partner, he promised to stop the violence, they missed their home, they didn't want their children's lives disrupted—all those sorts of reasons. But around 15% of them came back because they had no money and nowhere to go. In addition, there's another 90,000 of these 275,000 women who wanted to leave but didn't. The reasons they didn't leave are set out in detail in the report, but they include wanting to work things out, wanting the violence to end. For 22,000 of these 90,000 women, the reason was they had no money and no financial support.

We also need to note that almost 110,000 of these 275,000 women were not in employment, meaning they have no financial resources of their own, making them even more dependent on the violent partner. So, in support of the first part of my proposition, the numbers show that 275,000 women in Australia are living in violent relationships, and that as many as 34,805 of them would like to leave but have no money and nowhere to go.

If, for example, we had a national target of reducing the incidence of violence in Australia by, say, 100,000 a year, we could achieve a third of that target immediately by providing money for these 34,805 women to leave. As a result, these women are choosing to remain with the violence. We could help them to leave if we wanted to.

Now, let's look at the women who left. The ABS customised data shows that in 2016 there were 311,000 women with children under 18 who were living as single parents. Of these, 185,700 had experienced partner violence. That translates to a shocking 60% of single mothers who have experienced violence from a previous partner.

This is the headline finding of my report, and to understand just how shocking it is, I need to provide some context. Whenever you read about domestic violence in Australia, be it in newspaper articles or even government documents, the rate that is usually cited is the major finding of the ABS Personal Safety Survey 2016, and that is that one in six, or 17.3%, of Australian women aged over 18 have experienced partner violence since the age of 15. The trouble with that figure is that it includes all women in Australia, including those who've never had a partner. And let's not forget that the ABS definition of partner violence is violence perpetrated by a cohabiting partner—someone you lived with. So it's not very useful to include in our prevalence figures women who by definition could not have experienced partner violence. Yet we do—even the government does.

It makes more sense if we look at women who've ever had a partner, and when we do that, the figure increases to 22%. That's a terrible figure—22%, or almost one quarter of Australian women who have ever had a partner have experienced violence. I don't think most of us knew that. I certainly didn't.

There's another group who've suffered terrible rates of partner violence, and that is women who were once partnered and who now live alone. There are around 800,000 of them, and 40% of them experienced violence from a previous partner. This is a truly shocking figure, and this group deserves urgent investigation so that we understand more about the consequences of experiencing domestic violence in Australia. Who are these 800,000 women? I've never heard of them. They're not single mothers. Who are they? I hope somebody decides to make that a research topic. I'm not doing it because my focus was on single mothers, and an astounding 60% of the single mothers in my study have experienced partner violence. This is almost unbelievable. In fact, when I first saw the figures, I didn't believe them. I thought I was reading them wrong, because I'm not a statistician, so what would I know? But then I asked some statisticians and actually asked the ABS—correct, the figure's right.

The key thing for us to know is that these women were not single mothers at the time they experienced the violence. They were married or in a de facto relationship, because as we've already seen, the ABS definition of partner violence is sexual or physical violence or emotional abuse inflicted by a cohabiting partner. So what we have to understand is that these 185,700 women are single mothers because they left violent relationships.

In fact, as the ABS customised data shows, a full 75% of them say that the main reason they separated permanently from their partner was because of his threats or actual abuse, or his emotional control—what we now call coercive control. You will note that the number of women who stayed is greater than the number who left.

My report contains an enormous amount of detail, all provided and verified by the ABS. In other words, the ABS read my report when it was finished, just to make sure that I'd got everything right. They didn't give it the tick and say they loved it or anything like that, but I think they did, really. They don't often get this much attention. But what they did verify was that I had quoted and interpreted the figures correctly, and so we have the reassurance of the ABS on that.

There are details in the report that have never been published, many of which are very hard to read. We learn a lot about these women and what they have suffered, how the violence so often begins when the woman is pregnant, how it impacts on their daily lives and on their children. I'm not going to go into the details here because you can read the report—just download it, go to violenceorpoverty.com, and it's available and it's free. You'll see the terrific graphics and the data visualisations that really underscore the dire situation.

Instead, what I want to concentrate on tonight is the consequences for these women of having endured this violence. These are facts that we didn't know until the ABS provided this customised data. I will look mostly at the financial impact of having suffered violence. But first, I just wanted to make the important point that 67% of the women who experienced violence while living with a partner—that is, a total of 113,300 women—had children in their care at the time. And 88,600 of these women said their children saw or heard the violence. One of the things that's very troubling about this is that we know there is a high risk of intergenerational transmission of violence. Children who have either witnessed violence themselves against a parent, particularly against a mother, may themselves grow up to be either a victim or a perpetrator. Without intervention, some of these children may grow up to be either perpetrators or victims of violence themselves.

So this is a very important finding in itself, and for what it tells us about the likelihood of violence being transmitted into the future, unless we take immediate and drastic action now. This is an area that deserves a lot of further investigation, and as a society, we bear responsibility for ensuring that it does not happen.

But what I'll be presenting now are the financial consequences for these women of having left violent relationships. Perhaps the most dramatic and consequential changes are to their employment. The ABS figures show that of the women who had been assaulted by a previous partner in the past 10 years, 51% were not working at the time. 33% of them did not take time off work, although 15% did. In other words, as we saw with the 275,000 women who remained with violent partners, there appears to be a lower rate of employment among women who experience violence.

I've been very fortunate to have Professor Bruce Chapman of the ANU and his colleague Matt Taylor contribute to this report via some truly groundbreaking work they have done using HILDA data on the income consequences of leaving a violent relationship. As we know, the PSS—the Personal Safety Survey—is a cross-sectional study, giving us a snapshot of a situation but unable to track what happens to the women we're concerned about. HILDA is a longitudinal study, meaning that experiences can be tracked over time. Bottom line is that women who separated because of domestic violence suffer far greater drops in income than women who separated for other reasons.

Perhaps the most startling finding is that women who are single mothers due to leaving a violent relationship suffered a 45% drop in equivalised household income, compared with an 18% drop for childless women who did not experience domestic violence. Why is this the case? Is it because having experienced violence robs women of their confidence or self-esteem, makes them reluctant or fearful of re-engaging with the world? The fact is, we don't know. But we have to find out, both for the sake of the women themselves and for the economy. And this is going to be my next project.

Chapman and Taylor at the School of Business have postulated that their data suggests that the experience of partner violence impacts negatively on a woman's ability to secure or maintain employment post-separation. They propose to investigate this further. Their findings ought to be of particular interest to business, because business needs to involve itself in finding ways to bring these women into or back into the workforce. It's not enough just to have domestic violence leave—important and necessary as that is. We also need to come up with ways to help women who are not in the workforce. A full 60% of the 185,700 women who left violent relationships are in employment, but most of them are in such marginal employment that they do not have sufficient earnings to support themselves and their families. As a result, a full 50% of them rely entirely on government benefits as their main source of income.

And this is where the poverty comes in. Because as we know, payments for single parents are very low and have been made much worse by policy decisions by governments since 2006. I have adopted the term "policy-induced poverty," an extremely apt expression coined by Dr Susan Maury of Good Shepherd, to describe the financial situation in which single mothers find themselves. Perhaps the most confronting figure from the ABS shows that 48.1% of these single mothers are in the lowest quintile for equivalised weekly household earnings, meaning their weekly income is $460 or less.

The consequences are that these women are living in incredible financial stress. This is documented in various ways in the report, but I'd like to draw your attention to some figures that look at the cash flow problems these women experienced in their households over the previous 12 months. 60% of them have had one or more cash flow problems. For example, 78,000 couldn't pay their utility bill on time; 24,000 couldn't pay the rent or mortgage on time; 20,500 were unable to heat or cool their houses; 16,000 couldn't pay their credit card minimum; and 17,400 went without meals.

But to me, the most heartbreaking and revealing number is the 36,300 women who could not pay their car registration or insurance. It's very difficult, particularly if you're a single parent, to have employment if you don't have a car. If you can't drive to work, if you can't drive your kids to childcare, if you can't do all the normal things associated with most suburban lives—not all of us live in the inner city with public transport—most of the things involved in suburban living in this country require a car, and you're excluded from society in so many ways if you don't have a car. That is a particularly poignant finding and one that we have not been able to quantify until now.

So we've seen that the income is low, we've seen that women are having a great deal of trouble getting by. Something like 27,000 sought assistance from welfare organisations, while others were able to seek help from their families. These women, so many of whom left violent relationships and are now single mothers, are living in poverty—in some cases, extreme poverty—because of government payments policy.

Starting in 1973, when the Whitlam government introduced the supporting mothers benefit, single parents were treated with dignity, their payments gradually increased to the pension rate, and they were not required to seek employment, as it was recognised that their single parenting was in itself a job. Now, there were various changes over the decades, but none so drastic or so cruel as the 2006 "welfare to work" reforms, whereby the Howard government decreed that once your youngest child turns eight, women on what was then called the parenting payment would have to go onto the dole, then known as Newstart, which paid considerably less. From then on, these women were no longer seen or treated as single mothers—they were unemployed. Current recipients were grandfathered, but all new applicants fell under the new system.

Two things happened after Labor came to power in 2007 which made things even worse. First, in 2009, Kevin Rudd changed the indexation arrangements, decoupling the link to male weekly earnings and instead tying indexation to the CPI, which was lower. The result was that the gap between parenting payment and the unemployment payment widened even further every six months, and has been doing so ever since 2009. Then, in 2013, the Gillard government removed the grandfathering, which resulted in some 80,000 women immediately being forced onto Newstart—what's now called JobSeeker. This catastrophic move radically changed the system that previously had acknowledged these women were parents, not unemployed workers. It decreased their fortnightly incomes immediately by about $200, and via the new indexation arrangements by increasing amounts every six months.

At the moment, the current rates of base payments (as of March 2022) for the parenting payment (single) is $892 a fortnight. For JobSeeker (single with dependent children), that is a single mother whose youngest child is eight or above, the rate is $691 a fortnight. You can compare that with the age pension—a couple who are on $1,448 a fortnight. Everyone says age pensioners do it hard, but the age pension couple does not have kids who grow out of their clothes every six months, who eat massive amounts, and who demand the latest sneakers and mobile phones. Even when you take into account that the woman on JobSeeker with two children aged 10 and 12 will get some extra money—some family payment benefits, a bit of rent assistance if she's renting, and an energy supplement of $9.50, which is fairly meaningless given today's energy prices—the total amount she receives is $1,189.66 a fortnight.

I'm throwing a lot of figures at you, but this really is about the numbers. Just to spell it out, the amount of money that this single mother with two children aged 10 and 12 receives is $258 a fortnight less than the age pensioner couple gets. You can buy a fair bit of food for that. So what this means is that these women are trying to get by on very low payments, while at the same time being subjected to the humiliations—and I would say the cruelty—of the mutual obligations while trying to raise kids.

Of course, we all know about single mothers—the stigmas so often attached to them, the income difficulties they have, and that so many of their kids are living in poverty. What we didn't know, and now cannot unknow, is the connection between that poverty and the fact that a very large number of these women are single mothers because they have left violent relationships. We say to women who are in violent relationships, "Why doesn't she leave?" Well, this is one reason she doesn't leave. A lot of those 275,000 women we talked about in the beginning, they know what will happen if they leave, and so they have to make this terrible choice about enduring the violence, knowing it could escalate in intensity and frequency—it could put their very lives at risk.

We know from the ANROWS study of social attitudes to violence that some 32% of Australians think that a woman who stays in a violent relationship is partly responsible for what happens to her. So as well as the violence, these women also have to deal with the stigma of being a victim. And we also know that with so few of those women working full-time, or working at all, they had very few financial options, and so are therefore pretty much stuck in that situation.

On the other hand, those women who have left—75% of those who leave, leave without taking any property or assets. That means clothes, household goods like washing machines, but it also means kids' school reports, family photos, the stuff that tells our story and which in an ideal world we would pass on to our kids and their kids. Those women who have chosen to leave, often for fear of their lives, simply pick up the kids and run. They've gone to a refuge if they can get in. We know that women's shelters currently turn away 50% of the women who seek emergency assistance. They've gone to family or friends. We have figures that show a lot of these women and their kids have slept rough—they've slept in caravan parks, in abandoned buildings, or in their cars. It's a shocking situation.

This is what we are saying to Australian women who experience violence: stay and put up with the violence and the stigma of being an abused woman, or leave and have a 50% chance of living in poverty. The thing that's particularly galling, and the thing that shocked me the most about doing this report and the findings, is that because of the indexation arrangements, the situation just keeps getting worse and worse and worse. What I've tried to show tonight is that the consequences of leaving a violent relationship have been demonstrated by the ABS data to put women and their children into a very precarious financial situation. They may have escaped the violence—although in fact 36% still continue to experience violence from their previous partner for the first year after leaving—but around 50% of them are burdened with this policy-induced poverty.

Whatever policy reform solutions we arrive at, we still have to look at the overall situation and ask ourselves whether we are happy as a society to be trading off violence for poverty. That is the proposition, and it's not one that any of us can any longer ignore. The challenge for all of us is: what are we going to do about it? Thank you.

[Applause]

My name is Professor Carl Rhodes. I'm Dean here at UTS Business School. On behalf of the school and our friends at the Centre for Social Justice and Inclusion at UTS, it's our honour to be hosting this really important discussion. I also extend our thanks to the Paul Ramsay Foundation for their support of and research into what is clearly an urgent and important issue.

I also acknowledge that we are here in a business school—perhaps not the place you would normally expect to have a discussion like this—but to draw attention to, as Anne has clearly showed, domestic violence is intertwined with economic and financial justice. It's very much an economic issue, as the report is entitled, resulting in the choice for many between violence and poverty.

Anne’s very clear in showing that this issue of domestic violence with single mothers is far worse than we may have imagined. And this clearly is no time for ethical bystanding. The report is a harrowing read. If you haven't read it, I suggest that you do, but also a call to immediate action—what can be done? So this evening, we're delighted to welcome guest panellists to join Anne and invite them to join me here with Anne on stage.

Firstly, we have the Honourable Anna Bligh, CEO of the Australian Banking Association. She's a respected Australian leader and former Premier of Queensland, an advocate for education and the role of women in public life and services for the not-for-profit sector. Welcome, Anna. We also have Leanne Ho, CEO of Economic Justice Australia. She is a human rights lawyer and leader in the community and pro bono legal sectors, and has previously worked as Legal Adviser to United Nations peacekeeping missions and its human rights advisory panel. Welcome, Leanne.

We're going to spend about half an hour or so talking about some of the issues raised by Anne’s research. Anna, I might start with you, if you don't mind. Financial institutions are clearly a key part of the economy and the fabric of our society. Do you think financial institutions have a role to play in helping tackle violence against women and their children, or other forms of domestic violence?

Absolutely. Not only do I think they have a role to play, they are playing a significant role for many women. There's certainly much more that could be done. But first of all, let me say, I think there are few better ways to control someone than to ensure they have no access whatsoever to money. I worked in a women's refuge in 1981 and 1982 in Brisbane—40 years ago. I was surprised how many women would call and say, "I've got an hour, he's out of the house, I've got an hour to get out, I don't have any money." We would just say, "Come, get in a taxi, we'll pay it when you get here." I was a very young worker at the time, I didn't have much money either, but we're literally talking about women who didn't have five cents, didn't have a bank account, didn't have a single coin in their purse. That really means you can't do anything. In those days, it meant you couldn't use a public phone. It really is a way of complete control.

There are plenty of women in these circumstances who have some of their own money, but it's caught up in things like joint accounts, which are then controlled by their partner. The role of financial institutions, particularly banks and credit unions and the like, has evolved over the last 20 or so years and is evolving further. Australian banks started in 2016 putting in place a sector-wide guideline on dealing with these issues, basically saying this is not an issue on which banks should compete. It shouldn't matter who you bank with; you should be able to walk into the door of any bank and expect to be treated in a certain way and be entitled to certain rights and entitlements.

The guideline sets out a lot of details—some ways are really boring, but can actually make a woman's life much worse if she's leaving. Things like banks will not pass on to debt collectors any debt that's associated with a family that's experienced violence. They have abilities to do things like freeze accounts, particularly freezing joint accounts, until they can work out whose money it is before that account gets drained and the woman ends up even closer to poverty.

Another interesting thing that's confronted banks in the last couple of years is that perpetrators can be incredibly relentless in the way they pursue and stalk and threaten and control. Banks have found—in 2019, the Commonwealth Bank identified that perpetrators were using their online banking platform as a vehicle of abuse for victims. For any of you who've ever made a transaction, you can put in the reference a note to yourself. What they found was that there were very high numbers—they found it through one of their customers they were reconstructing accounts for. They found 8,000 of their customers who were experiencing sometimes 100 of these messages a day. The perpetrator was sending 10 cent transactions, using really low-value transactions, not to transfer money but to send an abusive, threatening message.

Every bank is now working to change their terms and conditions—if they identify that, they will remove you from their banking platform if you are the perpetrator. So, it's not only that banks and financial institutions, including insurance and superannuation, have all got to think about the role they can play. They have to know what their role is. It's not to work through with a woman some of the complex emotional issues around leaving or the experience of violence, but on the other side, what can we do to make sure you are kept as far away from abject poverty as possible? Banks are really well placed. These are people who know how to do this, who can really assist women with basic things.

We had to get AUSTRAC agreement—AUSTRAC is the regulator that regulates money laundering law. Any of you who've opened an account or got a new credit card, you'll know you have to take 100 points of identification. The number of women who leave a violent relationship where she doesn't have access to her passport or driver's licence, or if she does, she doesn't have access to it—almost impossible to get a bank account for the bank to be consistent with the 100 points requirement. Last year, we negotiated with AUSTRAC that banks can use other forms of identification, like statutory declarations from relevant people, because if a woman doesn't have a bank account, she can't get as meagre as it is—it's better than not having anything.

So that was quite a stumbling block, and it's those things—they're all little tiny things, but if you've just left a really violent relationship with no money, no bank account, or money in the bank account that's controlled by a violent partner, it makes it much harder to make a life for yourself and your children. So yes, absolutely critical role to play.

Thank you. I might turn to you now, Leanne, and move from the private sector to the public sector. Anne's report very much highlights how we have an inadequate social security system, which means that many women don't leave violent relationships or have to retur