Experts warn victim-survivors wrongly identified as perpetrators by police

Due to housing shortages for victim survivors, average shelter stays are dropping to as low as one year. Permanent Australian residents stayed in shelters for an average of 84 days, and temporary visa holders had an average shelter period of 130 days; “two services reported the average as high as 365 days”.

Seven thousand children and young people received support during the reporting period, but around 80 per cent of services did not have a dedicated team or individual to support children and half were not funded for such a role.

Leading Australian and global domestic violence expert Professor Kate Fitz-Gibbon said the report’s findings reflected a known problem with misidentification.

“These data from the industry confirm what our research has documented: that misidentification of victimized female survivors occurs far too frequently,” he said. “It is deeply troubling that this report measures the problem at such a high rate.”

Fitz-Gibbon, former director of the Monash Center for the Prevention of Gender and Domestic Violence and current chair of Respect Victoria, called for urgent action to reduce the prevalence and risk of victim misidentification.

Before introducing any new laws on coercive control offences, he said, “we must ensure that our existing laws and policies are working effectively to ensure safety and prevent harm”.

Police misidentification of victims often occurs when police misidentify the attacker due to factors such as misinterpretation of self-defense as aggression, victim blaming, communication barriers such as language or mental state, manipulation of the perpetrator, and discriminatory views.

Victoria Police predictions Misidentification occurs in about 12 percent of cases.

The report comes after Family Court chief judge Will Alstergren said men needed to stop being complacent about violence against women, which was significantly under-reported and was at crisis point.

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Approximately 70 percent of cases that come to court involve allegations of domestic violence.

“The level of risk and harm is absolutely unacceptable,” Alstergren said, and men needed to make efforts to reduce it.

Alstergren is holding a symposium at the Commonwealth Civil Courts on Friday, attended by 100 leaders from male-dominated sectors such as business, sports, education, law and government. They will discuss strategies to engage Australian men in tackling domestic violence across society.

“Men must now step up and stop being complacent and understand that this is not a campaign against them, it is for them: this is the problem of the whole society, not the problem of women,” Alstergren said.

He said he regularly attended events about ending family violence at which almost all the attendees are women, and called on male leaders to engage with the “wicked” problem.

“This [family violence] It’s truly shocking when you see it up close. “It’s not just people dying, it’s hundreds and thousands of women and children that are affected so badly, and you see many of them not recovering,” he said. “It is absolutely unacceptable that we have this level of risk and harm.”

Professor Kelsey Hegarty, director of the Safe Families Center at the University of Melbourne and joint chair of domestic violence prevention at the university and the Royal Women’s Hospital, said survivors of domestic violence had mixed views about coercive control laws, “but I certainly think it could lead to misidentification,” he said.

“Men who use coercive control are often using physical, sexual and other things; certainly isolation, monitoring, extortion and financial control, but when you take that alone and make it a separate entity or [criminalised] “There will probably be women accused of this behavior even though they are not guilty.”

Governments in Australia have been under pressure to introduce independent coercive control laws since the 2020 murder of Queensland woman Hannah Clarke and her three young children by her estranged husband Rowan Baxter.

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Baxter exerted significant oppressive control over Clarke before burning her and her three young children to death in the family car and then killing himself.

Coercive control has been outlawed as a standalone offense in NSW, Queensland and Tasmania.

Safe and Equal’s Farha said marginalized women would likely already be mistakenly identified as perpetrators and would be most at risk of being mistakenly targeted by any new coercive control laws that could be manipulated by criminals.

“We know this is likely to affect Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women, women from immigrant and refugee communities, women from LGBTIQA+ communities and women with disabilities, all of whom are often mistakenly identified by police as primary aggressors rather than those in need of safety,” Farha said.

Antoinette Braybrook, chief executive of Djirra, an Aboriginal community-controlled domestic violence service, said frontline workers were seeing a worrying increase in racist targeting of Aboriginal women as primary aggressors.

“Women are criminalized and imprisoned, their children are taken away, their safety is ignored,” she said.

“Criminalizing coercive control will compound this harm. It will perpetuate and exacerbate the systemic violence and racism that Aboriginal women already experience, and create new ways for the system to be used against women by perpetrators.”

Industry experts argue coercive control is already an offense falling under Victoria’s wide-ranging family violence laws.

“We truly beg both of them [the government and opposition] to listen to experts in the industry about the potential consequences, especially the potential for misidentification,” Farha said.

A government spokesman said: “Coercive control is insidious, abusive and manipulative. We stand with victims of domestic violence and always will.

“In Victoria, we have a nation-leading system focused on recognizing coercive control and holding perpetrators to account, so we are well placed to introduce the stand-alone coercive control offense and will work with the industry to get the settings right.”

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