Eight years ago Australia had a wake-up call on family violence. So how did we end up here again?

Rally calling for action to end violence against women outside Parliament House in Canberra, 28 April, 2024. Photograph: Lukas Coch/AAP

At least 27 women have been killed in Australia so far in 2024, prompting a record number of people to gather at Melbourne’s Family Violence Memorial on Thursday in collective grief and despair.

“Tonight we light not one candle but many,” Antoinette Braybrook, the chief executive of the Aboriginal family violence organisation Djirra, said in a speech ahead of the vigil.

“For every woman, for every Aboriginal woman, whose life has been violently taken. For the children who will never again be embraced by their mum’s love.”

The death toll, with most alleged to be at the hands of someone the women knew, is more than double what it was at the same time in 2023.

The vigil, organised by the family violence response organisation Safe Steps, occurs on the same date in Melbourne every year but it is usually filled with workers from the sector. This time hundreds of members of the public joined them. Similar public vigils were held around the nation.

Victoria has been particularly devastated by the recent deaths of Samantha Murphy, Hannah McGuire and Rebecca Young in and around the regional town of Ballarat. Young died in a suspected murder-suicide; McGuire’s former boyfriend has been charged with her murder. The man charged with murdering Murphy was not her partner, but her disappearance while out jogging heightened the grief and fury about violence against women.

It is galling for a state that in 2016 announced the first royal commission into family violence in the wake of a series of family violence-related deaths, including the murder of 11-year-old Luke Batty by his father following numerous attempts by Luke’s mother, Rosie Batty, to get help from police.

In response to the royal commission’s 227 recommendations, a record $1.9bn investment was promised by the Victorian government in 2016, spread across four years, to address family violence.

Many in the sector felt a comprehensive, system-wide approach was being taken for the first time and that meaningful, sustained change would result.

The acting chief executive of the Victorian family support agency Berry Street, Jenny McNaughton, recalls the organisation’s’ family violence response staff grew from 20 workers to 200.

“But as services grew so did demand,” she says.

“Today we are unable to meet all of that demand and it means we aren’t always able to speak to women as soon as they want to speak to us. But that is also when we’ve got the most possibility of changing outcomes.”

And Braybrook says “eight years on, Aboriginal women still experience violence at vastly disproportionate rates”.

“Djirra is unable to meet this demand.”

‘How could we have gotten to them earlier?’

Of the 10 women killed in Australia in the past weeks, six were only recently in touch with Berry Street asking for help, McNaughton says.

“How could we have gotten to them earlier?” she says on her way to the Safe Steps vigil. Her emotion makes it difficult for her to get the words out.

“I know our program has been able to save lives, I’m certain of it, I’ve seen it,” she says. “But what would have happened for these women if we just got in earlier? If we had time to help them with safety planning so they knew where to go if things got worse?”

That planning takes time, McNaughton says. Family violence and support workers need to identify times when the woman’s perpetrator is not present, and when they can take precautions against the likelihood that she is being tracked electronically.

Once frontline workers can speak to women safely, they can build a safety plan, connecting them with Centrelink and with maternal and child health stations, where more family violence support workers are often stationed.

McNaughton says one of the most significant investments as a result of the royal commission’s recommendations has been the creation and rollout of the Orange Door network, which are support and safety hubs where anyone experiencing family violence can access a range of services in one place.

It means victims don’t need to go to multiple services and constantly retell their story. More than 400,000 people, including about 170,000 children, have received support through Orange Door since it opened in 2018.

“They’re innovative,” McNaughton says, “But they haven’t been a cure-all. Bringing people from different organisations into one service is complicated.”

She says the staff at Orange Door services also have demands from the organisation they work for, whether that’s a legal, housing or family violence body.

If those services aren’t well integrated, staffed and funded, the Orange Door service simply becomes an entry point where women are triaged and left waiting for the support services to respond, McNaughton says.

“I think the idea of you only needing to tell your story once, that any door will be the right door, hasn’t quite come to fruition,” she says. “I don’t think we’ve been able to nail collaborative practice just yet.”

In the meantime, she says, demand keeps increasing.

The Victorian government committed to implementing all the royal commission recommendations, but it has been a different story in NSW.

The chief executive of Domestic Violence NSW, Delia Donovan, says many of the key initiatives proposed in the state government’s 2016 blueprint for reform remain unaddressed and unfunded.

She says there has been no investment in a comprehensive primary prevention strategy; co-designing reforms with victim-survivors; specialist homelessness services and affordable housing for victim-survivors; specific supports for children; or culturally specific support for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders.

“In NSW we are struggling with an abundance of words and an absence of action,” she says. “For decades we have been critically underfunded.”

Several family violence experts Guardian Australia spoke to across jurisdictions say many crucial services are still waiting to hear if they will be funded for a further year in the days before state budgets are delivered.

That funding uncertainty makes longterm planning impossible, including knowing whether existing staff can be retained.

‘Terrifying’ tracking capability

McNaughton, along with every expert spoken to by Guardian Australia, says another significant barrier to addressing family violence has been the rapid development and unprecedented sophistication of technology.

“There are so many different kinds of hidden cameras and hidden listening devices we are finding men are using now to even monitor women in their workplace that just didn’t even enter our minds at the time of the royal commission, and we have people that do sweeps of houses and find devices that are so advanced and so small,” she says.

Serina McDuff, the acting chief executive of the family violence prevention organisation Respect Victoria, agrees.

“With the latest technology, it is so devastatingly easy now how you can wander into any kind of electronics shop or buy online really simple, cheap trackers that can hide in cars or handbags.

“Tracking capability on smartphones is extraordinary, always advancing, and so terrifying,” she says.

“Think about what that means for frontline family violence services during the risk assessment and safety planning process, to have a whole additional realm of new technology to review into the equation, and then the kind of support that’s needed to try to put the safety planning in place and get new, safe devices to women.”

McNaughton says she recently heard about one woman so desperate to escape the control exerted by her perpetrator, who was tracking her, that she took her own life on the eve of his release from jail.

“She left a note, and had determined that it was safer for her child for her not to be there, because she knew that her perpetrator wanted to terrorise her and that he could do that through targeting her child,” she says.

“That death to me was not a suicide. It is another woman that has been killed through family violence.”

The growth of online platforms where harmful attitudes towards women are perpetuated adds another layer of concern.

“Community attitudes have a long way to go and aren’t shifting as fast as we would have hoped,” Donovan says.

McDuff says respectful relationships education became a core component of the Victorian curriculum in 2016, with about 2,000 schools now running the program.

“But that alone is not enough to drive community change on harmful gender stereotypes and harmful representations of relationships perpetuated online,” she says.

“It is pervasive and year-on-year it’s reaching our children younger and younger, the violent pornography on devices, and online influencers such as [self-professed misogynist and alleged human trafficker] Andrew Tate, where youth are learning about relationships.

“We’re seeing a change in behaviour among young men in schools who subscribe to these beliefs. We know female teachers who are leaving the profession because boys in the classroom who listen to Andrew Tate are acting in disruptive ways, in ways that are harassment. These behaviours are having real-world impact.”

A report from Jesuit Social Services, published in February, revealed that men who subscribe to harmful forms of masculinity are 33 times more likely to have used fear to coerce a partner into sex, and five times more likely to have perpetrated physical violence.

It’s the attitudes learned online and in the community that “makes the situation so much worse” and contributes to boys and men feeling entitled to stalk, abuse and harass women, and even to kill them, McNaughton says.

‘Stopping the violence before it starts’

Funding for prevention is crucial, McNaughton, McDuff, Braybrook and Donovan say.

On Wednesday, Anthony Albanese announced $925m towards helping victims of violence leave abusive relationships, and $6.5m for the eSafety commissioner to protect children from pornography and other age-restricted online services.

But there was nothing allocated towards a comprehensive primary prevention strategy to address the key drivers of domestic and family violence that Donovan and others have been calling for.

“Primary prevention means stopping the violence before it starts,” Donovan says.

“Quite simply sexual, domestic and family violence is a symptom of wider gendered inequality. One of the big factors contributing to the perpetuation of violence is intergenerational trauma and poor role modelling of what a healthy relationship looks like – particularly for children victim-survivors.”

McNaughton hopes that given the public, media and politicians are once again galvanised in response to tragedy, this funding will come.

“I do feel like, as with the royal commission, this is also an important moment in time,” she says.

“But to be honest, I am a little burned out and I am just hopeful that we are going to, as a society, keep up the momentum this time. Because it’s hard to see the impact of recent events on those frontline workers who are doing this work day in and day out, and not enough is changing.

“And I’m worried that even today we are not quite as up in arms as we were about this issue back in 2016. We should be. But I just wonder if the community is almost desensitised to violence against women, because there is just so much.”

Her voice cracks and she pauses as she tries to hold her tears back ahead of the vigil.

“It’s just been a lot of deaths. I don’t know how to express it other than that … it’s just been a lot.”

• In Australia, the national family violence counselling service is on 1800 737 732. In the UK, call the national domestic abuse helpline on 0808 2000 247, or visit Women’s Aid. In the US, the domestic violence hotline is 1-800-799-SAFE (7233).