Gender violence plagues Australia, government announces new measures

We turn now to the subject of domestic violence top of the political agenda in Australia. This comes in the wake of a multiple fatal stabbing and protests that followed. 5 women were among six people stabbed to death in the shopping mall in Sydney last month. There’d been protests during the past week against a rise in violence against women in Australia and Prime Minister has called it a national crisis. Tom Connelly joins us from our news desk. More on this one. Tom The Sydney stabbing made headlines about how widespread is this problem of domestic violence in Australia. So after a decades long trend in reduction, male violence against women has surged again in Australia. Last year 34 women were killed by their intimate partner, which is a 28% jump in the last 12 months despite only a 4% rise in overall homicides. That means that one woman is killed on average every four days now in Australia. And these figures has have led thousands of people to take to the streets and protest. And what we’ve heard them say is that they’re sick of the fact that misogyny and gender violence is still so ingrained in Australian civil society, in the Australian culture. That’s also led the Prime Minister to call a snap cabinet meeting and call the the issue, as you said, a national crisis. So let’s take a listen to to what he had to say Today is about who we are as a nation and as a society. We recognise that governments need to act, but we also recognise that this is an issue for the whole of society, not just for governments. It’s an issue for civil society. It’s an issue for the media. It’s an issue for all of us to work together in the national interest to deal with what is a scourge of violence against women, an issue for the whole society, says Anthony Albanese, the Australian Prime Minister, Tom, He’s calling it a national crisis. What’s he doing to stop it? So the Prime Minister has announced a $925 million package to help victims of violence leave abusive relationships. That includes so-called leaving violence payments of $5000 which come with risk assessments and safety planning. So essentially, this $5000 can especially help people who may not be able to afford housing if they were to leave an abusive partner. But what the government has really pledged to to change in this issue in regards to this context is that it’s they want to flood social media with positive influences on how boys should treat women rather than negative ones. So that includes restricting personalities that might be spreading misogyny, for example. And as part of this, the online watchdog the E Safety Commissioner, has developed a pilot program which will restrict access to pornography and violent video games for minors. To do this, they’re going to look at methods used by the UK recently legislation that they rolled out which uses third parties like mobile phone providers and and banks to verify people’s ages. That comes with its own hurdles. It would mean that pornography sites, for example, would have access to far more personal identification documents, drawing privacy concerns. And on top of that, the E Safety Commissioner is currently in a legal battle with Elon Musk over a censorship debate over a video of a terrorist attack that happened a couple of weeks ago, which is which is on X platform. There is a massive problem, isn’t there, of that issue of violent pornography being easily available to kids of any age on any kind of social media platform, which is a massive issue that needs to be addressed clearly. Also, this issue of how boys think about girls and treat girls from very, very early ’cause it’s it’s this behaviour you often learn from your parents and from people around you, so these things need to be changed and that takes a lot of time, doesn’t it? This isn’t an exclusively Australian issue though, is it? As as we all know, how does Australia compare to other countries? So that’s right. Obviously it’s an international issue. It’s interesting to look at how other countries have tackled it. Spain, for example, have developed a feminism department, which means that politicians, people working for the government who specialized in things like gender violence, can work closely with local authorities. Spain also changed legislation 2 years ago to eradicate the difference between rape and sexual assault as a further deterrent against sexual violence. But what we see in Nordic countries like Sweden and Norway are these early intervention programs. That’s where they implement education on young boys, on how to treat women from a young age. And these programs are in line actually with what protesters are saying in Australia, which is that this is not a problem, that the responsibility falls on women for them to change their behaviour. It’s on educating boys and men on how to treat them properly. Tom, thank you very much indeed. Tom Canetti with that analysis of the problem, focusing on Australia. But it’s not absolutely an Australian problem, as we were just discussing. Tom, thank you very much indeed. And do keep across developments for us. Tom Canetti from our news desk, Stanford Sport.