Following the 2009 Victorian Black Saturday bushfires, more than half the women in one study reported experiencing domestic and family violence. Many had never experienced it before.
The protests carried on for days and continue to simmer in a country whose social fabric has been torn by toxic masculinity and a violent colonial past.
Australia first needs a better understanding of what coercive control is and how to respond to it. If law reform is rushed, victims will be put at risk.
Technology plays a major role in violence against women and girls.
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Stay-at-home orders and social distancing make technology all the more important for maintaining human connections. They also make it easier for abusers to use technology against their victims.
Women may delay leaving an abusive partner if they co-own a pet.
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Women who lived in more deprived neighbourhoods during the first 18 years of their lives were nearly 40% more likely to experience partner violence in early adulthood.
Salon workers – who are usually women – report clients sharing details of domestic violence, health issues and heartbreak.
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While popular portrayals of hairdressers and beauticians present them as “bimbos”, salons can also provide a refuge for clients to share painful realities.
A typical informal settlement in South Africa.
EFE-EPA/Nic Bothma
Women and children remain vulnerable to harm even after intimate violence has occurred. Coordinating a community’s response can help avoid educational, employment, social, housing and legal problems.
Many behaviours associated with coercive control are not yet criminal in Australia, even though the impact on victims is profound.
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New laws in the UK have led to convictions for a range of deplorable behaviours used to control partners in relationships. It’s time Australia reconsidered introducing such legislation here.
Some men don’t realise their abusive behaviour constitutes domestic violence. This needs to change.
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Very few women, especially those married, feel protected by the domestic violence laws in Sierra Leone.
Dementia patients are often the perpetrators and often the victims of abuse. Research also shows that a medical history of head injury can more than double the risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease in some populations, even after many years.
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From aggressive patients with Alzheimer’s to frustrated caregivers, dementia is increasingly entwined with violence in private homes and residential facilities.
Most dollars spent on fighting domestic violence go to the criminal justice system.
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As lawmakers debate the future of the primary federal program aimed at ending domestic violence, one scholar says the criminal system supported by the legislation isn’t the way to stop that violence.
Contraception is sometimes controlled in abusive relationships.
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Domestic violence in pregnancy not only causes distress and trauma for the mother, it also poses serious risks for the baby’s health and development.
One third of women will suffer violence at the hands of someone they love, sometimes resulting in traumatic brain injury. Here, women lay on the street to protest this violence, in Pamplona in northern Spain, in 2015.
(AP Photo/Alvaro Barrientos)
Globally, one third of women suffer violence at the hands of someone they love. And for those who survive domestic abuse, traumatic head injury can be the devastating outcome.
It’s not the leading cause but it is the leading contributor.
Simone Ziaziaris/AAP
Are claims that intimate partner violence is the leading cause of death for Australian women aged 18-44 substantiated?
On International Women’s Day in 2016, a demonstrator carries a cross that reads in Spanish: “For you, for all” to protest violence against women. International Women’s Day is much more widely celebrated in Latin America than it is in Canada and the United States, but injustices for women is a global phenomenon.
(AP Photo/Eduardo Verdugo)
Women everywhere have low status relative to men. This is a global phenomenon and there are no exceptions, and there is much work to be done in Canada and everywhere. The time is now.