Securing women’s lives: Taking men’s lethal violence against women seriously

The toll of gendered violence, especially men’s lethal violence against women, has sparked marches in cities throughout Australia.

Anger and emotion remain palpable amongst protesters, advocates, feminist commentators, and women whose sense of security continues to be eroded in the face of the fatal attacks.

Perpetrators have been strangers, (ex)intimate partners and known men. Killings have taken place at home, in public, at work, in cities, the suburbs, and rural and regional. The common denominator is gender; the perpetrators are men, and victims are women.  

The PM responds: Gendered violence a ‘national crisis’

In the wake of the protests, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has declared gendered violence a “national crisis”, and announced almost $1 billion of initiatives to assist victim-survivors and address online misogyny and pornography. 

While welcome, these measures do not address the foundational issues that have seen gendered violence marginalised in national security frameworks and resourcing.

Gendered violence takes a toll

Men’s violence against women is not new, and lethal violence is only the tip of the iceberg of everyday gendered violence, particularly intimate partner violence, which is the most common type of violence against women globally.

The most recent data indicates that the rate of women killed by an intimate partner in Australia increased by 28% in 2022-23, compared to the previous year.

Gendered violence as a national security threat

One striking aspect of the recent killings of women is the growing rejection of the framing of such violence as “private” violence that doesn’t amount to as serious a national security threat as other types of violence more readily recognised as a “public” threat, such as terrorism or mass casualty attacks.

The different framings attached to gendered violence and terrorism were underlined by the decisions regarding security labels attached to recent stabbing attacks.  

The alleged non-lethal stabbings of a priest, bishop, and a parishioner in a church in Sydney were promptly labelled a terrorist incident, while the stabbings at a shopping centre at Bondi Junction Sydney, of six people, five of them women, with a further 12 injured, only two days before the church attack were not labelled terrorism.

Yet, police maintained that women were “obviously” the perpetrator’s primary target. While commentators have argued the legal definition of terrorism requires an ideological or religious motivation on the part of the perpetrator, the reality is that misogyny, which may amount to an ideology, is often overlooked as a motivating factor by police and security agencies.

One of the demands of the recent protest marches is that the federal government declares gendered violence a national emergency, and thus be embedded in Australia’s national security framework in the same way terrorism is.

Gendered violence as everyday terrorism

The argument that some types of gendered violence should be considered a type of terrorism is now being widely discussed. The argument goes beyond just the stabbings in Bondi Junction to consider the everyday terror/ism and toll of intimate partner violence. 

The lethal toll of intimate partner violence is far higher than that of terrorist attacks in Australia, though the former gets less investigative and media attention, and far less resourcing and funding.

Shifting our understanding of gendered violence, misogyny, and national security

The role of misogyny in mass casualty attacks and terrorism, and the connections with gendered violence and how best to counter these threats, are only just beginning to attract research and security, and police attention.

Feminist researchers and activists, however, have long challenged the private-public dichotomy, arguing instead that there’s a continuum of violence that connects the dots between violence of different types and scales.

The authors provided an expert report on the links between gendered violence and mass casualty incidents to the Canadian Mass Casualty Commission, established in 2020 in the wake of an attack in which 22 people were shot and killed by one man.

As is typical in such attacks, his first victim was his intimate partner. 

The thrust of our submission was that national security framings that categorise gendered violence as “private” violence and terrorism, and mass casualty attacks as “public” violence are contrary to reality and thus add to public risk, especially, but not exclusively, the risk to women.

The dichotomous approach undermines our ability to understand, prevent, and respond to all forms of mass casualty attacks and terrorism. It also reinforces the tendency to deny, minimise, excuse, and normalise gender-based violence.

The Mass Casualty Commission adopted our gendered approach to better-understanding, preventing, and responding to gendered violence and mass casualty attacks.  

It concluded that “[s]eeing ‘public’ and ‘private’ violence” as two separate phenomena is incorrect and dangerous.

All too often gender-based, intimate partner violence and family violence are the precursor to the forms of violence that are more readily seen as being of broader “public concern”. We ignore these forms of violence at our collective peril.

The connections between ‘public’ and ‘private’ violence

The connections between gendered violence, terrorism and mass casualty attacks can be found in the targeting of specific women, often as the first victim, and the history of gender-based violence in the backgrounds of men who commit terrorism and mass casualty attacks.

It can also be discerned in the explicit misogynist motivation of some mass casualty attackers, and the intersection of misogynistic motivations with other types of violent extremism, such as white supremacy, that are more widely recognised as motivation for mass casualty attacks.

Women’s security and national security are intimately connected

The connections between gender-based violence and mass casualty attacks have until recently been hidden in plain sight.

Today, a small but convincing body of gender-informed research brings the connections between these two species of male violence into sharp relief.

The dichotomous thinking regarding “private” and “public” violence has obscured the continuities between these different but linked forms of violence.

The key to better-understanding, preventing, and responding to mass casualty attacks and gendered violence is to abandon the dichotomy, to recognise the flow that exists between different types of violence, and to ensure funding and investigative resources and powers are directed effectively to all critical national security areas.