The Numbers We Can’t Look Away From: Domestic Violence and Femicide in Australia

I’ve sat down to write this piece three times now, and deleted it twice. Partly because it’s heavy, and partly because I know most of you come to lifestyle, style and travel inspiration, not this. But the more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve realised that avoiding it is exactly the problem. So today, just this once, we’re talking about something that isn’t pretty or aspirational. We’re talking about the women being killed in this country, and why, three years into a supposed national plan to stop it, the numbers still aren’t moving the way they should.

As it stands, 37 women have been killed by men in Australia so far this year. That’s roughly one every five days. According to Sherele Moody, who founded Australian Femicide Watch and has tracked these deaths since 2000, more than 1,300 women and girls have lost their lives to family or domestic violence in that time. In 2024, the toll was almost two women a week killed by a current or former partner.

The national picture from the Australian Institute of Criminology’s Homicide in Australia data shows 58 women were victims of domestic homicide in 2023, up from 35 in 2022 and 33 in 2021. Domestic homicides now make up around two in five of all homicide victims recorded nationally. Family and domestic violence offenders also rose 8 per cent in the 2024-25 financial year, the largest annual jump since national reporting began, with 97,800 offenders recorded by police, more than three-quarters of them men.

These aren’t abstract figures. Behind every one is a woman who had a name, a family, a life she was building, the same as any of us.

Because the way each state records and defines domestic and family violence differs slightly, the numbers aren’t perfectly comparable, but the picture is consistent enough to be telling.

New South Wales and Victoria report the highest overall numbers of domestic violence incidents, which partly reflects their larger populations. In Victoria in 2024, a third of all homicide victims died in a family or domestic violence context, and sexual assault victims recorded by police rose 13 per cent on the year before. NSW introduced a standalone coercive control offence in July 2024, and the state’s monitoring reports since have tracked patterns of controlling behaviour that were previously invisible in the data.

Queensland recorded 94 homicide victims in 2024, and almost half of those deaths were family or domestic violence related. Assaults with a domestic violence element made up three in five of all recorded assaults in the state that year, the highest proportion of any jurisdiction I could find comparable data for. Regional and remote Queensland communities are consistently flagged as under-resourced for support services.

Western Australia and South Australia report similarly high rates, particularly in remote and Indigenous communities, where access to refuges, legal support and police response can be limited by distance alone.

The Northern Territory has the highest per capita rate of domestic violence in the country, driven by both remoteness and the disproportionate impact of violence on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women, who remain significantly over-represented as victims of intimate partner homicide nationally.

Tasmania, despite its small population, continues to report troubling rates that mirror the broader national pattern.

In 2023, the federal government launched the National Plan to End Violence against Women and Children, a ten year strategy. Three years in, the question a lot of people are quietly asking is why the numbers haven’t followed. In April 2024, the Prime Minister called it a national crisis, noting a woman was being killed every four days. National Cabinet met specifically to discuss it.

And yet, Queensland’s 2026-27 budget cut $40 million from the state’s domestic and family violence prevention program. In New South Wales, the peak body Domestic Violence NSW says chronic underfunding continues to hit regional areas hardest, with its CEO telling the ABC that regional services need twice the funding of their metro counterparts, and remote services need up to nine times more.

There’s also an ongoing debate about whether Australia needs a royal commission into femicide, the way it has held them for veteran suicide, aged care and social cohesion. MP Zali Steggall has pushed for one in Parliament. The Prime Minister has so far dismissed the idea, saying we already know what’s required and need to focus on action rather than another lengthy inquiry. The national commissioner for domestic, family and sexual violence has echoed that a royal commission risks delaying help rather than delivering it. Reasonable people disagree on which path gets women to safety faster, but everyone I’ve read seems to agree on one thing: whatever we’re doing now isn’t enough.

It’s easy to feel helpless reading numbers like these, so here’s what’s consistently flagged by the services on the ground as making a real difference: sustained funding for frontline and regional services (not one-off grants), primary prevention work that addresses gender inequality before violence starts, and holding perpetrators accountable rather than placing the burden of safety on victims. Violence against women and their children is estimated to cost Australia $21.7 billion a year, so the economic argument for prevention is there too, quite apart from the human one.

If this is something you or someone you know is living with, please reach out. 1800RESPECT (1800 737 732) is available 24 hours a day for confidential counselling and support, and in an emergency, always call 000.

I’ll be back to regular programming next post, but I didn’t feel right letting this one sit unwritten any longer.