uoegendered

Day Six | Towards a just conclusion – a prosecutor’s perspective on tackling domestic abuse in Scotland

Anne Marie Hicks

Image of the Crown Office used with the permission of the Crown Office & Procurator Fiscal Service, Scotland

Transforming the institutional response to domestic abuse has been a key focus since I was appointed six years ago to a newly-created role of National Prosecutor, one which is not mirrored in other jurisdictions internationally. With a remit involving overseeing all aspects of policy, practice and training, including case work, service improvements and policy and legislative development, it’s my job to ensure prosecutors have the right tools to do the job and that our response is as effective as it can be.

My diary over this period reflects the breadth of the role – there’s no ‘typical’ day. To illustrate, I’m delivering training to prosecutors; reviewing the first six months of implementation of our new domestic abuse law; and working with our human resources department on the development of a gender-based violence policy for our staff. I’m also speaking at events and to media to publicise 16 Days, participating in a Ministerial Task Force to improve victims’ justice experience and a Task Force to improve forensic medical services for victims of sexual violence, and attending a multi-agency forum with criminal justice and victim support organisations to discuss the collective response to domestic abuse. Quite a variety!

The key benefits and difference the National Prosecutor role have made are around strategic leadership and specialism – having the authority to work across boundaries, to really drive change, upskill prosecutors and identify and implement service improvements at a national level. Externally, the role has increased understanding and public confidence in our approach, has strengthened multi-agency collaborations and has enabled us to play a more influential role in the national political response to tackling violence against women.

Robust prosecution critical in preventing abuse

Around 30,000 domestic abuse charges are reported annually to the Prosecution Service by the police in Scotland – covering the full ambit of offending including rape and murder. Domestic abuse is also a significant inequality issue – around 80% of cases involve abuse by male perpetrators towards women.

We take a robust approach to the prosecution of domestic abuse, recognising that effective enforcement and prosecution is critical to the success of any wider prevention strategy. Prosecution can disrupt the abuse and enable physical separation and a breathing space for victims through custody, or protective court orders. It can provide an opportunity for intervention with perpetrators and victims, and prevent further abuse towards them or other women who may be at risk in the future. Prosecution also plays a vital role in educating the public and changing cultural attitudes, by sending a strong message that this behaviour won’t be tolerated in society.

Prosecutions are often challenging evidentially given the hidden nature of this crime which still overwhelmingly takes place behind closed doors. Reluctance and disengagement by victims with the criminal justice process due to the dynamics and impact of abuse is also a significant issue and prosecutors have to work harder to get the right results, in close collaboration with other organisations to ensure victim support and safety is at the centre of our approach.

We operate strong presumptions in favour of prosecution where there is sufficient evidence – and against discontinuation of prosecutions once we’ve started, even in the face of reluctance by the victim. Victims’ views will always be important, but the public interest requires that all relevant factors are properly considered. This approach recognises the repeated nature of the crime and the state’s obligations – as confirmed by the European Court of Human Rights – to tackle violence against women and protect citizens from future harm.

Criminal enforcement alone will not eliminate domestic abuse; but without robust, consistent and effective enforcement and prosecution, we will never eradicate this behaviour in society and make victims and children safer.

Scotland’s new domestic abuse law

From April this year, Scotland has had the benefit of a new domestic abuse law which criminalises a course of abusive behaviour between partners or ex-partners (unlike other UK jurisdictions, the Scottish legislation doesn’t extend to other familial relationships).

Introduced to close a gap in the law in relation to many of the coercive and controlling behaviours which weren’t previously criminal, the new law is significant in a number of ways. For example, it moves away from an incident-based episodic approach and enables patterns of repeat victimisation to be prosecuted as a single course of conduct. It also defines abusive behaviour as including not only physical and sexual violence and threats, but also other coercive and controlling behaviours, including those designed to isolate, control, regulate, restrict freedom, punish, degrade and humiliate.

A further strength of the new law is that it focuses on the perpetrator’s behaviour and likelihood of this causing harm rather than requiring proof of actual impact and harm to the victim;and it recognises the harm caused to children by domestic abuse and introduces an aggravation to the charge where a child is involved. Finally, it enhances victim safety provisions, introducing mandatory consideration of protective non-harassment orders for victims and children on the conviction of the perpetrator.

It’s early days but already we’ve raised numerous prosecutions and are securing convictions. Crucially we’ve been able to prosecute coercive and controlling behaviours which were not previously criminal, making the true pattern of abuse visible and allowing courts to address the full extent of victims’ experiences. This is a significant step forward for Scotland in ongoing collective efforts to transform the justice response to tackling this insidious behaviour and keeping victims and children safe.

Anne Marie Hicks is the National Procurator Fiscal for Domestic Abuse at the Crown Office & Procurator Fiscal Service, Scotland

Day Five | Holding foreign fighters accountable for sexual violence

Susan Hutchinson

As the security situation continues to deteriorate in Syria and Iraq, Western nations are being forced to reconsider the issue of what to do with their nationals stuck there since the war with ISIS. When Turkey invaded northern Syria, the Kurdish authorities who had been managing the prisons holding ISIS fighters, including those who are foreign nationals, said they could no longer prioritise the management of these prisons. Many of those prisoners are responsible for perpetrating gross sexual violence as war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. But the Kurds are now facing another genocide of their own.

Too often, conflict-related sexual violence is considered a problem too difficult to resolve because it occurs in another country, by people from another country, against people from another country. But we have a unique moment in time to help end impunity for conflict related sexual violence. An estimated 40,000 foreign fighters from 89 countries travelled to Syria and Iraq to fight with ISIS. Many of the source countries are State Parties to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, obliging them to investigate and prosecute war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide in their own domestic court systems.

We needn’t wait indefinitely for the big boys of the UN Security Council to refer these crimes to the International Criminal Court. Countries like Australia have incorporated these crimes into their own domestic criminal code and have an obligation to investigate and prosecute their own nationals for the sexual violence they perpetrated as war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide while fighting with ISIS in Syria and Iraq. We have the jurisdiction and the competent authority; all that remains is the political will and investment.

For the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, ‘prosecute; don’t perpetrate’ released a short, animated video (above) explaining why and how we need to end impunity for conflict-related sexual violence. We made it with sketches and graffiti from an incredible Afghan artist and professor, Shamsia Hassani, who does a lot of beautiful work on women’s rights.

There are countless incredible women from conflict-affected countries defending women’s rights. Nadia Murad has been fighting for years for justice for survivors like her, not just of trafficking and sexual violence, but of genocide as well. She has shared her story countless times, but so far not a single ISIS fighter has been prosecuted for sexual violence as war crimes, crimes against humanity or genocide. The time has come for us to take up the baton, to fight for women like Nadia, to make sure she receives the justice she deserves, and all the women like her.

Investigating and prosecuting these crimes would be the responsible thing to do from the perspective of the rules-based international order. It would be the responsible thing to do if we wanted to end impunity for conflict-related sexual violence. It would be the right thing to do if we wanted to take action against gender violence. It would be far more responsible than leaving perpetrators in Syria, Iraq, Turkey or elsewhere to continue wreaking havoc on the world. It is also more responsible to ensure they are securely imprisoned within our own borders under the auspices of our own security agencies rather than in extremely unstable countries recovering from the conflict with ISIS.

When Yazidi activist Ameena Saeed Hasan bemoaned the UN Security Council’s inaction during a debate on trafficking of persons in armed conflict, she told of a Yazidi girl who had phoned her, begging, “if you can’t free us, bomb us”. “Where is the justice?” Ameena asked aghast by the total inaction of the international community.

Today is the International Women Human Rights Defenders Day. As part of our activism this 16 Days, we can help women human rights defenders like Ameena and Nadia. We can work to ensure our governments meet their obligations to investigate and prosecute their own nationals who perpetrated sexual violence as war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.
Susan Hutchinson is the architect of the prosecute; don’t perpetrate campaign to help end impunity for conflict related sexual violence. She is also a PhD scholar at the Australian National University’s Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs. Her research focuses on the implementation of the Women, Peace and Security agenda. Susan regularly blogs for the Lowy Institute’s Interpreter and BroadAgenda. She is a member of the Australian Civil Society Coalition on Women, Peace and Security and the Australian Arms Control Coalition.

Day Four | #MeToo and the work of ending men’s violence against women

Karen Boyle is a professor at a striking UK university. This blog was submitted on 21st November.

MeToo2

‘ME TOO and her too and them too and him too’ by Cyndy Sims Parr and used under a Creative Commons licence

On 15 October 2017, actress Alyssa Milano tweeted:

Me Too.

Suggested by a friend: “If all the women who have been sexually harassed or assaulted wrote “Me Too” as a status, we might give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem.

(@AlyssaMilano, 15 October, 2017)

Within 24 hours, 12 million Facebook posts using the hashtag were written or shared; within 48 hours, the hashtag had been shared nearly a million times on Twitter.

In some ways, #MeToo exemplified the feminist possibilities of social media: each new post joined an existing conversation and allowed us to build a picture of what they had in common. This was not a million miles away from the consciousness-raising groups of the Women’s Liberation Movement, where women shared their experiences – including of sexual violence – in order to build an analysis of what they shared in a patriarchal society. But, where consciousness-raising typically took place in small, closed groups, #MeToo brought with it a more politically diverse and potentially global audience.

However, I want to sound a note of caution about the way #MeToo is now increasingly referred to as a movement. To do this, I want to think about the relationship between #MeToo as a hashtag and Tarana Burke’s Me Too, founded in 2006. Burke founded the Me Too movement in response to a young woman’s disclosure of sexual abuse. At the time, Burke shut the young woman’s testimony down as quickly as she could. Yet, part of the reason for Burke’s reluctance was that the young woman’s testimony echoed her own experiences. For Burke, Me Too was (and is) about the pain and difficulty of recognition and solidarity, and the work this knowledge demands of us.

When Milano tweeted #MeToo, she was not aware of Burke’s work. After the tweet went viral, Burke’s work was publicly acknowledged, following a by now well-established pattern of Black feminist mobilisation online. However, Burke notes that the mainstream acknowledgement has been limited:

While it’s true that I have been widely recognized as the “founder” of the movement – there is virtually no mention of my leadership. Like I just discovered something 12 years ago and in 2017 it suddenly gained value. #metooMVMT #metoo

(@TaranaBurke, 21 February 2018)

Burke has consistently differentiated between the act of speaking out and the work that must follow on from that acknowledgement of personal experience in order to effect change. The media emphasis on Burke-as-founder obscures this, not least by emphasising her own personal story as a survivor.

In my research on the media coverage of the Harvey Weinstein case, I have similarly found that the decades of feminist activism and research on sexual harassment and abuse preceding October 2017 have largely been ignored. Not only have spokespeople for organisations like Burke’s been largely missing from mainstream accounts, where feminism has featured it has too often been as a site of suspicion because of the (in)actions of prominent, individual feminists.

What I want to emphasise, then, is the importance of understanding #MeToo not only as a social media trend, but as a mainstream news story. #MeToo was a response to a mainstream news story with Hollywood at its centre, so it is hardly surprising that #MeToo in turn became a major news story for global media outlets. Equally unsurprising has been the emphasis placed on the experiences of economically and racially privileged US women in this coverage. But this is a critique of the media, not of a movement, or even of the individuals using the hashtag on social media.

Louise Armstrong, who has written about media coverage of child sexual abuse testimony, argues that for the media “the personal is the personal” – and this can stop us seeing the bigger picture. There is also the risk that it makes stories about violence the stories only of the victim/survivors, as though the perpetrators somehow had nothing to do with it.

Even in the #MeToo era, men in public life have not been routinely asked if they perpetrated sexual violence, though after #MeToo went viral, there was a period where women in the public eye were almost routinely asked in interviews if they had a #MeToo story. This relentless focus on personal trauma compromised victim/survivors’ abilities to choose whether/how to tell their own stories, but also downplayed the expertise amassed by feminist organisations and researchers who have been listening to survivors for decades.

The feminist slogan “the personal is political” doesn’t mean that telling personal stories publicly is always or necessarily politically progressive – nor does it place an obligation on survivors to speak out. Unlike the women in consciousness-raising groups, those sharing #MeToo on social media since autumn 2017 haven’t necessarily had very much else in common, including how they make sense of their experiences of sexual harassment and abuse. This is only surprising if we think of victim/survivors as a homogenous group.

Of course, some women (and men) have been galvanised to political action by #MeToo, but a diverse group of people posting #MeToo do not necessarily constitute a movement. A movement, as Tarana Burke says, is work. Emotional work is part of this, but not all of it: the work this generates then includes advocacy, support, campaigning, policy development, research. This work takes time, and can be obscured by a focus on one-off statements.

For all of these reasons, I refer to #MeToo as a moment rather than a movement. As the women of the Tufnell Park Women’s Liberation Workshop wrote in the inaugural edition of Shrew in 1970:

We can be so written about and give so many interviews that we can be deceived into thinking that there is a movement when all we’re doing is dealing with the press and TV. (Tufnell Park Women’s Liberation Workshop 1970: 4)

Of course, dealing with the press and TV matter. But we should not allow the media to define our movements to end men’s sexual harassment and abuse of women.

Karen Boyle is Professor of Feminist Media Studies at the University of Strathclyde (@Unistrathclyde) in Glasgow, Scotland. She is the author of #MeToo, Weinstein and Feminism (Palgrave, 2019) and Director of Strathclyde’s Applied Gender Studies programme.

Day Four | #MeToo at Two

Bianca Fileborn and Rachel Loney-Howes

#MeToo exploded onto social media in October 2017, exposing and taking down some powerful men in the entertainment industry, and sparking conversations about the prevalence of sexual violence and what can be done in response. Two years on, however, what has the movement achieved? And what more needs to be done to address the cultural, political and legal dimensions that enable sexual violence to occur? In this blog, we address some of the key impacts of #MeToo two years on, and consider how we might go about the long, grinding process of change.

When the #MeToo movement emerged on social media in October 2017, it almost broke the internet. Within 24 hours, the hashtag had been used over 12 million times, with survivors of sexual harassment and assault from around the world speaking out about their experiences, while others used it to express their solidarity and support. As we pass the two-year anniversary of the hashtag, what, if anything, has the movement changed? And what still needs to be achieved?

In terms of the initial successes of the online version of #MeToo, in addition to the widespread use of the original hashtag, it was also translated into a variety of different languages, used in over 80 countries, and used a means for mobilising more specific local feminist agendas. In Argentina, for example, the #MeToo movement provided local activists with an opportunity to mobilise on the issue of abortion. The hashtag also generated some legal changes and investigations. Countries such as France, for example, made catcalling (street harassment) a crime in August 2018, with on-the-spot fines issued to offenders by police. The Australian Human Rights Commission also announced they would conduct an inquiry into workplace sexual harassment in June 2018.

One of the key successes of the movement was that it provided survivors with a new platform to speak out about their experiences of sexual violence. Twitter, Facebook and other forms of social media created new opportunities to collectively speak out about violence from multiple different geographic, political and cultural perspectives. It is well known that survivors’ experiences are routinely undermined or denied legitimacy in the criminal justice system, as well as by the general public. Too often, survivors are blamed for causing the violence, with many accused of lying or having ‘regretted’ consensual sex.

The sheer scale and response to #MeToo, however, gave survivors a powerful framework for speaking out, as well as offering recognition and validation in a way that official criminal justice mechanisms regularly fail to provide. While there are issues relating to whose experience is seen on social media and subsequently who is then recognised as a legitimate survivor, at a macro level the #MeToo movement provided survivors with an unprecedented opportunity to share their stories.

While the hashtag movement provided an important outlet to give voice to (some) survivor’s experiences, it is more difficult to know what has been achieved in terms of tangible structural and social change. Certainly, there were multiple public calls to address the structural causes of sexual harassment and violence, as well address the barriers for survivors accessing legal representation (for example, #TimesUp). However, in some instances, initiatives and organisations set up in response to #MeToo have come under scrutiny. Measuring social change is always difficult, and one of the key problems with the #MeToo movement is that it lacked (or lacks) clear goals, leadership, or indeed a united message.

Not long after the movement exploded online, it emerged that the term “Me Too” was in fact first coined by Tarana Burke, an African-American activist who has dedicated her life to supporting and advocating for sexual assault survivors. The revelation that #MeToo was in fact a movement spearheaded initially by a woman of colour generated a significant amount of backlash, and opened up a dialogue about the all-too-frequent erasure of the advocacy work of women of colour in the area of sexual violence, as well their experiences of gender-based violence.

From the outset, the movement was accused – as the feminist movement has been historically – of focusing too heavily on the experiences of young, cis-gendered, able bodied, white, middle class, heterosexual women. There were (and remain) serious questions as to whether and how women and survivors from marginalised groups might benefit from #MeToo. The oversight of the work of women of colour, such as Tarana Burke, and the plethora of women of colour around the world who have been working tirelessly supporting survivors and lobbying for funding increasing and social change, illustrates that the public face of anti-sexual harassment and violence remains that of privileged white women.

While creating space for survivors to speak out is undoubtedly important in many respects, it is less clear whether the widespread discussion generated by #MeToo has been fruitful in shifting attitudes and behaviours. Although this type of change is slow-burning – and it’s unlikely that any single activist movement will generate the social, cultural and structural shifts required to end sexual violence – the evidence so far suggests that #MeToo has had limited success in this regard. As Australian masculinities scholar Associate Professor Michael Flood notes, studies in the UK and the US were conducted in 2018 to capture the effect of the #MeToo movement on men’s knowledge about #MeToo, their attitudes towards gender inequality, inappropriate behaviours, and their willingness to listen to and believe women. Results were mixed, and inconclusive at best.

Concerningly, #MeToo was also subject to significant backlash and polarisation – something we’ve seen in response to second and third-wave feminism before. The movement was accused of going “too far” inciting a witch hunt against powerful men. Others have criticised the movement for placing experiences of sexual harassment on par with survivors experiences of sexual assault and rape. Canadian legal scholar Dr Heidi Matthews has further suggested that the movement has generated a sex panic – or at least lumped risky (but wanted and consensual) sexual practices in the realm of sexual violence.

We argue however that rather than buying into the backlash, we should take the opportunity #MeToo has generated to broaden our understanding of what sexual violence is, and to engage in more productive conversations about consent, pleasure and heteronormative masculine entitlement. Ultimately, this is what will help to drive change and work towards the prevention of sexual violence in all its forms.

Dr Bianca Fileborn is a Lecturer in Criminology, School of Social & Political Sciences, University of Melbourne. Her work examines the intersections of sexual violence, space/place, culture and identity. Bianca is the author of Reclaiming the Night-Time Economy: Unwanted Sexual Attention in Pubs and Clubs (Palgrave), and co-editor of #MeToo and the Politics of Social Change.
Dr Rachel Loney-Howes is a Lecturer in Criminology, School of Health and Society, University of Wollongong. Her work explores the use of digital media for anti-sexual violence activism. Rachel is the author of the forthcoming book Online Anti-Rape Activism: The Politics of the Personal in the Age of Digital Media, and co-editor of #MeToo and the Politics of Social Change.

Day Three | Unintended consequences of domestic violence law

Heather Nancarrow

Unintended consequences

Women are increasingly ensnared in the criminal justice system as a result of domestic violence laws that were designed to protect women from men’s violence. This is especially the case for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women.

The enormity of this problem is captured by the Queensland Domestic and Family Violence Death Review and Advisory Board, which reported that 44.5 percent of female adult victims, and nearly all Aboriginal family violence victims, had been identified by police as a respondent to a domestic violence protection order application on at least one occasion. That is, victims of domestic and family violence had been construed as perpetrators, prior to their domestic violence-related death.

Understanding how and why law that was originally designed to protect women from men’s violence is being used against them – and what to do about it – is the subject of my book, Unintended consequences of domestic violence law: Gendered aspirations and racialised realities, which was published in October. The limitations of the law as a site for justice and empowerment for women has long been the subject of feminist critique internationally (see, for example, the work of Carol Smart, Kathleen Ferraro, and Leigh Goodmark) and here in Australia (such as Rosemary Hunter’s book, Jane Wangmann’s doctoral dissertation and my journal article).

A key feminist concern is male power in law’s structure and processes, with debates centred on whether women should be treated the same as men, or differently. Others are equally concerned, or more so, about white power in the law (see, for example, The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Women’s Task Force on Violence Report, as well as Hillary Potter’s Battle Cries and Beth E. Richie’s Arrested Justice), particularly where law’s structures and processes reflect neo-colonial power.

My research, using Queensland as a case study, addresses both concerns and pays attention to the intersections of gender, race and class in the cases of 185 people within four groups, roughly equal in number: Indigenous men, non-Indigenous men, Indigenous women and non-Indigenous women. (Note that ‘Indigenous’ is the term used in police and court records.) Each person in the research sample had been charged on at least one occasion with breaching a domestic violence order (DVO). Here is a sketch of what I found.

Coercive control and resistance

Although not explicitly framed as such, Queensland’s domestic violence law was originally intended to address an ongoing pattern of coercive control perpetrated by men against their intimate female partners (see chapter 3 of Nancarrow 2019). The law recognised non-physical abuse as tactics of control and assumed a particular kind of victim: a subjugated, powerless woman. Therefore, it gave the state (in other words, the police and the courts) powers to make civil DVOs without requiring the consent of the victim, and made the breach of a DVO a criminal offence.

The law is being appropriately applied in regard to the majority of the men in the sample, though less so for the Indigenous men. That is, most of the men had been charged with breaching a DVO on one or more occasions due to coercive controlling abuse. Their abuse was aimed at general, ongoing control of their partner: an attack on their “autonomy, liberty and equality”.

Fights, dispute resolution and chaos

But the law is not being applied according to its original intent when women are charged with breaches of DVOs. Nearly all of the women in the sample had been charged on one or more occasions with breaching a DVO due to fights: physical and verbal abuse in the absence of an ongoing pattern of coercive control. This was also true for some of the men, especially the Indigenous men.

Further, some of the fights that the Indigenous women and men engaged in were characteristic of contemporary forms of traditional Aboriginal dispute resolution (see Marcia Langton’s chapter in Being Black: Aboriginal cultures in ‘settled’ Australia). This is a process traditionally regulated by cultural rules and boundaries, but which may now manifest as less structured and potentially more dangerous due to colonial interference and associated trauma.

For about one-third (35%) of the Indigenous women, and 5% of the non-Indigenous women, fights (and related DVO breach charges) occurred in a context of “chaos” – a description frequently used by service providers and police prosecutors that I interviewed to help understand why Indigenous men and women were over-represented in DVO breach data. “Chaos context violence” (see Nancarrow 2019, chapter 7) typically involves a cluster of attributes including (but not limited to) extreme dysfunction arising from acquired brain injury, for example; trauma or poor mental health; and substance addiction.

Implications for theory and practice

Policy analysis must take account of the patriarchal and racist structures in which domestic and family violence occurs, and it must distinguish between coercive control and fights. Giving the state power to make DVOs without the consent of the victim is sound logic for cases of coercive control, but it is not sound for cases involving fights. Nevertheless, fights can be distressing, harmful and lethal, and alternative strategies are needed to address them. Restorative justice practices and couples counselling may be appropriate in such cases.

The logic of state power over victim choice in cases of chaos context violence is not only unsound, it is unjust. To some extent, it reflects the deployment of exceptional state power to punish people for behaviour resulting from violence perpetrated on them by the state. Ending chaos context violence ultimately requires structural reform to address racial and socio-economic inequality; at an individual level, it may involve therapeutic intervention and support.

Risks inherent in a paradigm shift

A paradigm shift in current mainstream responses to intimate partner violence, which distinguishes between coercive control and fights is needed, but there are significant risks associated with such a shift. Further development of knowledge and skills to assess and distinguish between coercive control and fights is needed for any approach. We cannot risk a return to the days when coercive control was dismissed as an argument, or a fight. Nor should we facilitate the criminalisation of women (especially Indigenous women) and some men (especially Indigenous men), whose use of violence is not an expression of patriarchal coercive control, but an expression of powerlessness in a society where power and resources are distributed unevenly along gendered and racialised lines.

My research represents challenges to orthodoxy within current domestic violence theory and practice. It calls for reconceptualising types of violence to take account of gendered and racialised contexts in which it occurs. I argue that the criminal justice system is not only ineffective in many cases, but it is unjust. Though there are undoubtedly challenges of achieving the recognition of women’s agency in fights; a victims’ choice in engaging agents of the criminal justice system; and unequivocal state sanctions against patriarchal coercive control of women, this nonetheless is what we must work towards.

Heather Nancarrow has a PhD in Criminology and Criminal Justice and has held many state and national leadership roles in regard to policy on the prevention of violence against women. She is currently the CEO of Australia’s National Research Organisation for Women’s Safety, an Adjunct Associate Professor at UNSW Sydney and an Adjunct Research Fellow, Griffith Criminology Institute, Griffith University. Her work has been recognised with several awards including the “Queenslander of the Year Community Spirit Award” in 2009; “Honours in recognition of outstanding leadership of the National Council to Reduce Violence against Women and their Children and advancing strategic implementation of the National Plan” awarded by Victim Support Australia in 2012, and in 2010 she was named a Rotary International Paul Harris Fellow.