National Domestic Violence Remembrance Day is held annually on the first Wednesday of May, as part of Domestic Violence Prevention Month. Vigils are being held across Australia to remember individuals who have died and raise awareness about the impact of family violence.

In 2024, 103 women and 20 children lost their lives to family and domestic violence in Australia. We also recognise that there are those whose lives have been lost to domestic violence who may not yet be known. Their lives matter and we recognise and honour their story.

The vigil is an opportunity to honour and remember these individuals. Attendees will have the opportunity to write a short message acknowledging those who have died, and the courage of all victim survivors.

The Consortium acknowledges the strength and resilience of survivors of family violence. Family violence is a structural and social issue that significantly impacts women and children, families and communities. We recognise the courage of victim survivors, along with the dedicated workers responding to family violence.

Trained staff will be available for anyone who requires further support or needs assistance accessing services.

The Consortium is a partnership of five specialist gender-based violence organisations across the Loddon area:

• Centre for Non-Violence (CNV)
• Annie North Women’s Refuge
• Centre Against Sexual Assault Central Victoria (CASACV)
• Women’s Health Loddon Mallee
• Sunbury and Cobaw Community Health.

The Consortium provides integrated regional programs and services for victim survivors of family and sexual violence, men who use violence towards family members, and works to prevent gendered violence.

If you, or someone you know is experiencing family violence, or you are concerned about your behaviour towards your family, help is available.

In any emergency call: 000

Centre for Non-Violence: (free call) 1800 884 292
The Orange Door Loddon: (free call) 1800 512 359
Safe Steps: (24/7 statewide service) 1800 015 188
Centre Against Sexual Assault Central Victoria: (03) 5441 0431

Ends

For all media enquiries, contact Rachel Dale, Media and Communications Lead at CNV via [email protected] or 0488 991 978.

We are already at capacity and simply cannot afford uncertainty.

We are not alone.

Family violence organisations right across the nation have been calling on governments to walk the talk and commit to increased and secured funding for the sector. Specialist family violence organisations like CNV work, often outside of the spotlight, with thousands of individuals each and every year to provide programs and services that directly improve and increase safety. The work we do with victim survivors to increase safety and wellbeing and with perpetrators to take responsibility for their use of violence, works.

We are calling on our Commonwealth leaders to support us to do the work it takes to end violence against women and children.

Our specialised workforce deserve fair and secure pay conditions.  The programs and services that we deliver to our community deserve fair and secure funding to be able to operate at full capacity, and our work in preventing the violence before it begins requires dedicated funding.

We are in a national crisis. Last year a woman was murdered as a result of gender-based violence every four days. 2025 is proving yet again, to be another year where women and children are being murdered in entirely preventable circumstances.

It is not ok that as a frontline service we constantly need to make program decisions based on insecure or inadequate budget conditions rather than on the need. And need for our services has never been greater. We are seeing a marked increase in the number of victim survivors and people who use violence accessing our service. In particular we are seeing greater numbers of children requiring specialist family violence support. We cannot operate in a budget vacuum. Especially when we know that in Australia, the cost of violence against women and their children is estimated at $26 billion a year (Commonwealth of Australia, 2022).

Last year, our staff across the Orange Door Loddon (TOD) and CNV offices provided over 50,000 hours of specialist support for victim survivors. The number of victim survivors that our specialist -family violence staff worked with in TOD increased by almost 10 per cent. Similarly, CNV saw a distinct increase in the number of direct referrals to our service with over 2,400 victim survivors accessing much needed support. Not only are we seeing a rise in the number of people seeking support, we are also seeing a rise in the number of complex and high-risk cases requiring intensive management. By way of example, of the 3520 MARAM assessments (how specialist services and police assess family violence risk) we conducted this year, 27 per cent of victim survivors had 10 or more lethality indicators. When someone has five or more, they are considered to be at imminent risk of lethality or serious harm.

We cannot afford to turn people away from much needed specialist family violence support.

While we have wholeheartedly welcomed the Federal Government’s commitment to ending violence against women and children through the National Plan to End Violence against Women and Children 2022-2032, the most recent budget hand down has failed to bring the family and sexual violence sector out of crisis mode.

The National Plan identified that one of the key pillars to achieve generational change was to strengthen the capacity of specialist family, domestic and sexual violence services (Commonwealth of Australia, 2022). However, without significant, and ongoing funding to the specialist sector, the National Plan has no way of achieving this objective.

Each and every year, the sector faces extraordinary uncertainty in budget allocation all while each and every year, the demand for our services increases. In the Loddon Region alone, we are seeing a significant spike in the number of family violence incidents.  We know that these figures are reflected right across the states and territories.

It is a confronting message to not only the sector but also to the community, that the lives of women, children and diverse communities – who are at the highest risk of harm from family violence – are further jeopardised by line items on a budget.  We need to be adequately resourced to do our job, because without us, there is no safety net in place for the thousands of victim survivors that walk through our doors every year.

An investment in the family violence sector is an investment towards a future society that is free from gendered violence.

For further information:

Dr Clare Shamier
Head of Business Development and Advocacy
e: [email protected]
m: 0488 281 528

For general media enquiries:

e: [email protected]

And there is much to celebrate. We see daily, the incredible work, resistance and strength of the women and girls we meet, from our own family members, to friends and strangers in the street.

We see women represented at some of the highest levels of government, business, sport, the arts and the music industry. We see women and girls each and every day bringing to the table innovation, expertise and a determination to push forward and expand the possibilities for all of us.

Representation matters.

And yet, women are still largely underrepresented in leadership, women are still underpaid and undervalued in their jobs.

And women are devastatingly over-represented in gender-based violence. And for women and girls from diverse backgrounds, particular Aboriginal women and girls, their lived experience sees them more than 33 x more likely to be hospitalized as a result of family violence.

And as we gather today, in our thousands, spending time reflecting on the hard-won rights and advancements that the women who have walked before us, alongside us and are following in our footsteps have been fighting for, and continue to fight for, we are seeing, in very real time, the rapid rise of systemic and societal misogyny, the likes of which that we have not seen for many decades.

We are seeing again the normalisation of rigid, outdated gender roles and a rise in the public’s misconception that somehow, the advancement of women is a direct threat to men’s rights. That our right to say no, is a threat. That our right to walk away from a violent relationship a threat, that our right to choose our reproductive futures is a threat, that our right to lead is a threat.

And so it is, that as we advance, all around us the tables are turning, the landscape shifting and with it, the rules of the game. The shadow of far-right social media influencers are entering politics, the billionaires with sexual violence rap sheets are informing national policies and influencing global politics and trade.

Capital punishment for seeking an abortion. Abolition of diversity and inclusion positions and policies. The illegal stoppage of international aid. The forced removal of children to foreign countries, often without their parents. Bills to return to the days before ‘no fault’ divorces.

These changes are not outliers, they are part of sweeping reforms to dismantle the hard-won gains and rights of those most vulnerable to men’s violence. War does not start with a bomb.

It starts with a pen. And right now, we are at war. As women and girls in 2025, we are under attack like never before.

How easily our rights are stripped from us:

• Our right to self-determination.
• Our right to reproductive safety and planning.
• Our right to be decision-makers in our own right.
• Our right to work.
• Our right to equal pay.
• Our right to live in peace and without violence.
• Our right to be safe at home.

Dismantled.

Yes, we have come so far over the last several decades. But let’s be honest: the bar was always set far too low. Yes:

• She has the right, if she is granted it, equal pay.
• She has the right, if she can afford it, to access reproductive healthcare.
• She has the right, if she can access childcare, to go to work.
• She has the right, if he doesn’t kill her first, to leave her husband.

But what a woman does not have, and has never had, is the right to equality.

Not a single country has achieved gender equality. Not one. Not here, not there, not anywhere.

And we know that the only way to end violence against women, girls and diverse communities, is through equality. Equality is about respect and in its absence, we are left with disrespect. And for women and girls, that’s a dangerous place to be.

Every 10 minutes, a woman is murdered around the world because of gender-based violence.

Every week in Australia a woman is murdered as a result of gender-based violence. More than 80 per cent of the time, by a man she knew.

Every six minutes police in Victoria respond to family violence incidents.

In our own region we are seeing across all LGAs where CNV operates, a rise in reported family violence incidents, a rise in the number of breaches, but concurrently a decrease in the number of convictions.

We also know that these numbers do not reflect the reality facing families in our region, where family violence too often occurs in the home, away from public eyes, still hidden behind closed doors, unreported. Not believed.

She makes it up.

She’s exaggerating.

It was just a joke.

For 100 women last year in Australia murdered as a result of gendered violence, for the thousands of women and children hospitalised last year as a result of family violence, and for the thousands of women and children experiencing homelessness as a result of family violence:

She was not making it up. She was not exaggerating. It’s not a joke.

We know that the experiences of family and gendered violence in Australia is not unique. We know the rise of violence is not isolated. Globally, across every country in every town and city, women and girls are experiencing higher rates of inequality and violence than in previous years. The rise of misogyny is increasingly leading to extremism. We need to pay attention.

We must, as part of our conversations of celebration today, remember that for millions of women and girls around the world today, as it was yesterday and as it will be tomorrow, that inequality is the very definition of our collective lived experience.

We must continue to fight for our voice to be heard.

And we will continue to push forward, to demand change, and reclaim our future. Our lives depend on it.

Importantly, it set out for the first time, that fundamental human rights must be universally protected.

76 years later, the rights of the billions of people – most predominantly women and children – around the world are under unprecedented threat.

This is why, this International Human Rights Day, the Loddon Consortium for Gender Equality & Violence Prevention has united to stand up and demand that protecting human rights is the only way forward.1 We must protect:

Our right to exist.

Our right to live in safety.

Our right to equality.

Every 10 minutes a woman is killed around the world as a result of intentional violence. In 2023 alone, over 51,000 women had their lives forcibly cut short by acts of violence, mostly by someone known to them.2

Devastatingly, the violence does not stop there.

Globally, 650 million (or 1 in 5) girls and women alive today have been subjected to sexual violence as children.3

State-sanctioned violence is also escalating in unprecedented magnitude.

Globally, tens of thousands of lives have been intentionally, and forcibly ended due to violence, with unprecedented violence escalating over the last 14 months. War and conflict, disproportionately impacts women, children and diverse communities. A 2023 UN Women report stated that in 2023:

[T]he proportion of women killed in armed conflicts doubled compared to 2022. Four out of every ten people who died as a result of conflict in 2023 were

women. UN-verified cases of conflict-related sexual violence increased by 50 per cent.4

In Gaza alone, more than 43,000 people have been killed – 70 per cent of whom are women and children.5 We know that this figure is underreported, with conservative estimates as published by numerous agencies, including the United Nations, the Gaza Ministry of Health, and world-renowned medical journal, The Lancet recently estimating that the death toll will eventually fall within the hundreds of thousands.6

We are what we allow.

The hard truth is, that as a community, we allow human rights abuses.

In Australia, we are bearing witness to the intentional killings of women as a result of gender-based violence every three days. During the last week of November, at the height of the 16 Days of Activism against Gender-based Violence, 6 women in 7 days were killed.

This is not an anomaly. Every six minutes Victoria Police respond to a family violence incident. The Victorian Crime statistics to June 2024 paint a sobering picture: police recorded over 98,000 family violence incidents in the previous 12 months. This signalled a

6.1 percent increase from the previous year. Victim survivors of family violence continue to predominantly be women and children, while perpetrators continue to predominantly be men.7

Rates of sexual violence in Australia over the last 12 years, have also increased year on year. Samantha McNally, ABS head of crime and justice statistics, stated that 2023 “[…] is the highest rate of sexual assault victim-survivors recorded in our 31-year dataset.”8

Nationally9:

• 1 in 5 women experience sexual violence since the age of
• 1 in 16 men have experienced sexual violence since the age of
• 98% of reported sexual violence are perpetrated by

And as rates of violence increase, funding models continue to be unsustainable. Core services for sexual violence, family violence, housing, and allied health operate under conditions that are defined by short-term, underfunded budgets that were never going to be able to allow services to meet demand.

Unilateral budget cuts and funding provisions to services are increasingly decided without consultation, without impact assessments and importantly, without future planning in place to safeguard victim survivors from further harm.

Politically, we are witnessing a disturbing trend towards an extremist right that is actively seeking to dismantle the inroads that feminists and human rights activists have fought long and hard for. Marginalised communities who are already experiencing increased rates of harm, particularly those from First Nation, LGBTQIA+, CALD and people with disability are at profound risk of further harm where human rights are not universally protected.

Within a context where gender equality has always been far from reach, the reality is that what was built over decades, has in just a handful of years, been dismantled, and we are again fighting on the frontlines for the most basic of human rights.

The incredible advocacy work of the trailblazing feminists that came before us must serve as an important reminder of why, more than ever, we must not be complacent in our advocacy.

Now is the time for us to make a united stand, to mobilise and take action to create a free and just world for all. Because now – more than ever – those at greatest risk of harm are facing extraordinary threats to safety and wellbeing.

We cannot do this alone. We cannot do this in isolation.

The only way forward is together, connected, with feet on the ground demanding collective action from each other, our peers and allies:

In solidarity for the victim survivors. In solidarity for the peacemakers.

In solidarity for the humanitarian workers. In solidarity for the specialist services.

In solidarity for the advocates.

In solidarity for the women, children and those from diverse communities of whom each and every life matters.

It’s back to the grassroots.

Signed:

Julie Oberin, Annie North Women’s Refuge

Kate Wright, Centre Against Sexual Assault Central Victoria

Margaret Augerinos, Centre for Non-Violence

Jeremy Hearne, Sunbury and Cobaw Community Health

Kellie Dunn, Women’s Health Loddon Mallee

1 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 1. Available from: https://www.un.org/en/about- us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights [Accessed: 3 December 2024]

2 United Nations 2024. ‘One woman or girl is killed every 10 minutes by their intimate partner or family member’, Press Release, 25 November. Available from: https://www.unwomen.org/en/news- stories/press-release/2024/11/one-woman-or-girl-is-killed-every-10-minutes-by-their-intimate- partner-or-family-member [Accessed: 3 December 2024]

³ United Nations Children’s Fund, 2023. International Classification of Violence against Children, New York, 2023.

4 UN Women 2023. ‘War on women – Proportion of women killed in armed conflicts doubles in 2023’, press release, 22 October 2024. Available from: https://www.unwomen.org/en/news- stories/press-release/2024/10/war-on-women-women-killed-in-armed-conflicts-double-in- 2023#:~:text=In%202023%2C%20the%20proportion%20of,increased%20by%2050%20per%20ce  nt. [Accessed: 9 December 2024]

5 Khatib R, McKee M and Yusuf S 2024. ‘Counting the Dead in Gaza: difficult but essential’, Vol.404(10499), p. 237.

6 Ibid.

7 Victorian Crime Statistics 2024. ‘Family Incidents’. Available from: https://www.crimestatistics.vic.gov.au/crime-statistics/latest-victorian-crime-data/family-incidents-2     [accessed: 28 November 2024]

8 Australian Bureau of Statistics 2024. ‘Recorded sexual assaults reach 31-year high”, media release, ABS, Canberra. Available from: https://www.abs.gov.au/media-centre/media-releases/recorded- sexual-assaults-reach-31-year-high [Accessed 9 December 2024]

9 Australian Bureau of Statistics 2023. ‘Personal Safety Survey’, available from: https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/people/crime-and-justice/personal-safety-australia/latest-release and Australian Bureau of Statistics 2021. ‘Sexual Violence – Victimisation’, 24 August. Available from: https://www.abs.gov.au/articles/sexual-violence-victimisation [Accessed: 9 December 2024]