Criminal Justice

ELYSE METHVEN: So it's just after 4pm so I think we should begin now. So welcome to our event. On behalf of the UTS Criminal Justice Cluster and the UTS law faculty I would like to welcome guests and our fabulous speakers to what should be a critical and stimulating discussion on the topic of Coercive Control: Thinking beyond criminalisation. Before we begin I would like to acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Eora nation upon whose lands UTS's City Campus now stands. I pay respect to their elders both past and present acknowledging them as the traditional custodians of the knowledge for this land and extend my respect to First Nations people present today. First Nations sovereignty over this land remains unceded. I also wanted to let our audience know that unfortunately Nicole Lee could not join our panel today due to health reasons. If you do not already, I encourage you to follow Nicole's writing and advocacy, which you can view via her Twitter page as she provides an important and often neglected voice on the lived experiences of family violence perpetrated against those who have a disability or depend on careers or family members for support.

I'd also like to lay out a few housekeeping rules. This Zoom event is being recorded for teaching, learning, research and event purposes. Only key speakers will appear in the zoom recording. You will have an opportunity for questions from the audience towards the end of the discussion and please post your questions in the Q&A chat function.

We have the unique pleasure today of being joined by panel members who each contribute unique experience and knowledge to the debate on appropriate responses to coercive control. So firstly, I would like to introduce you to Ashlee Donohue. Now Ashlee is a proud Aboriginal woman from the Dunghutti nation born and raided in Kempsey NSW. Ashlee is an author and educator and advocate around the anti-violence message. Ashlee is CEO of the Mudgin-Gal Aboriginal

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women's centre and sits on the Our Watch women's Aboriginal advisory committee and is chairperson of Warringa Baiya Aboriginal Women's Legal Service.

We are also joined today by Associate Professor Kate Fitz-Gibbon. Kate Fitz-Gibbon is a director of the Monash Gender and Family Violence Prevention Centre and Associate Professor of criminology in the School of Social Sciences at Monash University. Kate conducts research in the field of family violence, femicide, justice responses to violence against women and the impact of law reform in Australia and internationally.

And our final panel member and speaker is Dr Jane Wangmann. She is senior lecturer in the faculty of law here at UTS. In her research Jane draws on her extensive work in the field of domestic violence and the law for almost 25 years as a solicitor, policy officer and academic. She is interested in how domestic and family violence is understood and responded to by the legal system across multiple areas of law. Jane is a non-Government sector expert on the NSW Domestic Violence Death Review Team.

So I now would like to hand over to Jane to give a brief discussion on, and talk about, the issue of what is coercive control and recent policy developments in this area.

DR JANE WANGMANN: Thank you Elyse and welcome everybody. I too acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which we are today. I am also here at UTS so are on the unceded land of the people of the Gadigal people of the Eora nation and pay my respects to their elders past and present. I would like to acknowledge any Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people attending and participating in this panel. Welcome.

In acknowledging the lands on which I sit I am conscious of the fact that when I talk about law, which is what we are going to do today,

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particularly in the context of family violence we need to fundamentally position it in the context of the way the dominant legal system has been used against Indigenous people since colonisation.

So as Elyse said, I am going to provide a bit of an overview and context to our discussions before we open up to other panel members and before we open up to general questions from the audience. It seems important to really start with what is coercive control. For me this is really important because there's been some kind of mischaracterisations and misunderstandings, particularly in media commentary in recent
years. It is also really important in order to - to describe what it is in order to know what responses might best fit it, whether it is law or other responses.

So coercive control is not a list of non-physical forms of violence, although it does include these and it does play an important role in bringing to the fore these non-physical forms of violence. It is not another form of domestic violence. Coercive control is all about describing the context, pattern and impact of the violence and abuse many women experience in their personal lives. It is about how it operates in terms of limiting a victim survivors sense of self-worth and their space for action. So Evan Stark's work, which has been really key here in this work around coercive control, he describes it as a liberty crime and that evokes what we are talking about. Coercive control might include physical violence, sexual violence, property damage, financial abuse, technology-facilitated abuse, surveillance, isolation, denigration and many other acts and behaviours that are really quite individualised and targeted at an individual victim. All of these forms of violence interact, combine, reflect and build on each other in order to create this structure and architecture of control and all of these things take place within an environment of pervasive gendered structural inequality that

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legitimate and enables the abuse to take place and makes it difficult for women to seek help. There was an article published just over a week ago in which Rosie Batty describes the experience of coercive control. I will quote her words because she captured it much better than I can. She says, "It's not another form of abuse, it is almost like a web that uniquely ties you to the abuser. It is an invisible web, no one else can see it."

So many of the mechanisms of coercive control that I have mentioned are very subtle but powerful. So one of the clearest examples I have from my work and my research over the years is a woman told me every time there was a domestic homicide her partner used to make her sit and watch the news coverage. He didn't say anything, it was completely unnecessary. The effect was, and she knew what the
message was, just by making her sit and watch that news. Although this term "coercive control" might be new to many people, this understanding of the patterns and contextual nature of domestic and family violence isn't new. Considerable research and advocacy since the 1970s, 80s and beyond has really emphasised it is much more than incidents of physical violence. In this work coercive control is a term that has been used. Rebecca Emerson and Russell Dobash used the term in the 1970s and Evan Stark has used it in his most recent work but we see the use of the term "power and control" in the work of the Deluth project and the power and control wheel which many people are familiar with and we most recently have seen the term "social entrapment" and in Australia it has been used by a number of people. Social entrapment adds some important dimensions here in that it not only looks at what the perpetrator does in terms of coercive control but it looks at the role of institutions, systems and structures in terms of whether they assist or fail to assist victim survivors. It also enables us to ask about the way in which coercive control is exacerbated by other structural inequities like

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gender, race, class, disability and other things. So what's really new in all of this is this intense and explicit discussion we have been having about coercive control, what it's like to live with it, what we might need to do in order to respond to it and this is a really good thing and this is something that we should really welcome this much more detailed discussion around what is coercive control. What is also new is this focus on criminalisation, can we and should we criminalise this in Australia. It follows England and Wales in 2015 and the Republic of Ireland and Scotland in 2018 and in Scotland they call it domestic abuse and in Northern Ireland. While much of the discuss in Australia has focussed on the UK developments it is important to realise that other jurisdictions have also introduced offences around pattern and non-physical abuse so France, Portugal, Sweden and other places.

So discussions in Australia have really intensified in the last year-and-a-half and I have tried to pull together a snapshot, you can let me know if I have missed anything out but it has been quite a busy
period of time. In NSW there's been two private members bills introduced to parliament in 2020 and of course we had the Joint Select Committee on Coercive Control which reported in June this year and they recommended that we should criminalise coercive control here in NSW. In Queensland, there is a current women's safety and justice taskforce, one of its terms
of reference is about whether or not there should be a stand-alone
offence and they are due to report on this particular question of a stand- alone offence in November this year, having just had a recent extension. In South Australia, there's a draft exposure bill and the Government is inviting submissions on that. They close on Saturday 2 October. The Northern Territory, has indicated that it will consider criminalisation has part of its review of their domestic and family Violence act and there has been discussions in the ACT, Victoria and Western Australia. At a federal

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kind of level coercive control has been part of the work of the meetings of Attorney-Generals so when they bring all the Attorney-General's together from across Australia and it has been part of the recent roundtables to inform the work of the National Plan and while that has not necessarily been confined to the issue of criminalisation it has been a really key issue they have been talking about. Of course in Tasmania, which I haven't mentioned yet, there has been for quite some time some early precursor offences of emotional abuse and economic abuse. These introduced in 2004 and they have been little used although in recent years some of that use has been increasing.

So while the focus of today is to explore some of the limits and problems of this really centralised focus on criminalisation and to try to look beyond it, it is important to recognise the benefits the proponents argue will result from criminalisation and these include that such an offence would help us move away from incident-based focus of the criminal law which just leaves so much absent. That it benefits the lived experience of women. That it fills a gap by bring to the attention of the criminal law many acts of non-physical violence and its patterned nature that otherwise the criminal law just can't see it. The other benefit is it would send an important message to the community that all forms of domestic violence are against the law and will not be tolerated. There are a number of problems and risks associated with criminalisation, some of which we will talk today and I will briefly canvas some. One is whether the criminal law is really well equipped to deal with the come bless and gendered nature of coercive control. The perennial problem of ... the risk of unintended problems particularly for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women and the cost of criminalisation that will probably divert much-needed resources away from early intervention and prevention.

The discussion around criminalisation tends to ignore the fact that

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coercive control is already addressed in a number of areas of law. For example in some domestic violence protection order legislation, although notably not here in NSW, and in the Family Law Act and we might ask questions about how well those areas do address coercive control and what improvements might be made. We also know very little about how these offences are operating in the UK, largely because they are quite new. So in Scotland there have been strong prosecution rates, early guilty fees and few women have been prosecuted as offenders. In England and Wales the evidence from research has been a bit more patchy. We see differences in terms of police use of the offence, so what we might call postcode justice, we see police still viewing incidents, just more of them rather than a pattern. We see higher attrition for their coercive control offence than for other domestic violence offences and here if people are interested I really recommend recent work by Ian Brennan and Andy Mihill and Sandra Walklate. Numbers of prosecutions by police tell us very little about how women in all of their diversity have found the use of the offence and whether they are safer.

So through today's panel we are going to discuss some of the risks of criminalisation and the limitations of this focus. That is the need to think beyond criminal law. This has been recognised by the NSW joint select committee which did make recommendations regarding the need for a whole-of-government response including important work around education and prevention and resourcing and also most recently respect Vic released a position paper on coercive control and primary prevention just this month.

So now I will turn to the panel discussion and it seeps to good place here, as Elyse mentioned to you, Nicole Lee is unable to be with her today but she has been able to record a message for us and she explains this need to move beyond criminalisation and the importance of prevention

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much better than I have. So I will turn over to Nicole.

NICOLE LEE: Hi. Sorry I can't be there today. I am in the hospital. On the topic of coercive control I want to just keep this really brief. I deeply, deeply want to see an investment in primary prevention, especially around coercive control and all forms of violence so that nobody goes through the 10 years of abuse that I went through. And secondly, I want to see a reduction and an elimination of the harm that is done via the criminal justice system that leaves victims, like myself and others, out the other side with a conviction yet still deeply, deeply broken and fighting for help and support like I am today. Thanks very much and I really hope you enjoy the panel. Bye.

ELYSE METHVEN: So that obviously is quite a moving piece from Nicole and does raise a number of issues about some of the voices that were left out of the debate potentially or could be better included in the debate around criminalising coercive control. So Jane in her talk mentioned the various policy developments in Australian States and Territories and I was going to ask this question to the general panel but I thought I might start by directing this question to Ashlee. So, as you know, the NSW parliament Joint Select Committee on Coercive Control recommended the introduction of a criminal offence of coercive control. So Ashlee, do you agree with this recommendation and also were there any voices or issues that you feel were left out of the discussion?

ASHLEE DONOHUE: Firstly, I do not agree with it and, yes, there were lots of voices left out of the discussion, mainly Aboriginal women's voices working on the ground, working in community. The issue that I have with coercive control - we all know coercive control exists, we are all aware of

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that, especially Aboriginal people because coercive control - this country was built on the coercive control of Aboriginal people. We understand it and have lived it. The issues around coercive control is that I don't believe enough thought has been put into it. We don't even have - I know this is in the next question, we don't even have a description what domestic violence is, Australia-wide so now we want to bring another layer in what domestic violence is under the umbrella of coercive control.

So if coercive control is - I have just been enlightened now by Jane. My idea of coercive control was everything that's not physical violence but you've stated that it is all - everything that makes up domestic violence. So is it domestic violence or is it coercive control? You know, these are the questions that we have to ask. We talk about, you know, people being left out of the conversation. Aboriginal women have been screaming at the top of their lungs around this topic, around coercive control and the more thought that we have to put into it because, you know, it's evidence-based, we've noticed that. So if coercive control, if she can't show signs of assault, of physical assault, the police don't do anything. We had an incident just last week in our centre, a woman rang and said, "I've been assaulted but the police can't do anything because I haven't got any cuts and bruises." So with coercive control, how are we going to prove it? It is all good and well to say that women keep diaries and doctor's appointments and what not but a lot of women in domestic violence relationships - I know this because I am a survivor of extreme domestic violence - if you are keeping any kind of journal or anything it more than likely will get destroyed. If you go to the doctors the man will more than likely go to the doctors with you. If you have a phone number in your phone that is not recognisable to your partner, he will ring that number. When we talk about coercive control and all the things that make up coercion, how will the evidence - I have said this several times

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like an Aboriginal woman can be standing there dripping in blood and it was shown in Jess Hill's, "Look what you made me do" she was standing there, battered, bruised, in blood and the police did not take an ounce of notice of her, they arrested her. So what hope have Aboriginal women got of proving that coercive control is in play when police won't believe them when they are standing there dripping in blood? That's the questions that need to be answered and this isn't rocket science. Like, you know, we like to think that everything is fair and we are all one and we are all free. Aboriginal women aren't equal to non-Aboriginal women in this Australia. We like to think that there is no racism. There is racism. Domestic violence doesn't discriminate but the systems put in place discriminate. The reality is if coercive control goes ahead, we are giving more power to those systems. Those systems being the police and so we get 19-20-year-old policemen who are - you know, their work is working with domestic violence, coercive control, they don't understand, they may never have met an Aboriginal woman before and we give them the power, we give them the ultimate power and that power is to kill. Whether we like it or not police have the power to kill. So if there is a domestic violence issue and there is coercive control involved and you have to prove that, we are giving them more power and they have the ultimate power. 19-20-year-old policemen that barely get any training, they have the ultimate power in Australia, in the world and that is to kill. We are not looking at that. No one is talking about that.

ELYSE METHVEN: Thanks, Ashlee, and I think Kate, that probably goes to something you have researched before which is what kinds of challenges victims might face in having evidence of coercive control being admitted into court. Could you speak more on that point?

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ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR KATE FITZ-GIBBON: Absolutely. I would also like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the lands for me in Victoria, it is the Wurundjeri people and pay my respects to elders past and present and to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people here today. As you mentioned, I have been involved with colleagues, some of whom it is very nice to see, have logged onto this panel, particularly Sandra Walklate in the UK looking at the challenges victims face in having evidence and in engaging with the criminal justice system. I think it is really important to be really deliberate here in terms of saying that questioning the role of the law in responding to coercive control is not to question the seriousness of coercive control. That's really important. We've heard from Ashlee and Nic to the incredible and profound impacts of coercive control on a person's life. It is also really important not to shy away from the fact that we have over three decades of evidence that documents the difficulties faced by women when dealing with the criminal justice system and the creation of a criminal offence wouldn't do anything to deal with these well-documented difficulties. So I think some of the kind of key points that we have looked at is in the successful operation of an offence of coercive control would firstly rely upon victims being willing and able to engage the police and Ashlee's already noted really succinctly the clear reasons and barriers that are problematic here but research has consistently shown the many reasons why women, victims of intimate partner violence may be hesitant to call the police, to report that violence and may be unable to. They fear gender bias, they fear discrimination, they hold shame and stigma, they fear not being believed, they're concerned that the abuse will escalate following police intervention and rightly so and they fear they might be blamed for the abuse that was committed against then, we have seen, including in the example that Ashlee gave, the real issues that we have around misidentification of the

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primary aggressor. For women that are within a coercively controlled relationship, these barriers to seeking help are particularly insurmountable. We know then that victims who do contact the police are likely to come up against additional barriers. So, for example, the implementation of an offence is going to require police officer's ability to identify the potential presence of coercive and controlling behaviour to illicit information from the victim and to correctly assess that pattern of behaviour at an incident. This requires officers to move away from assessing a particular incident and to interpret a series of interrelated offences and the harm that flows from this. This is a really important

shift in focus for the police but we shouldn't under estimate how challenging that shift is and the extent of the specialist training and education that that requires and an understanding of the gender dynamics that are at play in coercive control situations. Without the commitment and the rollout to that specialist training, that education, which hasn't happened in NSW as yet, we really have to question the extent to which police are going to be able to operationalise an offence like coercive control. Just one more point and then I'll share the mic but the think the other key thing, if we go beyond policing and into the criminal courtroom, the key that emerges is how will victim survivors prove coercion and the difficulties that women victims of gender-based violence face in documenting what they are facing including coercive control just can't be overlooked. As we have heard, coercive control focuses on a pattern of abusive behaviour and can involve unremarkable, everyday acts that when views in isolation may not be considered criminal but in the context of that relationship and the pattern of behaviour, they can be instilling incredible fear and impacting a woman's everyday life so the very same barriers that we know have traditionally hindered women's access to justice are likely to persist despite the existence of a new

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offence. So I definitely think there is a lot of work to be done in improving our response to criminal justice, responses to coercive control, but I'd be very, very can concerned about sending victims into a system that will inevitably fail them and potentially retraumatise them.

ELYSE METHVEN: Thanks, Kate. Jane, do you have any thing to add in relation to any voices or key issues that you felt might have been left out of the discussion in relation to the NSW recommendation that coercive control be criminalised?

DR JANE WANGMANN: I might just talk a bit about - I guess the law reform process that NSW adopted. They adopted what is a really traditional law reform process. They set up an inquiry, they invited written submission, they then invited a select number of people to come and give evidence before them and they did one site visit to Narrandera. That is the subtitle of it. I think what we really need to ask, particularly when you have an inquiry that is looking at gendered violence and it is also looking at intersections with criminal law about which we know that marginalised women experience great difficulty, whether or not they should have adapted the process more. I mean, who writes submission? Who has the energy and capacity to write those submissions? We might acknowledge that NSW did it over the Christmas break which also impacts on the extent to which women and services can provide submissions. We also need to ask who gets invited to give evidence before those processes and how they experience that and whose vices are left out. One of the things that was really noticeable for the NSW inquiry was that at the time it was in progress there was a really interesting but heated debate going on in social media particularly by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women, scholars and community members about criminalisation and it

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ended up being written up by Professor Chelsea Waitago and others on a piece on the conversation. I think in this day and age a law reform process has a duty to inquire about the different voices that aren't being heard, particularly in an area like this, rather than thinking that that simple position of inviting people to write in is all that they need to do. Women victims of violence and particularly Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women with a disability and those that experience some other disadvantages, that type of process is not necessarily how you are going to hear their voices.

ASHLEE DONOHUE: Can I just add something, please? ELYSE METHVEN: Sure.

ASHLEE DONOHUE: That's right, Jane, what you were saying. Other voices, I was in this training session yesterday and I woman that was in there comes from a remote area and she said - this is what she said, she said well, all these laws and Government, they only worry about NSW, that being Newcastle, Sydney and Wollongong. She said, "They don't care about us regional country towns." The same can be said about this coercive control. Who has spoken to any of the women in Walgett or in Collarenebri or Lightning Ridge or Kempsey. Where all the voices and all the people sitting at the table were people in cities. If we are going to do this thin we have to have the voices of everyone. Mudgin-Gal weren't invited to the submit or anything and we are the only Aboriginal women's organisation in metropolitan Sydney that is 100% run by and for Aboriginal women. If you want Aboriginal women's authentic voices on the ground, why wouldn't you come to the only service that provides that? So voices are missed left, right and centre. Like what Chelsea said

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in her report that she wrote. And especially country and regional Australia. They don't even - their voices don't get heard either. So if we are going to do this, then do it properly otherwise we will be sitting here having this same conversation in 50 years in we are all still here. Nothing changes unless nothing changes. We need to change it up. We need to be transparent and hearing everybody's voices, not just do a middle class white lens approach because that doesn't work, it hasn't worked, it's never worked and it is not going to work.

DR JANE WANGMANN: If I can flow on from Ashlee too. Both NSW and Queensland, they have eight months to report on this issue and it's just not long enough to do the type of thorough type of inquiry that is needed around coercive control, criminal law and other responses that might be needed.

ELYSE METHVEN: Thanks, Ashlee and Jane and Kate.

ASHLEE DONOHUE: I was going to say like my old man used to say, if you are not going to do something properly, don't do it at all.

ELYSE METHVEN: That is a great point. I wanted to follow up from that. You raised voices that have been left out of the debate including First Nations, victims and family, what are some of the concerns that you see in your work and life experience of first Nations victims when it comes to criminalising coercive control?

ASHLEE DONOHUE: Was that for me?
ELYSE METHVEN: Yes, Ashlee. What are some of the concerns that First

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Nations victims raised when it comes to criminalising coercive control and do you think that the Government has done enough to address those concerns?

ASHLEE DONOHUE: No, they haven't done enough to address those concerns because if they had they would no longer be concerns. It's the misidentification, you know, if police are called out to - I can attest to this because this is, I have lived this. When you call the police when you are in a domestic violence incident and you have the courage to call the police, the perpetrator either runs or they can control themselves, so the police turn up and for Aboriginal women, and I speak as an Aboriginal woman that's done this, he could sit there and answer all the
questions - I was running around like a blue arse fly screaming and shouting, "Why aren't you doing anything. Arrest him." If this is evidence-based and the young police officer who is 19 years old and is given the ultimate power to shoot with his gun if he chooses to or to Taser and harm with no consequence, an Aboriginal women is saying thing, they have a right - okay, they will have a questionnaire, there are 10 questions that police have to answer, who was the aggressor? If the man is sitting there calm they will write the woman. Who was hurling abuse? The man is sitting calm, they will write the woman. This doesn't matter you are black, white or brindle. This can happen with coercive control. But for Aboriginal women who are never considered good witnesses how is it going to be different? How is having this law without more thought, more discussion and conversation - discussion conversation around it, how is it going to benefit Aboriginal women who are the highest percentage of domestic violence people in this country, have the highest rate of child removal, the highest rate of incarceration, how is adding another legislation that could very well, and Will, and does,

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result in a woman who's called the police for a domestic violence incident being arrested herself? That's the bottom line. That's that misidentification of the woman who is ringing. Trust me, when Aboriginal women ring the police it takes a lot of courage and a lot of guts to do it and they don't do it light-heartedly which I'm sure a lot of women don't do, but for our women particularly with all the incidents of deaths in custody and our women deaths in custody, which is a higher percentage than men, why would we do it if we didn't really want help or need help and then be pulled up or be chucked into jail for obstructing justice, whatever it's called, offensive language or maybe they do a check on you and you have an outstanding fine and you are arrested. Just like the girl in that documentary, she was arrested because of outstanding bloody fines and her little baby died, got murdered and she told the police what was going to happen. The grandfather - the Aboriginal grandfather told the police what was going to happen and the police did - I was about to swear then - did nothing. Everyone has seen that. That is the reality. If people don't look at this and understand that, that that is the reality for Aboriginal women, that's on TV, that's been put there by a white woman who did that and people still aren't taking notice of it, what chance do Aboriginal women have to be seen and notice and heard when we are saying exactly the same thing and it is falling on deaf ears.

ELYSE METHVEN: I think that raises some really important issues and also the gaps and some of the stereotypes that are relied upon that just don't work and don't comprehend the complexity of domestic violence.

I now wanted to ask Kate a question that leads nicely from what Ashlee was saying. That is that you have written previously that, "Law is not a tool for prevention or early intervention." Can you expand on what you mean by this in the context of debates around appropriate responses

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to coercive control?

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR KATE FITZ-GIBBON: Absolutely, thanks, Elyse. Absolutely just reaffirm what Ashlee was saying there around the risks of misidentification. It is so significant, the work in Victoria of Ellen Reeves and one of my colleagues, and tells a paper that was put out by In Touch around the risks for culturally and linguistically diverse women in that space I think really needed to be listened to as a cautionary tale in that space as well as the significant risks for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women. I think the criminal law is inherently reactive. By the time we are looking at a criminal law response in the majority of cases we know that women's safety, their everyday, their lives, are incredibly compromised, at risk and so what - I really encourage, and I was so pleased in particular in the last fortnight to see the release of the discussion paper by Respect Victoria that Jane's already mentioned and I will pop a link in the chat in a moment, but we need to be looking at the prevention, the primary prevention of all forms of coercive control. We need to be focussing on the importance of primary prevention efforts that tackle the attitudes, the structures and the norms that drive coercive control behaviours. We have to encourage Governments to commit to prevention efforts in this space and it is difficult because it takes time, it takes funding and there are not immediate gains but ultimately if we
don't commit in that space we will be here having this conversation about the prevalence of coercive control in our community in 10, 15, 20 years' time. It is not an either/or in terms of investing in prevention or investing in response. We have a national crisis here we absolutely have to do both. But certainly to date the focus on response has been so loud at the expense of also having a focus on prevention. So I'd really encourage us to be pushing that prevention lens forward as well. I think in terms of

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what you ask there Elyse as well around earlier intervention, I think it is earlier that we need, I think we should be thinking encouraging States and Territories to do much more detailed work around improving risk identification assessment and management practices for coercive control. We currently have very limited understanding across Australian States and Territories of how frontline practitioners, including but certainly moving beyond police, are identifying assessing and managing coercive control. We know that coercive control is a key risk factor proceeding intimate partner homicide and we know it significantly restricts victims ability to seek help but time and time again we are seeing cases of women who have been killed by their intimate partner violence when there was a background of coercive control but there were system touch points, that there were people who had visibility of that woman, that perpetrator and their lives. So we really need to be asking if we know that coercive control is a critical risk factor, what can we be doing to make those risk identification and assessment practices more effective and I think that really includes moving beyond specialist domestic violence practitioners, entry-level police as well as specialist police, it includes looking at all the different systems of law, of support services, education systems that interact with all members of our community and upskilling them to understand the impact, the seriousness of coercive control, what constitutes coercive control. We looked at here Ashlee who brings incredible expertise to this panel and Ashlee and Jane having a conversation back and forth about what do we mean by defining coercive control. We need to have clarity across the community about this so we can intervene earlier and ultimately prevent the escalation and prevent the need for a legal response.

ELYSE METHVEN: Speaking of clarity that also goes to an issue that was

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raised earlier and that is that there is currently no nation-wide definition of "domestic violence" and any panellist can jump in here but why is it important that a definition of "domestic violence" be adopted across State and Territory legislation in Australia?

ASHLEE DONOHUE: I will go first. It is important that it is adopted because what it is saying is that from state to state there is different laws and rules around domestic violence and how many of us know women that have left a state to go to another state because of domestic violence and the perpetrator follows them. So if - the laws are more lenient in one state than another, you know what I mean? If we are going to do this properly it has to be a blanket approach, it has to be the same law, rules, across Australia regardless. If we are saying that we want it to be fair and for every woman to have the same fair - or person or you know, victim of violence, it has to be a consistent law across the whole of Australia otherwise what is it? Each state has a different idea of what domestic violence is? Don't you agree? Or do you think it is okay for every state to have their own law on what domestic violence looks like and what it is? And then we will add another one on with coercive control. Doing great.

DR JANE WANGMANN: I fundamentally agree, Ashlee, that we need to have a common, shared understanding of what is domestic violence across Australia. That has been called for. Like the - the Australian Law Reform Commission in its family violence report recommended a common interpretive framework and a definition and the only people that took it on was the Family Law Act. All the states have done their own thing around. That there are some similarities in Victoria but they have all tended to do their own thing. One of the things we have certainly seen vividly with

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COVID responses is this fragmented federation that we have. It is not
fair or right that a woman living in one state gets a different response in another and, I mean, at the beginning in my introduction I listed all the places where this is work on coercive control at the moment. Now someone could, if they really wanted to and had the energy and the time and resources write a submission to every single one but we should be talking together to make our laws the best that they can be regardless of whether you live in South Australia or NSW. We also, I think, need to know - have this common understanding about what we are talking about. It helps us with data. At the moment we don't really have a really clear picture of the prevalence of coercive control because we don't have a shared definition and we really need this in order to know whether any of the response, whether they are criminal or primary prevention, are working. I think it is vital.

ELYSE METHVEN: Thanks, Jane. So leading on from that I just wanted to ask you a question and that is one of the key arguments for the criminalisation of coercive control is that it will fill an important gap in the criminal law. What problems do you see with this characterisation?

DR JANE WANGMANN: So I think in many ways Ashlee has already touched on this. The problem I see with the gap argument - it is then really well captured by Julia Quilter wrote a chapter, I am happy to send the reference, about the problem as just seeing it as a gap. If we see it as a gap it means it will be filled and filled quite easily with this new offence and that fixes everything. So Quilter argues it implies that all the other responses to physical violence or sexual violence is working perfectly well because we just need to fill this gap over here. That is clearly not the case. Ashlee has given us some really clear case

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examples. I sit on the NSW Domestic Violence Death Review Team and it is certainly true that almost all the cases that we hear have been proceeded by coercive control and some have no physical violence but they are also preceded by service delivery gaps, whether it is police or health or judicial or lawyers, they are also the feature. So we really need to ask - we need to really shift this whole system and you know, so when I look at some of the homicide cases, so people would be familiar with John Edwards suicide and his murder of his two children, the gaps in

that - like, yes, there could have been - this new offence could have been charged but it wasn't the most fundamental gap here. The gaps were about the police not doing their job, not recording the incidents, not following up complaints around stalking. It was around the independent children's lawyer not doing the job properly. These were the fundamental gaps that were taking place in this case. So I think sometimes by thinking about a new offence as a gap that can be filled we sort of put to one side the fact that it is a much more complex problem around the way in which the legal system responds to coercive control that needs to be fixed first if coercive control is to ever have a chance of operating in the way that proponent s want it to operate.

ELYSE METHVEN: Thanks, Jane. That answers that question really well. I think I just want to then move on to a question - I know all panellists have touched on this question, but it's a big one, which goes to what should we be doing to address coercive control beyond criminalisation? I might ask that before going to any Q&A questions which I know we have quite a few from our audience but firstly, what are some things that we should be addressing beyond criminalisation to address coercive control and that behaviour?

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ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR KATE FITZ-GIBBON: Perhaps I will jump in first. I have already mentioned a few but just to reiterate, I think it is
incredibly important that we look at specialist training of all police officers. We know that responding to all forms of domestic, family and sexual violence takes up a significant proportion, if not the vast Ma north of police work. We need to ensure that all officers have a basic literacy and understanding of these forms of violence, the way they present, the dynamics and the intersectionality issues that arise across the range of the different incidents that they will be attending on a weekly, if not daily, basis. So specialist training is essential. We need to ensure risk assessment and identification management practices. We need to look at cohesion around the definition, around the shared language of coercive control across Australia and I think what is important here is we have a shared problem. This isn't an issue that is unique to one community, one State and Territory, this is an Australian problem, it is a global problem but here in Australia we need to have a shared responsibility and knowledge around what we are seeking to prevent and to address. So I think they're some of the key things that we need to be doing in the first instance.

ASHLEE DONOHUE: I think in order for it to work and in order for domestic violence to be reduced is that firstly we come up with a national definition of what domestic violence is and for any law enforcement people, like police or anyone working in that space, needs to do cultural training, not only for - like we are a multicultural country. Um, you know, people from different cultures are going to, um, respond differently in domestic violence situations when police are called so therefore I think the police need to have some form of - the training needs to be better because the police are the ones that are being sent out to prevent and

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stop and whatever around domestic violence. So I think they need to have some kind of counselling in becoming - even on the run counselling so they need to be able to have better communication skills. You know, I sat on this panel before when we were - with police - it all fell short, but I said that the police need to work on their image, you know, because police don't have a great image and yet police are the people that are called for any violent crimes. So they need to be able to respond to that better than the way that they are. And that's not - that is a systems problem. That is a Government problem. The Government need to step up. There is this people that goes round, I'm sure you are all seen them, no one ever says "F the fireman" but it is "F the police." There is a lot of aggression and violence perpetrated by police officers with absolutely zero responsibility on their behalf. That's got to change because how are we going to eliminate violence in this country when the people who are out there supposedly helping to reduce that violence are violent themselves?

ELYSE METHVEN: Thanks, Ashlee. Jane, do you have anything else to add on thinking about moving beyond criminalisation?

DR JANE WANGMANN: Yes, I do. One of the things that I think is important is that partly the discussion around criminal law makes us think that that is the only area of law that responds to coercive control and there are many other areas of law that sometimes have much greater possibilities to make change in women's lives. So family violence, so both parenting and property, child protection and immigration and other areas. At the moment we have had this discussion around - like, I'm talking about the law reform process, is around criminalisation but they haven't really talked about well if we were to criminalise, what flow-on effect might happen to these other areas. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander

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women I am particularly thinking about, what will that do around child protection? Will it make it worst in terms of the attention that child protection services might have? There is also some positive things to think about in terms of the scope that might be in play to look at the way in which other areas of law beyond criminal law might also provide a better response. I was interested Kate that you said Sandra Walklate was here. I read her piece written with Lucy Williams that talks about the position of criminalisation in the UK Ben the point they made is that divorce made one of the biggest differences to women in terms of safety. So if we bring back into the picture these other areas of law we might actually get a better response. The fact is, I think, some of the studies say that women, when they're experiencing domestic violence and family violence they tend to engage with ten different areas of law at the same time in order to get some relief. It might be debt, it might be tenancy. Unless we have all of that in the picture we are really cutting up the problem that women and children experience rather than thinking about it holistically. I would like to see a much greater picture, like not to let the fragmentation of law take place because I think one of the things that law does well is it puts things in books. So it will say we have got this criminal offence of coercive control, that's that over there, without thinking about how it relates to or pushes the ore areas of law. I think that would make a big difference.

So in terms of family law for example, it currently operates in a way that ties many women to an ongoing relationship with their former violent partner and in many cases that is regardless of whether or not that offender has been charged with any criminal offence. I would suggest that will remain the same even if we have a coercive control offence but what could really make a different is really doing more work on what coercive control means for parenting and the impact that it might have

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been children. So I would really like to see a greater look at other areas of law at the same time.

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR KATE FITZ-GIBBON: If I can quickly jump in, Jane, I am really taken by - at the start you were saying about the limits around consultations that have taken place and the challenges that a lot of victim survivors will have in engaging at all with that process. I think we need to better understand what it is that victim survivors of coercive control want. What does safety and justice mean to them and what does that look like? Is it a criminal law response or is it criminal law outcomes. I think that's imperative. We need to stop assuming that we know what victim survivors want and actually empower people to contribute to that discussion in a far more wholesome and meaningful way.

ELYSE METHVEN: Thank you all. It has so far been a very engaging discussion. I this I you all have so much more to say. I would like to
now move to our questioners as we have such an engaged audience and so many questions too. So I will ask by asking those questions and please if audience members could type any questions they have in the Q&A that would be wonderful. So I will start with a question from Renata. Renata says, "I think the focus on whether or not to criminalise is divisive as it takes focus off what needs to be done now to prevent violence and improve systems to domestic and family violence. You have spoken

about police training on correctly identifying the primary aggressor, are there any other things you could think could be changed to create more just systems? I might ask - yeah, Jane.

DR JANE WANGMANN: I'm happy to come in. I would like to agree with Renata. It has tended to be a bit of a divisive debate and I think that is

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unfortunate because, one, we don't necessarily all have to agree and I think we get a deeper, richer and more nuanced response if we all listen to each other and talk about what we agree or disagree on. It has been unfortunate to see it be a yes or no thing rather than the grey that actually does characterise this area and how you respond to a social problem like this.

In terms of other areas, I think there really are other areas in which we can do work now and the select committee report did touch on these and ask questions about them. So one of the areas that I'd really like to see more work is around the training of lawyers. Like, lawyers bringing in relationship evidence when they have a criminal matter before them so we can see a physical assault not as an isolated incident but rather in that big picture and we have a very patchy use of relationship evidence across Australia. So that could make a real difference.

I think in terms of civil protection orders, I think NSW does stand behind the other jurisdictions by not having a clear definition of "domestic violence". I think the way in which Women's Legal Service in Victoria for example, I think in their position paper on coercive control talked about the arguments that their lawyers run by using the preamble in their legislation and being able to use the definition means they potentially have more progressive arguments in court that might not be possible here without a definition. I think they are positive things that can happen now.

ASHLEE DONOHUE: I'm of the belief that, you know, we're, what is it - I can't think of what the old saying is, but we're all focussing on preventing a problem without focussing on how do we prevent the problem from the get-go. A lot of the discussions, a lot of the solutions are after the fact. I think we should go back - for better education in schools, clearer

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messaging about what exactly domestic violence, coercive control, whatever it is, that Australia wants to eventually call it and stick to it so that then it's passed down from generation to generation knowing exactly what it is, knowing what the consequences of being a perpetrator of it is and knowing the signs from a young age. What we are doing now is we are waiting for after the fact. We are waiting for the abuse and everything to have already happened. What ever happened to prevention is the best cure? We need more preventative measures before it gets to woman - two, three women a year - sorry, a month, getting murdered. We need to prevent that before we are here being divided over a term that encapsulates violence, that is the reality.

ELYSE METHVEN: My next questions comes from a professor here at UTS as well who says strength to Ashlee and Mudgin-Gal and says we should be talking about First Nations women's self-determination, policing is a colonising instrument, let's shift the paradigm. Her question is to Ashlee, what types of work do Mudgin-Gal do and seek to do in this space of self-determination for women?

ASHLEE DONOHUE: Firstly we are, like I said, 100% run by, and for, Aboriginal women and have been so for 29 years so that is self-determination in itself. As one of the only services that are 100% run by, and for, Aboriginal women in the metropolitan Sydney area. That to me is self-determination. We also provide a space - we don't have a criteria. Any Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander woman walks through our doors we do our very best to service, to help, to advocate as best we can. I was only speaking earlier about what we want Mudgin-Gal to be. We want to it be the hub for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women. We want to it be the hub for any Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander

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woman from around Australia who is coming to Sydney and who wants to meet and mingle and meet other Aboriginal women to come to Mudgin-Gal. Anyone of colour, black women, Indigenous women from around the world want to meet and mingle with Aboriginal women come to Mudgin-Gal. That will make a difference. Getting our mums and clients into the centre knowing it is a safe space. You don't have to be going through domestic violence to come to Mudgin-Gal, it is a drop-in centre. You can come and create our beautiful earrings with us when we do our cultural things. I will show you because I have it here, belly casting and painting them. That is my latest granddaughter's belly. We do things like that that is empowering and uplifting and preparing women for motherhood and young girls for womanhood. That is self-determination, getting back to grassroots, knowing there is a safe space, knowing that we are a service that's acceptable of all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women and knowing that we do not have a criteria

ELYSE METHVEN: Thanks, Ashlee, I think you answered that question really well and I do recommend people to check out Mudgin-Gal and the work that you do there. It's very important work.

So I now turn to Katya's question. She says how can the rules of evidence be changed to overcome some of the challenges that our speakers have raised today? I might turn you Kate if you are able to answer that question.

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR KATE FITZ-GIBBON: I will start but I'll defer to the lawyers on the panel on the specifics as a criminologist rather than a criminal lawyer. I think what's really important here, and it is going a little bit around it so I apologise if this doesn't exactly answer your

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question, but changing laws is only going to achieve so much in a system which for decades has failed victim survivors of gender-based violence. We know there are limits of policy interventions and changes. We need to look at the culture, we need to look at attitudes, assumptions and norms both in terms of those supporting the very behaviours we are trying to address but also those that the professionals that work within these systems bring because if we don't address those we won't see meaningful change in the space.

ELYSE METHVEN: Thanks, Kate. Jane, did you have anything to add there?

DR JANE WANGMANN: I did mention the use of relationship evidence and I think that's key and you can see differences across the jurisdictions so in some jurisdictions they've put it into legislation and some have left it at common law so you get some differences. So that would be a key area.

I also think some of it is also just about in training lawyers and judges about trauma. So it is not necessarily the rules of evidence that are preventing things from coming to the fore but it is about how people - so people make all these assumptions about how they think a victim will respond and sometimes a victim might respond in a very - what people might describe as a more typical response being sad and submissive but some won't and they will be mouthy and aggressive. That is also a trauma response. We need to fundamentally change the training and understanding that all the first responders have, so not just police, but lawyers and judges to really understand there is a multi publicity of trauma responds and they are all valid. It is not necessarily about changing rules of evidence. Sometimes it is about making sure that those that implement the law have an understanding of what they need to do.

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ASHLEE DONOHUE: Can I just add too, it is also making things easy understanding. Like with the strangulation laws. If you ask a woman, "Did he strangle you?" And she will say, "What do you mean, did he choke me?" That is two different things in a court of law, choke and strangulation. Yes, he choked my. It is difficult for a woman if she is on the stand and what did he do, choke? It is did you eat something and choked on it and not somebody put a hand around your throat. It is simplifying the wording and making it accessible to all people. We are a multicultural country so it need to be accessible the language, the understanding needs to be accessible to everyone, not just middle class people.

DR JANE WANGMANN: If I can add on from Ashlee, Heather Douglas, I know she has written this in her submission to the Queensland taskforce has made the same kind of comment around the use of the term "coercive control" it is not necessarily well understood and maybe we should look at thing that is much more well understand like domestic abuse because people know what that's - we end up in the position of thinking is this something new and I have to learn about what that is. That language might also be an important thing to have a look at.

ELYSE METHVEN: Thanks, Jane. Our next question comes from anonymous attendee but they ask an important question about how can we increase intersectional service practices and delivery especially for women with a disability, whether that is physical, psychosocial or neurodevelopmental or even older women within such siloed systems. They say services don't know what to do when domestic and family violence comes up and other domestic and family violence services are

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not accessible to people with a disability. Any thoughts on how we increase that intersectional service and delivery?

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR KATE FITZ-GIBBON: I think this is absolutely essential and I wish we had Nic on the panel because she would be able to speak to this with so much expertise. What I think is really important is that we need to recognise the ways in which coercive control can manifest differently for women and children and men with disability and it can involve coercive control both within and outside the context of intimate partner relationships, that we also have the critical issue arising around power imbalances and paid and unpaid carers as well. We have to ensure that our definitions are intersectional, that they are inclusive of

the experiences as a very - as a starting point, it is about that whole system, training and understanding of the issue to ensure that wherever the touch points are for those living with a disability that are experiencing coercive control that there is that understanding of how it may manifest differently.

ELYSE METHVEN: Thanks, Kate. Like you said, Nicole would have had many thoughts on this so I do recommend all our audience to follow her on twitter and follow her research and work. Jane, did you have anything to add there?

DR JANE WANGMANN: I wanted to add something that kind of connects with something that Kate said earlier, we don't want to be here in ten years saying the same thing. Having been around for a very long time it is disappointing to still be talking about the need for intersectionality across disability and other services. We have been talking about this for so long and at some point the action - we just have to force the action

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accountability. I don't have the answer to that but it really partly we are talking about a lot of things and at some point the Government has to, you know, really put the resources up in a long-term funding kind of way. We really have to put training in terms of a long-term commitment to the issue.

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR KATE FITZ-GIBBON: Absolutely, Jane, and we've been really privileged, myself and members of our Monash team to be conducting the national consultations around the next national plan and that has just come through so strongly and the generosity of advocates and practitioners and experts to keep turning up to these consultations year in, year out, decades in and decades out and ask people for the same thing. But I think it absolutely came out from the Women's Safety Summit also last fortnight so the next National Plan has to show that commitment and has to, I think, really step out in really clear ways how that is going to be implemented and achieves because it is just so apparent from every pocket of experience and expertise across Australia, that's needed.

ELYSE METHVEN: So we might move to our next question. They direct their question to Kate and say you've spoken about in the event of criminalisation a need for specialist retraining police to identify patterns rather than specific incidences. Do any of the panellists believe there exist the resources for the level of training required, particularly given existing inadequacies or total failures by police in the area of domestic violence? Also, do you believe there has been any demonstrated evidence that there may even be a proper attempt at this retraining of police? So Kate or Ashlee, did you want - maybe Kate start and then Ashlee.

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ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR KATE FITZ-GIBBON: I will say a few things and hand over to Ashlee. I think - it is a really good question. In terms of whether the resources exist, they just have to. This has to be a priority and the prevalence of it and the impacts of it should justify the level of priority that needs to go into it. I think there are some - there are certainly lessons that can be taken from some of the international examples so we can look at the research that's been done since the introduction of the offence of coercive control in England and Wales since 2015 by colleagues such as Sandra, Charlotte and Andy looking at the training around coercive control and what's worked there and what hasn't and how that's shifted over the first six years of the offences operation. Likewise evidence coming out of Scotland around what's needed for police training and specialisation to support work in this space. It is not specific to coercive control but I think there are really important learnings around police training as welcomes out of Victoria in the five years since the royal commission and the establishment of the centre for excellence at Victoria Police that is focussed on family violence, police train and taking an embedded whole of police response to. That we really need to be looking at what the impact of that has been and questioning what more needs to be done and what would a gold standard of police specialisation and training look like in this space.

ASHLEE DONOHUE: My thing on this is we're worried about the cost of training the police, what is the cost of domestic violence, assaults and victims in Australia? If we train the police we reduce those costs. So why wouldn't it work? Like, you know, if it is about money, like you know, violence, it is killing - people are being killed daily from violence in this country. Wouldn't the money be found to prevent that if that's the

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message that we're getting out? You know, we hear - I don't know
what - people are always saying domestic violence costs so many million dollars a year in this country, well then, prevent domestic violence by putting it into resourcing the powers that be or, you know, finding a better way or whatever, but, you know, it's - one outweighs the other. You get what I'm saying? I don't think I am making sense. People are always crying about domestic violence costs so much money a year for women that are - and men and people - that are victims of domestic violence. Well, better train the people that are first responders to domestic violence, put better education tools in place in the curriculum in schools and we may be able to win this battle because right now that is not happening and the violence is becoming more prevalent, the violence is becoming bolder and the violence is becoming more common. People aren't afraid to bash someone in public. People video tape it. They put it on Facebook, they put it on Instagram, they put these fights up. We have to stop that. Let's move towards that. How do we prevent that?

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR KATE FITZ-GIBBON: I absolutely agree and I don't think we've ever had the level of funding across the whole of system response, across prevention, early intervention that we need and that would be commensurate with the size of the problem. You look at the investment in Victoria has been 4.1 billion since the royal commission, that is more than all other States and Territories and Commonwealth Government combined. So we need all the States and Territories to step up. We need the Commonwealth Government to step up and to match the level of funding with the size of the problem and to recognise the severity of the women's safety issue, the community safety issue that's presented.

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ELYSE METHVEN: Thank you. Our next question comes from Isabel. So Isabel says some of the sector are opposed to the criminalisation of coercive control. They have illustrated that by creating another offence marginalised communities who have historically been over policed will continue to be targeted and over represented in the criminal justice system. I'm wondering if the panel have thought on alternatives like systems of restorative justice? Does anyone have any thoughts on alternative systems?

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR KATE FITZ-GIBBON: I will just jump in here. I think it is absolutely something that I think we should be exploring, noting that the punitive systems of criminal justice system are not for many, they are not for few. So we should be looking at all alternatives. I have really been thinking about recently following the national consultations is what does it mean to have a right to recovery or a right to healing having experienced any forms of domestic and sexual violence. Looking at what restorative justice can offer victim survivors and perpetrators in that space is really important in considering healing and recovery.

ELYSE METHVEN: Thanks, Kate. Our next question asks why do these Commissions continue to ask for consultations and stories by people with lived experience in very exclusionary ways? We need to use inclusive communication methods, culturally sensitive which includes women with communicative impairments, so everyone can - people, their voices can be heard. It is more of a comment but it goes to that issue of impairment and how could commissions of inquiry be more inclusive. I know Jane did touch on that but did anyone else have thoughts on that issue?

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ASHLEE DONOHUE: By being inclusive. It is as simple as that. That is my point. I brought that point up but you know, everyone isn't invited into these spaces and conversations. Some people have to knock down doors to get into these spaces and, you know, especially for Aboriginal women, and I will say this, because again we are the highest percentage in domestic violence and yet I'm not - it has only been recently, maybe in the last ten years that our voices have been even barely heard. So before that, this is with any - this is with men, this is with people with disabilities, this is with anyone that is not a white Australian, I will just say it straight out, these legislations, these rules, these processes are all again seen through a white middle class lens and unfortunately that lens does not see all the other people. I will say it again, we are a multicultural country but in order for us to be able to have these conversations and work in this space then we need everyone's voice. Be inclusive. Don't just say this is an inclusive space and we are going to include everyone when everyone is not included because then we are just telling lies, aren't we?

DR JANE WANGMANN: I agree with Ashlee, I think we really need to do better around law reform processes. I mean, these things cost money but they should in order to have all the voices heard, we need to give these types of law reform processes money. Royal commissions tend to have more money given to them so we tend to see better processes. I guess, in many ways this connects back nicely to the question we had earlier about the separation of disability services not responding well on one hand and think not getting a good response when you go to a violence against women service, not getting the crossover. We have seeing now they are putting in a police a number of measures to ensure they are getting evidence from a ring of different groups. That should

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happen in a violence against women inquiry. The same thing should take place. You can see it is just like this separation, this demarcation that is just not appropriate.

ELYSE METHVEN: So we probably have time for just a few more questions. Thank you so much audience members, you have been really engaging and there have been diverse questions so far. Cissy asked do you think it would be worth setting up a domestic violence or family violence court especially for Family Court matters or criminal matters that are more sensitive to the needs of the complicity of issues that could have more trained lawyers and could have more protections for vice-presidents where behaviours of coercion could be explored in a proper arena? Then we have drug courts in certain states but, yes, should a specialist court on family and domestic violence matters be set up?

ASHLEE DONOHUE: I think that's a great idea. Again, as long as it is inclusive of everyone, of all nationalities and that all women feel safe and heard and supported to attend those courts. That is the issue here. Remember, domestic violence does not discriminate. It doesn't matter if you are black, white or brindle or what God you worship or how much money you have in your bank. It does not discriminate. It happen s in every city, town, country in this world. What discriminates are the systems in place so if we are going to have these systems like what was said, a court like that, it has to be inclusive of everyone that is going to attend it. That is what we are missing. That's what's missing in Australia, that inclusiveness of everyone's voice and so that an Aboriginal woman can go to that court and see an Aboriginal person and know, "I will be okay." A Muslim woman can walk in there and see a Muslim worker. An Asian or disabled lady can walk into that space and see

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someone that they know, "Okay, well I'm going to be okay here." Because if any of the people that I mentioned walk into a space where it is all just white they will not feel like they are okay. I know I am ramping on that but that is the honest truth. That is the truth. That is the truth that a lot of people don't want to acknowledge either but unless we are going to move forward and make it inclusive then that is what we have to talk about.

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR KATE FITZ-GIBBON: It is absolutely critical Ashlee so I think you should keep ramping on about it. I think when we talk about specialist courts they are absolutely about integral part of the issue and an integral part of the solution noting that they are a reaction so we still need to be doing the work earlier as well. I think we need to ensure that we really interrogate what we take for granted is a specialist court. This can't just be a separate building, a separate room or a separate list that the cases get put on, it has to be specialisation like Ashlee said from the point that someone enters that court system, enters the area to leaves, it needs to be specialist training and understanding, intersectional trauma-informed responses at every single point of the process. I think that is where we have seen some of the specialist court models fall down is that they take kind of a specialist-like approach. We need to do it. It requires investment and we absolutely should.

DR JANE WANGMANN: If I can add there we do have examples of specialist courses around the country. Someone just posted in the chat that there is one in WA. The fact is that the scale of the problem means that every court needs to have some level of specialisation. I just did some research on family law and I was lucky enough to visit some regional circuit courts in country and rural areas across a number of

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states and the lack of services available in those areas. The reality is if we have a specialist court it is going to be in metropolitan areas. We can't - I just don't think we can do that. We need to really force specialisation across courts so that no matter where you live you are getting some good response to the violence that you are experiencing.

ELYSE METHVEN: So I am just going to ask two more questions, there are so many so it is very hard to choose and - but this one suggests that if we were going to criminalise coercive control what steps should we take and how should the process take? So what would those next steps be if parliament was going to criminalise coercive control?

DR JANE WANGMANN: So if they are in that - that's certainly the recommendation here in NSW - we have to see it as an inquiry process that cons. I would really like to see the Government release not just one exposure bill but maybe a couple of exposure bills that people with look at and see how they are going to work. The select committee recommended there would be a taskforce that would do this kind of operational - I can't talk it's been too long - I still can't say it - that work in setting it up, just choose a different phrase, and that would have broad representation including representation in Indigenous communities so really thinking about how the offence would work and how they would draft it. That needs to be a longer consultation process. One of the things that Scotland has shown us is that you should take some time in doing this.
So they, you know, put in place specialist prosecutors and they really ramp ed up their training not just for police but for lawyers and judges and so on. If they are going to put it in place and they need to make sure it works well, then they need to also make sure that there is a commitment to resources beyond that. I mean, we know that most

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women don't report to the police and even if there is a coercive control offence I would suggest that that is still going to remain the case. So we still need to have service delivery responses to assist as far as women that don't go to the police but I think a commitment to further consultation around a draft bill and multiple draft bills would be really useful.

ASHLEE DONOHUE: Just to add to that, I think that letting everyone know across Australia exactly what coercive control is. Right now it is just a word. Everyone says, "What does that mean? What is it?" There is a confusion around it. The transparency of exactly what it is. I'm not against coercive control. Like I said at the beginning, I know what it is, I have lived it, all Aboriginal people have. I'm not against that there needs to be - that it needs to be criminalised, I'm not against that but what I'm against is the not knowing. Not exactly knowing what it is, not exactly knowing what it is you have to do if it is happening to you. That is not clear at the moment and that is where the problem lies. You know, there is no clarity and the fact that it gives, again, police more power than they already have and like I've said there, they have the ultimate power, they have the power to kill. That is any new police officer that comes out with a gun in his belt and he can pull that trigger and there will be very little consequence. That is a big power. People don't - just think of that for a moment. They have the power to kill with no consequence. If this gets criminalised, then that is more power. We have to be very mindful and understand and get the messaging out exactly what it is, exactly what you have to do and exactly what the consequences are instead of this round about just keep talking about this is what it is, this is what you should do and that grey area, that division. Be clear about it, be straight up the middle so everyone understands it and then we can move forward.

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ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR KATE FITZ-GIBBON: I think critically, and Jane touched on it briefly there but there has been some discussion of setting up a taskforce to monitor what the impact is. That is absolutely critical. This has to be a process of reform. It cannot be dropping in a new law and considering the job done. As the Victorian on the panel, I'll say as well, it has to be a representative taskforce and we have two brilliant NSW people here in Jane and Ashlee who should absolutely be on that. Let's make sure it is a representative taskforce that monitors the impacts of these reforms in practice and for all the reasons that we have spoken about today that it includes diverse views and opinions.

ASHLEE DONOHUE: Can I just add, I will say this because I have worked with thousands of men. I don't know if you are aware of this. I was a lead writer on the NRL Voice Against Violence, the original training package, I was a lead writer on that. I had a lot to do with the Tackling Violence program that used rugby league as a vehicle to get the anti-violence message out to men. Men are still confused about exactly what domestic violence is. If we add another layer of coercive control and what that is, the understanding of it isn't clear. So, again, Australia has to have a blanket approach of what domestic violence is and coercive control has to fit into that. You can't have all these separate lawyers because that is where the confusion bills and that is when it is really hard to prove. You know what I mean? The more layers, the harder it is to prove that this kind of abuse is happening. It has to be again, transparent, easy for everyone to understand and inclusive for all - men, women, everything in between. All of it. The human race.

ELYSE METHVEN: I think that is a really good note to end on. Sadly we

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can't have anymore time for questions but I know there is a discussion that the buzzing on my phone, continuing on Twitter, so I would invite people to join that discussion and I would also, on behalf of the UTS Law Faculty and the UTS Criminal Justice Cluster really like to thank our panel members, Jane Wangmann, Ashlee Donohue and Kate Fitz-Gibbon and also Nicole Lee for her contribution to this discussion as well. I also want to thank all our guests for really being engaged in this discussion. This has clearly prompted more questions and a much longer discussion, so I hope that that discussion does continue and that does involve all voices as we've stressed today and is in a much broader platform than just through law reform inquiries and the very narrow way that they are conducted. There is clearly much more to do beyond criminalisation and towards the prevention of family and domestic violence in this country. So thank you again and we hope to see you at another UTS Criminal Justice Cluster event.