From the Margins to the Mainstream: The Domestic Violence Services Movement in Victoria, Australia, 1974-2016

From the Margins to the Mainstream

Dr Jacqui Theobald is a lecturer in social work and social policy at La Trobe University Bendigo in the La Trobe Rural Health School. Jacqui has published on the history of Victorian domestic violence services, and homelessness. Her recent research has focused on violence against young women, mental illness and housing insecurity. Jacqui has practice experience as a social worker in homelessness and housing.

Associate Professor Suellen Murray is the Deputy Dean Research and Innovation in the School of Global, Urban and Social Studies at RMIT University. Suellen has specialised in research regarding violence against women and its related policy and practice responses, and the life histories of care-leavers and related social policy and social work practice. She has published several books including More Than Refuge: Changing Responses to Domestic Violence (2002) and, with Anastasia Powell, Domestic Violence: Australian Public Policy (2011).

Dr Judith Smart is Adjunct Professor at RMIT University. She has published on twentieth-century Australian women’s organisations, as well as on women and political protest, particularly during World War I. She is the author, with Marian Quartly, of Respectable Radicals: A History of the National Council of Women of Australia, 1896–2006 (2015) and has co-edited, with Shurlee Swain, The Encyclopedia of Women and Leadership in Twentieth-Century Australia and, with Fiona Davis and Nell Musgrove, Founders, Firsts and Feminists: Women Leaders in Twentieth-century Australia (2011).

From the Margins to the Mainstream

The Domestic Violence Services Movement in Victoria, Australia, 1974–2016

Jacqui Theobald and Suellen Murray with Judith Smart

MUP ACADEMIC

An imprint of Melbourne University Publishing Limited

Level 1, 715 Swanston St, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia

mup-contact@unimelb.edu.au

www.mup.com.au

First published 2017

Text © Jacqui Theobald, Suellen Murray, Judith Smart, 2017

Design and typography © Melbourne University Publishing Limited, 2017

This book is copyright. Apart from any use permitted under the Copyright Act 1968 and subsequent amendments, no part may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means or process whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publishers.

Every attempt has been made to locate the copyright holders for material quoted in this book. Any person or organisation that may have been overlooked or misattributed may contact the publisher.

Text design by Phil Campbell

Cover design by Phil Campbell

Typeset by J&M Typesetting

Printed in Australia by OPUS Group

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

Creator: Theobald, Jacqui, author.

Other Creators/Contributors: Murray, Suellen, author. Smart, Judith, 1950- author.

Title: From the Margins to the Mainstream: the Domestic Violence

Services Movement in Victoria, Australia, 1974–2016 / Jacqui Theobald;

Suellen Murray; Judith Smart.

ISBN: 9780522872569 (hardback)

ISBN: 9780522871647 (paperback)

ISBN: 9780522871654 (ebook)

Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.

Subjects: Feminism—Australia—History.

Women—Australia—Social conditions.

Victims of family violence—Victoria.

Front cover: Chief Commissioner of Police Ken Lay with Rosie Batty on the Walk Against Family Violence. Fiona McCormack, CEO of Domestic Violence Victoria, is holding the banner on the right. (Photographer: Penny Stephens, The Age, 25 November 2014. Fairfax Media Image ID FXT312941)

Contents

Illustrations

Acknowledgements

List of Abbreviations

Chapter 1: Introduction

Chapter 2: The beginnings of the women’s refuge movement in the 1970s

Chapter 3: The domestic violence services movement in the 1980s

Chapter 4: The domestic violence service system in the 1990s

Chapter 5: Reforming the domestic violence service system in the 2000s

Chapter 6: Ending domestic violence in the 2010s

Chapter 7: Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

International Women’s Day March Melbourne, 8 March 1975

International Women’s Day March, Melbourne, April 1979

Women’s refuge workers protest for more government funding outside Parliament House, Melbourne, 19 December 1983

National women with disabilities and violence workshop, February 1998

Launch of No More Deaths Campaign, Melbourne, 25 August 2014

Acknowledgements

This book could not have been written without the contributions of many current and former workers, activists and policy makers in the field of domestic violence. Many people have committed their time and energy along the way. Fiona McCormack and Alison Macdonald from Domestic Violence Victoria (DVVic) deserve special thanks for their sustained commitment and enthusiasm throughout the research and publication process. The other original project reference group members, Kathy Russell, Vig Geddes and Wendy Austin, also deserve acknowledgement and thanks.

This book would also not have been possible without the input of the many interviewees who willingly participated in the research; to them we express our sincerest thanks. These stories provided us with the inspiration and encouragement to finish this work.

A number of individuals warrant special thanks for their support and assistance during the life of the project; these include Wendy Austin, Vig Geddes, David Green, Keran Howe, Judy Johnson, Julie Oberin, Rose Solomon, Ulla Svensson and Jean Taylor. In particular we are immensely grateful to Wendy Austin, who was instrumental in initiating the project, and whose tireless commitment to documenting this history was reflected in her provision of support, resources, detailed feedback and much personal encouragement.

We also acknowledge the Australian Research Council for a linkage grant (LPO562154) awarded to Suellen Murray, Judith Smart and industry partner DVVic, which funded much of the research for this book. Funding assistance to support the publication of this book also came from La Trobe University and DVVic. Thanks also to those who assisted us in locating photos for the book: Jan Reiher, Peter Lindeman of Fairfax, Harry Tanous of AAP, Keran Howe of Women with Disabilities Victoria, and Julie Oberin of Annie North Women’s Refuge. Carolyn Frohmader from Women with Disabilities Australia gave permission for us to use an image, and we also thank her.

Jacqui would like to thank Suellen Murray and Judith Smart for their impeccable supervision and unflagging support during the initial research, and for their ongoing commitment to transforming it into this book. Jacqui also thanks her colleagues in Social Work and Social Policy at La Trobe University Bendigo, including Di Cox, Fiona Gardner, Jennifer Lehmann and Natasha Long, for their friendship and support. Noel Murray generously reviewed drafts of this work and maintained his unwavering support throughout the project. Suellen would like to acknowledge Professor David Hayward, former Dean of the School of Global, Urban and Social Studies at RMIT University, for his support in honouring the award of research leave that allowed her time to work on this book. Finally, Suellen warmly thanks Libby Best for her ongoing support of her academic endeavours.

List of Abbreviations

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

[T]he politicisation of the women’s refuge was a really important process … what was happening here was that in fact a long-standing social problem, one of the most significant kind of residual problems in Australian gender relationships, violence to women … was being unlocked.

David Green, interviewed by Jacqui Theobald, 28 March 2008¹

In Victoria in 2015, the newly elected state Labor government, headed by Premier Daniel Andrews, established a royal commission into family violence. This commitment was made in the lead-up to the 2014 state government election, when, as opposition leader, Andrews announced to the state Labor Party conference that a royal commission was urgently needed to ‘get to the heart of the problem’ because it had become a ‘national emergency’.² The catalyst for a public inquiry at this level was influenced by the courageous actions of domestic violence campaigner and survivor Rosie Batty. Following the murder of her son by her former partner in early 2014, Batty articulately and tirelessly advocated the need for greater awareness of, and improved responses to, women and children experiencing domestic violence in Australia. She garnered public acceptance and recognition for her endeavours, and was appointed Australian of the Year for 2015. In her acceptance speech, Batty appealed for domestic violence to be ‘brought out from the shadows and into broad daylight’.³ These events were unimaginable forty years earlier when feminists in Victoria and across Australia first established women’s refuges. At that time, domestic violence was not publicly acknowledged or tackled in any coherent way at either a Commonwealth or state government policy level. What happened to sanction public recognition of domestic violence, and to make it the centrepiece of the Victorian government’s social policy agenda in 2015?

In the mid-1970s, feminists in Victoria and across Australia initiated the process that Batty and other activists continue today of making public what had previously been considered a private issue by identifying the ‘intolerable circumstances’ facing large numbers of women and children seeking emergency accommodation. Although services that provided accommodation to women and children in crisis had certainly existed for a long time, the refuge movement of the 1970s made explicit the link between domestic violence and the need for refuge. They sought to ‘get to the heart of the problem’, as they saw it, by redefining domestic violence according to radical feminist understandings of all forms of women’s oppression—gender inequality. Movement members soon realised, however, that exposing the problem was not, in and of itself, enough to eliminate it. Consequently, they have continued to demand that the government and wider community take responsibility for tackling it. In Victoria and nationally, this has resulted in an abundance of services (including outreach and other specialist women’s domestic violence services), programs, legislation, and financial investment designed to deal with domestic violence. At the same time, organisations have become increasingly responsive to the diverse requirements and subjectivities of women and children.

Since the 1980s, Australian federal, state and territory governments have pursued policy in relation to domestic violence and violence against women more broadly and, over the years, have formed task force investigations, created domestic violence units within police forces, and established other government inquiries.⁴ These developments have had tangible effects on the everyday lives of innumerable women and children. Since the mid-2000s Victoria has attempted a concerted whole-of-government response to domestic violence involving an integrated family violence service system, which includes interservice collaboration with specialist courts and police. These achievements have been recognised as models of best practice both nationally and internationally, and point to the significance of Victoria to the overall Australian movement.

What has happened in the forty years since the refuge movement began that enabled change of this magnitude to occur? How have movement members continued to publicise, respond to and make sense of the problems facing women in their services? The central purpose of this book is to answer these questions by analysing the shifting trajectory of the Victorian domestic violence services movement and documenting the efforts of activists over a forty-year period to have the problem redressed. The book traces the movement primarily from the viewpoint of those who have worked in its services from its beginning in 1974 until 2016. It does not provide a history of individual domestic and family violence service providers in Victoria but, rather, examines the development of the Victorian movement within the wider sociopolitical and institutional Australian context.

Despite the gains made by the domestic violence services movement both in service development and in social policy, there has been no comprehensive full-length history of any state-based refuge movement in Australia. For this reason, it is not possible to undertake a detailed comparison with other states. However, this book partially fills a substantial gap by documenting and contextualising the history of the refuge movement in Victoria within the wider Australian context. Our analysis makes evident the influence of feminism and the contributions of women’s organisations to service delivery, social policy and legislation concerning domestic violence in Victoria and Australia. In doing so, it emphasises the unequivocally political nature of women’s activism and achievements in this area and considers ways in which women’s organisations have worked together to achieve social change.

The topic of this book is significant in the contemporary context because violence against women continues at disturbingly high levels. In 2004 it was found to be the leading cause of death, disability and disease among Australian women aged between 15 and 44 years.⁵ For the same age group in 2011, 5.1 per cent of the entire disease burden experienced by women was due to interpersonal violence.⁶ The extent and severity of domestic violence have been revealed in reports such as the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ Women’s Safety Australia (1996), which documented that one in five women report experiencing violence at some time during their adult lives.⁷ A decade later, 40 per cent of Australian women reported at least one incident of physical or sexual violence since the age of 15, with most being perpetrated by a current or former partner or family member, and there were similar findings when the research was repeated in 2012.⁸ Domestic violence affects not only those directly involved but also the broader community. The annual cost of domestic violence to the Australian community was estimated at $13.6 billion in 2009.⁹

Recognition, documentation and analysis of the domestic violence services movement is important because the legitimacy of feminist organisations has been challenged by conservative governments. At times federal and state government policy has worked to undermine the equality of women.¹⁰ As political scientist Marian Sawer notes, from 2004 until 2010, national leaders of the Australian Labor Party campaigned without so much as a reference to women, and, despite policy initiatives designed to tackle violence against women, they lacked ‘a coherent plan for addressing gender inequality’.¹¹ The release of the Gillard Labor government’s National Plan to Reduce Violence against Women and Their Children in 2011,¹² together with the announcement of its policy framework, Equality for Women, in 2010, signalled improvements. Of concern, however, is the ‘state of play’ since the 2013 federal election, which saw the installation of a conservative and neoliberal Coalition government. Of particular consequence for women and children experiencing domestic violence have been funding cuts to social security payments and community service organisations, including legal aid, social housing and homelessness services. More broadly, the period since 2013 has been characterised by the dismantling of essential social welfare infrastructure and institutions, generating ‘negative impacts on women and their vulnerability to violence’.¹³

Following the appointment of Malcolm Turnbull as prime minister in 2015, and in the aftermath of several egregious deaths of women and children from domestic violence, the Coalition government reaffirmed its commitment to tackling domestic violence. Turnbull labelled the problem a ‘national disgrace’ and announced an additional $100 million in funding to tackle it.¹⁴ Although these rhetorical and material commitments are encouraging, it remains a matter of concern that the conditions required for gender equality, and by extension the prevention of domestic violence, are being simultaneously eroded. By contrast, in Victoria recently, there have been promising developments. At the end of 2014, the newly elected Labor government appointed the first minister for the prevention of family violence in Victoria and Australia, Fiona Richardson. It also agreed to implement all 227 recommendations of the Royal Commission into Family Violence, which reported in March 2016, and, in the following November, Minister Richardson released Victoria’s first ‘Gender Equality Strategy’, Safe and Strong. It will form a key component of the government’s plan to tackle violence against women. As the minister makes clear, ‘societies with greater gender equality have lower levels of violence against women’.¹⁵

The longer history of domestic violence and women’s refuges

When women’s refuges began in the 1970s, they were responding to an ‘almost invisible issue’.¹⁶ Domestic violence did not exist as a named social issue, let alone as part of a public policy platform, framed as a problem of gender inequality. The refuge movement engaged in a process of defining the problem of domestic violence as a feminist issue, and radical feminism fashioned members’ ideas. What became known as domestic violence was commonly referred to at this time as ‘cruelty’ within the context of the law, and was one of the grounds on which women could seek divorce.¹⁷ Although legal remedies were available, in reality most women did not benefit from them because of the legal costs involved, lack of financial independence, fear of retaliation, and shame that their marriage had failed.¹⁸ Domestic violence had long been silenced throughout the preceding years for a number of reasons relating to the traditional rights of men to discipline their wives, the confinement of women to the home and the limitations of legal redress. However, during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, cruelty became increasingly unacceptable within marriage, and legislation came to reflect changing attitudes to violence.¹⁹ Nevertheless, domestic violence was not discussed widely and publicly.

Problems facing women, including what came to be known as domestic violence, had been of concern to feminist activists from the late nineteenth century onwards, and historian Marilyn Lake has documented five overlapping periods of Australian feminism, arguing that they ‘constitute an organised political movement’.²⁰ However, until the women’s liberation movement, feminist activism, including that relating to domestic violence, had maintained as its cornerstone the moral and caring role of women, a kind of public maternalism based on the view that the ideal family home should constitute the model for the nation as a whole. Domestic violence as a specific problem had remained mostly hidden in ‘the codes and limited strategies of the temperance movement’ and philanthropic societies.²¹ This meant that feminists from the women’s liberation movement ‘did not at once identify the violence of male partners as a key issue’ because, as historian Janet Ramsay argues, ‘they had become detached from the clear knowledge and subtle political placing of such violence by their feminist forebears’.²² As a result, many felt that domestic violence was a newly ‘discovered’ issue.²³ Although earlier feminists framed the problem and measures to deal with it in ways that were different from those of their late twentieth-century successors, they were nonetheless aware of and active in response to such violence.

Women’s refuges developed within the context of charity-based emergency accommodation for women. Religious organisations had provided some limited accommodation services for homeless women for a long time. Although it was not publicly recognised and debated, women who experienced domestic violence would have accessed such services. Mary Anderson Lodge was one such place operated by the Salvation Army. It loosely aligned itself with the refuge movement after 1975 by accepting government funding, although it continued to operate relatively independently until more recent years. Catholic organisations such as the Good Shepherd sisters’ convent in Abbotsford and the Missionaries of Charity Women’s Shelter in Fitzroy also provided crisis accommodation for women, and the latter continues to operate today. But neither was aligned with the refuge movement, and they generally saw their work as an extension of Christian duty, focusing on restoring families and defending women’s morality. Other non-denominational organisations such as Hanover Welfare Services identified the problems facing women as ‘human distress’ and argued that it was common to all those experiencing homelessness.²⁴ None of these groups were in the business of critiquing the social structures within which women became homeless. Only after the beginnings of the refuge movement did some sections of the community begin publicly to acknowledge that ‘the battered wife is a tremendous and very common problem’.²⁵

The issue of homeless men dominated public discourse at this time, and the main welfare services in Melbourne responded with large accommodation facilities. These included ‘The Gill’ run by the Salvation Army, and ‘Ozanam House’ auspiced by St Vincent de Paul. The Commonwealth government played no formal role in the provision of these services until people from Victorian homelessness services successfully pressured both political parties to establish a working party to investigate ‘the needs of homeless men and women’.²⁶ This was set up following the election in 1972 of the Whitlam Labor government.²⁷ The working party’s recommendations formed the basis of the first Commonwealth legislation providing for homeless people passed in December 1974, the Homeless Persons Assistance Act (1974), and most of the recommendations were implemented under the national Homeless Persons Assistance Program in 1975. Notably, the working party had concluded that ‘women were not a significant part of the homeless population’,²⁸ and argued that the government’s response to the problem should ‘give consideration to not segregating the sexes’.²⁹ Thus the extent of women’s homelessness and its relationship to domestic violence remained unacknowledged. It was not until the development of feminist refuges that women’s homelessness was publicly and explicitly linked to the issue of domestic violence. Feminist refuges argued against the welfare-focused charity model, and responded with new ways of interpreting and dealing with the problem of domestic violence. These changes were to occur within an international context, and the emergence of refuges overseas was well known in Melbourne in the 1970s,³⁰ especially those developing in the United Kingdom, and in the United States and Canada.³¹

The refuge movement was centrally involved in transforming dominant discourses regarding the problem of interpersonal violence in heterosexual relationships. The invisibility of the issue also meant that its extent and severity were unknown. The first formal use of the term ‘domestic violence’ in a national context was in a submission to the 1975 International Women’s Year United Nations world conference, and it incorporated a socially based analysis.³² According to social scientist Adrian Howe, the formal adoption of the term ‘domestic violence’ above other terms such as ‘criminal assault in the home’ or ‘wife-bashing’ represented a concession by policy advisers to ensure that the ‘relatively benign term … succeeded as a discourse’.³³ It is certainly the case that in Victoria by the late 1970s ‘domestic violence’ was the term most commonly used within the refuge movement as well as in public policy discourse more broadly.³⁴ Ramsay contends that this early framing by Australian feminists of domestic violence as a social issue was relatively uncontested by established professions. This was different for feminists in Canada, the USA and the United Kingdom, where ‘established individual pathology framing[s] of family violence’³⁵ retained greater influence and they were forced to negotiate their understandings of domestic violence with established professions whose ‘controlling role in the policy processes … limited feminist influence on the eventual policy framing of domestic violence’.³⁶ However, the relatively uncontested adoption of the radical feminist analysis of domestic violence in Australia meant that when ‘broader ranging analytical discussions about domestic violence and appropriate policy responses … began, feminist refuges had already been funded and feminist identification and ownership of the issue of domestic violence had an established presence in the policy arena’.³⁷

In Victoria, the level of ‘ownership’ of the issue was evident in the refuge movement’s activism in a range of institutions and organisations.³⁸ Radical feminist refuges were therefore ready and determined to defend their analysis in opposition to other professions as well as those within their own movement. However, during the mid-1970s, the key issue was still homelessness. Refuges had played a critical role redefining and gendering it, maintaining that women’s homelessness resulting from ‘intolerable circumstances’ was distinct and a result of women’s inequality in society. It is also evident that the refuge movement’s emphasis on women’s homelessness as a policy problem related to its desire to achieve government funding. Over the next several years, the refuge movement began to concentrate on domestic violence above and beyond other issues facing women in refuge, such as their homelessness. At the same time, access to refuge was narrowed so that, by 1978, the group was arguing that refuges should not be a response to ‘homeless women without children’.³⁹ Furthermore, ‘the needs of women in particular crises, such as drug dependence and discharge from psychiatric institutions or prisons, should be provided for under a different program than the women’s refuges program’.⁴⁰ This marked a turning point for the refuge movement, whose original aims and objectives were shaped by a commitment to offer support to all women. A combination of issues influenced