In regional Australia, a series of tragic deaths has rippled across a group of close-knit communities.
During the course of the past week, the death of Molly Ticehurst, a 28-year-old childcare worker in the New South Wales town of Forbes, sparked outrage just a day before the body of Emma Bates, 49, was found in Cobram, Victoria.
The mayor of Forbes, Phyllis Miller, says Ticehurst was loved by many and that her death had left many families and the children she cared for reeling.
“Molly was a very beautiful young woman and very highly regarded in our community,” Miller says.
“The whole system has let her down badly.”
This year, 26 women in Australia have been killed – a rate of one death every four days – according to data compiled by advocacy group Destroy the Joint’s project Counting Dead Women.
Of those, half occurred in regional parts of Australia, highlighting the vulnerabilities faced by women experiencing violence outside metropolitan areas.
Across Australia, frontline services, domestic violence advocates and police officers are demanding investment in violence prevention and a crackdown on law enforcement.
The NSW government also has ordered a review of the bail laws following Ticehurst’s death, over which her ex-partner Daniel Billing has been charged with murder. The NSW police commissioner, Karen Webb, has backed this review as an urgent priority, but she acknowledged that more needed to be done to stop domestic violence happening in the first place.
This weekend, thousands are preparing to take to the streets in 17 rallies across the nation calling for greater action on a growing epidemic of women killed in violent attacks.
In Ballarat, Victoria’s third-largest regional city, the rally on Friday marked the second time in a month residents had marched the city’s streets demanding an end to the killing of women.
An earlier protest came a week after the body of Hannah McGuire, from the nearby town of Clunes, was found dead in a burnt-out car in a state forest, and within 48 hours of police launching a new and unsuccessful search for the body of Samantha Murphy, allegedly murdered on 4 February after leaving her family home to go for a run.
Ballarat has also been rocked by the death of 42-year-old Rebecca Young, who was killed in a suspected murder-suicide by her partner, in the small suburb of Sebastopol.
Wendy Sturgess, the chief executive of non-profit community service organisation Child & Family Services Ballarat, says the interconnected nature of regional and remote communities can add additional barriers.
“We hear about women in remote settings, who lived for years with family violence because they don’t have access to means of transport to leave, they don’t have access to legal services and the perpetrator can often be a mate of everybody’s,” she tells Guardian Australia.
Elise Phillips, the deputy chief executive of Domestic Violence NSW, says resourcing in regional and rural areas is a major issue. In particular, the lack of housing and crisis accommodation.
“Women are having to choose between being homeless or between continuing to experience abuse,” she says.
Phillips points out that the Victorian government spends more than all of the other states and territories combined on DVF services. The NSW government spends less than half of what Victoria does, despite supporting a larger population.
“This means that frontline services on the ground are struggling to meet demand and frontline workers are faced with having to turn vulnerable women and children away,” says Phillips.
Meanwhile, women in rural areas across Australia are 24 times more likely to end up in hospital due to domestic violence issues, she says.
“We’ve made it very clear to [the premier, Chris Minns that] changing the bail laws alone is not going to get the job done,” Phillips says.
Antoinette Braybrook, the chief executive of the Victorian Aboriginal-community controlled family violence prevention and legal service Djirra, also says data on the number of murdered and missing First Nations women is poor.
“The most recent national data suggests that Aboriginal women are 33 times more likely to be hospitalised and 11 times more likely to die from a violent assault than other women. But rarely are our stories covered or seen as newsworthy,” she says.
The Victorian premier, Jacinta Allan, has vowed to establish a taskforce to determine ways to curb the spate of women’s deaths.
Sturgess says solutions must be focused on early prevention and notes men’s behavioural programs are critical to help break intergenerational cycles of violence.
“There is a lack of support the further out you go for men, in particular in terms of behaviour change programs,” she says.
Such programs are critical, she says, for helping men, women and children.
“If we’re helping men, we’re helping women and children as well.”
Lauren Callaway, Victoria police’s assistant commissioner for family violence, says practical measures that could be considered include tougher penalties for perpetrators who breach family violence intervention orders.
Meanwhile, in NSW, an estimated 40% of police work is responding to domestic violence incidents.
A report released by the state’s police watchdog last year found there had been an improvement in how police respond to incidents, including introducing police teams that specifically focus on DVF in each of the state’s six policing regions.
But it found that in more than a third of complaint investigations reviewed by the commission, police failed to investigate reports of DVF properly, and the bulk of the work is still carried out by general police officers.
Though there is training related to responding to DVF, the training is not mandatory, and the lack of training was highlighted as an issue in the cases reviewed by the watchdog. The police agreed in principle to a recommendation from the report to make the training mandatory and increase the frequency.
The watchdog recommended that NSW follow Victoria and Queensland and establish separate commands which deal with DVF. But given the population and size of the state, it said a command for each region could be warranted.
In the Bega Valley region, Vesna Andric, who runs the region’s Staying Home Leaving Violence project, says police have one domestic violence liaison officer for the whole region and “it’s not enough”.
She wants to see more resourcing for police and domestic violence services, but also a greater focus on prevention.
“We need education in schools on healthy relationships,” she says. “We need something that allows men who are thinking about violence to come forward and get rehabilitation.”
“We need to set something up so an expert can talk to those men when violence is happening and, when they’re charged about what’s on their mind, what their plans are, rather than letting them stew and ruminate in the dark.”
• In Australia, the national family violence counselling service is on 1800 737 732. In the UK, call the national domestic abuse helpline on 0808 2000 247, or visit Women’s Aid. In the US, the domestic violence hotline is 1-800-799-SAFE (7233). Other international helplines may be found via www.befrienders.org.
