More than 70 per cent of men who killed their current or past female partners had at least two interactions with police, the legal system or child protection before the killings, an analysis of a decade’s worth of sentencing comments has revealed.
More than three out of five of the killers had a prior engagement with police, 65 per cent had “prior engagement in a legal setting” and 65 per cent had prior convictions for a criminal offence. Thirty-four per cent had prior convictions for family violence., said “the number of different points of intervention that perpetrators of these killings have with the system shows us these killings are inherently preventable.
“The findings show us that the perpetration of serious harm including death by offenders who are on bail is not a problem unique to NSW,” Fitz-Gibbon said. “There is a need to consider whether bail laws are adequate in each of the state jurisdictions.” “The study supports recent calls for a greater focus on the perpetrators of this violence: there is a need for all Australian states and territories to embed effective perpetrator risk assessment and management practices,” Fitz-Gibbon said.“Most states and territories have introduced victim-focused risk assessment and identification frameworks, and while this is important, critically, we have to ensure perpetrators are also in view and their risk managed.
Since the rate of women’s deaths at the hands of men appeared to increase in 2024 – at one point equating to– experts have questioned the predominance of whole-of-population gender equality education, versus more focus on men living with trauma, alcohol and drug abuse, and mental health issues, and tackling the nation’s problems with pornography and gambling.
Just over half of offenders had a history of alcohol misuse, 41 per cent had a history of drug abuse and 46 per cent had histories of mental illness.