11/07/2026
In 2009, 23 per cent of Australians believed domestic violence is committed equally by men and women. By 2021, that had risen to 41 per cent.
The belief has almost doubled. The evidence has not moved.
That figure is our most recent national picture, but the survey behind it was run again in 2025 and the new results are due this year. We would like nothing more than to see these attitudes starting to turn. What worries us is that much of the more recent evidence points the other way.
In 2022 to 2023, 89 per cent of people killed by an intimate partner in Australia were women. Women are most often killed by a current or former partner. Men are most often killed by an acquaintance or a stranger. A partner is rarely the one who kills them.
When New South Wales began recording coercive control as a crime, 94 per cent of the victims were women, and 92 per cent of cases involved a male perpetrator and a female victim.
Control at one end, homicide at the other. The same pattern runs through both. The victims are overwhelmingly women, the perpetrators overwhelmingly men. It is a gendered crisis, and the data has always said so.
So why is understanding going backwards while awareness climbs?
Look at where the shift is sharpest. In the largest Australian study of its kind, 26 per cent of men aged 18 to 30 agreed that a man should use violence to get respect if necessary. Among men aged 31 to 45, it was 11 per cent. The younger the man, the more likely he was to endorse it, the reverse of the progress we assume each generation makes.
And it starts younger still. When the same researchers surveyed teenagers aged 14 to 18, the boys who most strongly held rigid beliefs about manhood were the ones most likely to excuse violence. More than one in four agreed that if a man is violent towards his partner, she probably provoked it or deserved it. Among the boys who rejected those beliefs, it was one in fifty.
Rigid masculinity teaches that control is strength, and that women owe men deference. Misogyny is what that belief hardens into. Violence is what it produces. These are not three separate problems. They are three stages of the same one.
So who is teaching it? Around two thirds of young men now regularly engage with masculinity influencers online. Much of that content, loosely known as the manosphere, reframes men as the real victims, treats equality as a threat, and normalises contempt for women. Misogyny is not new. What is new is the reach. It has been packaged, sharpened, and delivered to boys at the scale of a phone.
Australian teachers were among the first in the world to raise the alarm, reporting rising sexism and gendered harassment in their classrooms. And this harms boys too. It sells them a version of manhood built on control and isolation, at the very age they are working out who to become.
This is what prevention is now up against. The evidence points to what works: respectful relationships education in schools, sustained public campaigns that shift social norms, work that engages men and boys before harmful attitudes harden, and the digital literacy that helps young people question what they are being fed online. These approaches change attitudes, and they work best when they reinforce each other, not as one-off lessons. But they are competing with an online machine that is relentless, well resourced, and always within reach.
And yet the ground has not been lost. Most teenage boys still believe it is fine to talk openly about their problems and to comfort one another, and they still turn to parents and real relationships, not online influencers, for guidance on what matters. The manosphere is loud, but it has not won the room. That is what prevention exists to protect, and why it has to be resourced to do it.
Ending this violence in one generation is not a slogan. It is the stated commitment of every Australian government under the National Plan to End Violence against Women and Children 2022 to 2032. That cannot happen while every part of the system built to meet it is stretched beyond capacity. Prevention stops harm before it starts. Early intervention catches it early. Response keeps people alive. Recovery helps them rebuild. Each one is underfunded against the scale of the problem, and prevention has long drawn the smallest share, historically around one in five dollars, despite being the only part of the system that can stop this violence before it starts.
In our submission to the Second Action Plan, we call on governments to resource the whole system properly, from prevention through to recovery and healing. The evidence on what works has been clear for years. What is missing is not knowledge. It is the funding to act on it at the scale this crisis demands.
Sources: NCAS 2021 and Manosphere Guide 2026, ANROWS. AIC Homicide in Australia 2022-23. BOCSAR Coercive Control Report 2025. The Man Box 2024 and Adolescent Man Box 2025, Jesuit Social Services. Movember, via UN Women. Westcott and Roberts 2023. Our Watch. National Plan to End Violence against Women and Children 2022-2032. Rapid Review of Prevention Approaches 2024.
If you or someone you know needs support:
1800RESPECT: 1800 737 732 (24hr)
DVConnect: 1800 811 811 (24hr)
Full Stop Australia: 1800 424 017 (24hr)
MensLine Australia: 1300 789 978 (24hr)
Rainbow DV Helpline: 1800 497 212 (24hr)
13YARN: 13 92 76 (24hr, First Nations)
Emergency: 000
