Large proportions of the population in Australia have perpetrated domestic or sexual violence. If 1.6 million women (17%) and 548,000 men (6.1%) in Australia have experienced physical or sexual violence from a current or previous cohabiting partner since the age of 15, then in turn, large numbers of people are the perpetrators of this violence.
There is no national Australian data on people’s perpetration of domestic or sexual violence. While we have good data on violence victimisation, we know far less about violence perpetration. Existing scholarship, however, does give us some idea of the extent and patterns of perpetration.
The State of Knowledge Report on Violence Perpetration reviews what is known about who perpetrates domestic, family, and sexual violence, how, and why, in order to enhance national efforts to end this violence.
Data from victims and police
One of the consistent findings from victimisation data, legal system data, and survey self-reports is that most violence is perpetrated by men.
Among all people in Australia who have suffered violence, nearly all had experienced violence from a male perpetrator (95% of male victims and 94% of female victims). Around one quarter of all victims had experienced violence from a female perpetrator (28% of male victims and 24% of female victims).
Close to nine in ten perpetrators of homicide in Australia are male. Three-quarters (75%) of all victims of domestic violence reported the perpetrator as male. Among all genders of victims of sexual violence since the age of 15, six times as many people reported violence by a male perpetrator as by a female perpetrator.
As most victims do not formally report to authorities, police and legal data are limited sources of information on perpetration. Police data tends to capture only the most severe cases, legal definitions vary across Australia, and existing data are shaped by the over-policing of First Nation and ethnic minority communities.
Self-report data
Another stream of data comes from surveys in which people report on their own use of violent behaviours. A key issue here is that most self-report data on domestic violence relies only on asking individuals if they or their partners have ever committed any violent acts from a specified list (slapping, kicking, punching, and so on).
Popular measures such as the Conflict Tactics Scale do not also ask about severity, frequency, impact (injury or fear), intent, whether the acts were in self-defence, or their history and context. They omit sexual violence, stalking, other violent acts, and violence after separation.
Much self-report data on domestic violence does not measure the pattern of power and control exerted by an individual over their intimate partner or former partner, although many researchers and advocates see this as defining domestic violence.
Studies of domestic violence that use the Conflict Tactics Scales or other similar, acts-based measures tend to find that males and females perpetrate aggression against intimate partners at similar rates, or in some instances that women report higher rates of perpetration than men.
Such studies also often find that substantial proportions of people have used at least one type of aggression or abuse against a partner. For example, in a US study among university students, 18% of men and 34% of women reported perpetrating physical aggression towards their partners and 98% of both men and women reported perpetrating psychological aggression.
Apparent findings that men and women are using domestic violence at similar rates must be interpreted with caution, for four reasons. First, most studies are just ‘counting the blows’, measuring any use of a set list of violent acts. They may lead to false positives or over-reporting, including of harmless and innocuous behaviours. Second, there is evidence that men are less likely than women to report their own use of violence. Third, more of women’s than men’s violence is in self-defence. Fourth, even where overall rates of the use of various violent acts are similar among males and females, males’ use of violence typically is more frequent, severe, fear-inducing, injurious, and harmful than females’ use of violence.
Gender contrasts in rates of perpetration are far stronger for sexual violence. Boys and young men have significantly higher rates of sexual violence perpetration than girls and young women, as documented in reviews of studies among teenagers and young people.
Significant minorities of males have ever perpetrated sexual violence. For example, close to one-third (29%) of men at universities in the USA and Canada have perpetrated sexual violence in their lifetimes. In a multi-country self-report study in the Asia-Pacific, proportions of men reporting some form of rape of a woman or girl ranged from 10% to 62%.
Perpetrators in society
People’s use of violence often starts young. Substantial proportions of adolescents perpetrate dating violence against their intimate partners and ex-partners. US studies find that the average age of first perpetration of sexual violence by males is 16.
Few perpetrators are held to account for their crimes. The vast majority of perpetrators of domestic and sexual violence do not ever come to the attention of police or legal systems.
Perpetration is driven by risk factors at the individual, relationship, and community levels.Prevention efforts must address childhood exposure to domestic and family violence, violent and sexist norms, peers’ condoning of violence, community disadvantage, and other factors.
To prevent domestic and sexual violence, we need to know far more about perpetrators and perpetration. We need national data on the extent and character of people’s use of domestic and sexual violence. We need well-designed methods that capture the character, breadth, severity, impact, and contexts of violence perpetration. We need research on female and LGBT perpetrators and on diverse forms of violence. We need to know more about the risk and protective factors that either feed into perpetration or protect against it.
Without this information we do not know where best to target interventions against perpetration effectively, when to intervene early, and whether Australia’s efforts to reduce the use of violence are making progress.
A shorter version of this article was published in The Conversation, February 8 2023, here.
See the full report Who uses domestic, family, and sexual violence, how, and why? The State of Knowledge Report on Violence Perpetration here.