On a Friday night at the end of May, my mother sent an ABC news article to our family group chat. I opened it, shocked to read a mother and daughter had been killed in a shooting just five minutes from where I grew up in Subiaco, Western Australia. The suburb was Floreat – an affluent part of Perth’s Western Suburbs.
The pair were the 30th and 31st women in Australia to be killed violently by a male this year. The perpetrator was a 63-year-old man looking for his ex-wife.
As rates of gender-based violence continue to climb in Australia, Dr Anita Morris, Dr Christine Craik and Audrey Rouse are among those questioning what’s driving this growing violence, and whether there’s a link to the consumption of internet pornography among young people.
The results of the Australian Institute of Criminology’s National Homicide Monitoring Program were released in late April. It reported a 28 per cent increase in the total number of women killed by ‘gender-based violence’ in Australia between July 2022 and June 2023, up from the previous year.
The killings of Jennifer and Gretl Petelczyc in Floreat mean this number is only continuing to climb.
But academic and AASW Family Violence Accredited Social Worker Dr Christine Craik doesn’t believe this number is anywhere close to reality.
“When I worked at a major trauma hospital, women would come in who were victims of family violence but it was never written down. The ambulance notes didn’t have anything about that, the ED didn’t have anything about that.”
The Australian Child Maltreatment Study conducted in 2023 sampled over 8000 Australians aged 16 years and above. It reported more than 62 per cent of Australians have experienced a form of maltreatment during childhood, with domestic violence being the most common “individual exposure type”.
Dr Craik said while children can learn from being exposed to domestic or family violence, other factors impact learned attitudes towards women.
“Children learn from what they see around them, about relationships, about respect or disrespect,” she said.
“Our attitudes towards gender and gender roles are transferred by so many means, not just what you see in the family home.”
“If you grew up in a home where there was violence, that meant you were to be violent, then we’d have just as many women being violent as men being violent and we just don’t.”
Statistics show significantly more men are perpetrating domestic and family violence than women, with the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare reporting 75 per cent of domestic violence cases were carried out by a male, compared to 25 per cent by a female.
Family Violence Principal Practitioner Dr Anita Morris described how acts of family and domestic violence can be learned and transferred generationally.
“We do think boys and young men may be more at risk of modelling by an adult male figure in the family that could predispose them to things like misogyny, disrespect for women, in their intimate partner relationships,” she said.
“Adversities that children experience (such as domestic violence and child abuse) put them at a greater risk at either becoming a victim of abuse as a young person into adulthood or using violent behaviours into their adolescence and adulthood,” Dr Morris said.
Intimate Partner Homicide is currently the leading domestic homicide type within Australia. In their findings, the AIC revealed 89 per cent of intimate partner homicides between 2022 and 2023 were perpetrated against female victims, compared to just eleven perpetrated against males.
In early May, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese declared Australia’s domestic violence problem a national crisis after the Federal Government announced in August last year its First Action Plan (2023-2027) to reduce the number of women killed by an intimate partner by 25 per cent annually.
However, Dr Craik and Dr Morris think the solution to domestic violence is complex and will require a change in the consumption of internet pornography by young people.
“I think pornography is a huge issue,” Dr Morris said.
“The young age boys are engaging with pornography contributes to how men are meant to understand and feel about women and girls.”
“Some of the things they will see are deeply disrespectful to women, and support the sorts of behaviours they would then consider normal in their intimate relationships.”
Research tends to support Dr Morris’s suggestions. A Beyond the Screen 2022 study states the median Australian age at which men are first exposed to pornography is 13 years, compared to 16 years for women.
Of those men who consume pornography, 53 per cent were inspired by it in their sexual behaviour, and women who reported experiences linked to pornography were 12 to 20 times more likely to be victims of sexual violence.
University student Audrey Rouse said she was continuously warned at school “to be careful” because boys were “more likely to model pornography and it was a lot more violent”.
She used Fifty Shades of Grey as an example of pornographic media where violence against women carried out by men is presented as pleasure and creates a false image of intimate relationships between men and women.
Dr Craik said she was made aware by a member of the South Eastern Centre Against Sexual Assault of the increase in “young women turning up in emergency departments with assault to their genital areas” at the time the film was released.
In a separate 2023 eSafety study called Accidental, unsolicited and in your face, 76 per cent of young people who had seen online pornography said it had negatively or very negatively impacted their ideas about intimate relationships and expectations about sex.
“Pornography is the new sex education,” Dr Craik said.
“Sex education through porn has normalised forms of sexual assault. It’s normalised men being predators, it’s normalised women being prey.”
Ms Rouse says she’s seen the firsthand effects of internet pornography consumption among school students and believes consent education in schools is not nearly enough to tackle the issue.
“We need to push more towards men getting better psychological treatment because there’s stigma around ‘men can’t have mental health issues’ until a woman dies.”
Dr Morris shared a similar perspective. She said “conversations between men about their experiences and how they want to be as men in the community” are important.
“Talking about some of the struggles men have with their mental health is creating an environment where you can work towards change if you’re starting to communicate about these problems,” Dr Morris said.
She says Governments investing in risk assessment tools and extensive research is progress, but significantly more focus needs to be put on researching perpetrators.
“We need to get better at understanding the impact, who it affects. We’ve spent a lot of time and investment on understanding who it happens to and not enough on understanding who does this.”
Dr Craik agreed, stating she’d observed focus being put on victim-survivors and barriers to disclosure, instead of the perpetrated behaviour. Emergency Departments and Family Court were places she recalls frequently observing this happen.
“You see it everywhere. When people say why doesn’t she leave, no one says why does he do it.”
“Speaking to a lot of survivors who have been to emergency departments for help, everything I saw was around the barriers to disclosure for women, nothing about the perpetrated behaviour that was the barrier to understanding by professionals,” Dr Craik said.
As for young people’s consumption of internet pornography, Dr Craik believes schools and parents can play a critical role in helping young people differentiate between healthy intimate relationships and abusive ones.
“Young people need to be able to understand what’s respectful and what’s disrespectful, what’s intimacy and what’s abuse, where consent sits,” she said.
She says the “unfiltered access to porn” young people now have will require “teaching children and young people how to critically engage with what they’re seeing and teaching parents to be able to facilitate that conversation with kids around critically engaging”.
Dr Morris says one of the keys to changing perpetrator behaviour lies in talking to and researching people using domestic and family violence, encouraging them to take responsibility for changing their behaviour.
“The more that we can raise awareness about the need to better understand the problem [of domestic violence], [the sooner] we can start to reduce the rate of those gendered homicides that we’re seeing at the moment.”
It’s now been almost nine weeks since Jennifer and Gretl Petelczyc were killed in their Floreat home and the gender-based homicides occurring in Australia continue.
I’m left wondering how many more articles reporting on the deaths of women being violently killed by men will be sent into our family group chat before Australia’s domestic violence crisis is tackled.
Between the 26th and 28th of July, What Were You Wearing is hosting a National Rally Against Violence in sixteen cities around Australia including Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra, and Perth.
More information about the locations of the marches can be found on the What Were You Wearing website.
If the content in this article has been distressing in any way, the following helplines can be good places to start in finding support:
1800 Respect: 1800 737 732
Lifeline: 13 11 14
National Sexual Abuse and Redress Support Service: 1800 211 028
Full Stop Australia: 1800 385 578
Rainbow Sexual, Domestic and Family Violence Helpline: 1800 497 212
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