A ustralia’s domestic, family and sexual violence commissioner, Micaela Cronin, said this week that the scourge of violence against women and children in this country should be treated with the same degree of seriousness as terrorism. She is right. Her comments come as the number of women alleged to have been killed this year through family and domestic violence reaches 35, on top of the deaths of another 17 women allegedly by male perpetrators.
“We need to be using all of the tools that are available to us that we use for terrorism,” Cronin said in her speech to the National Press Club. She suggested the use of standard counter-terror measures like monitoring social media, tracking purchases and engaging surveillance. Why wouldn’t we? A brutal tally of lost lives demonstrates that death and injury from terrorist acts are minimal in comparison to women’s suffering.
The local terrorist “threat level” is set at “probable”, yet there have been zero deaths in Australia from terrorism so far this year. The last lethal terrorist event in this country was the Wieambilla shootings in 2022. We are currently holding a coronial inquiry into it.
We insisted more could be done because it was horrific and intolerable to have an event like that on the national consciousness. The murders of every woman and child are also horrific. Women and their allies in this country do not want any murders on the national consciousness.
So we have marched. We have wept. We have screamed .