Four people, including three women and a child, were killed in suspected domestic violence attacks in New South Wales in the space of 24 hours last weekend, and police said none of the alleged offenders were known to them. By Thursday, that number had climbed to five, after a one-year-old stabbed in the Blue Mountains died in hospital. The horror sits right where the system likes to pretend it has control. It doesn't.
Who the system sees — and who it doesn't
The latest Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research results show more than 38,800 domestic violence-related assaults in the 12 months to June 26, up 3.4 per cent over the past decade. Domestic Violence Death Review Team data shows that since 2000, 351 women, 230 men and 137 children have been killed in domestic violence-related homicides in NSW. Those numbers are not hidden. They sit there, year after year, while the machinery of state protection keeps arriving after the damage.
Macquarie University criminologist and former police detective Vince Hurley said, "This notion that police always know who the offender is, is a bit of a misconception," and added, "I would say probably 75 per cent, if not more, of domestic violence offenders are not known by police." He said information may be recorded by other agencies but not shared with police. "It might be known to health officials, such as hospitals or GPs, but that information is not necessarily passed on to police because of privacy regulations," he said. "It's impossible to police what you don't know."
That line lands hard because it exposes the split between what institutions know and what they do with it. Hospitals, GPs and other agencies may hold pieces of the picture, but the fragments stay trapped inside separate bureaucracies. The people at risk live with the consequences.
What gets funded, what gets ignored
Dr Hurley said he had reviewed hundreds of cases as part of his research into domestic violence and identified three key underlying issues: alcohol, drugs and mental health. He said untreated mental health conditions could contribute to offending and that services were often out of reach. "Most people who are wealthy might be able to afford to make a psychologist appointment and pay $300 an hour," he said. "But for the bulk of the population, particularly in low socio-economic demographics, that is just not an option to them."
That gap is not abstract. It is built into who can buy help and who can't. The wealthy can purchase access. Everyone else gets told to wait, cope, or fall through the cracks.
NSW Mental Health Minister Rose Jackson said it was important to distinguish between antisocial behaviour and people suffering from mental ill health. "Failing to do so may inadvertently diminish the personal responsibility of those who perpetrate violence. It also risks unfairly stigmatising people living with genuine mental ill health," she said. Her warning about stigma sits beside a system that still leaves too many people without support until violence has already happened.
General manager Chris Lacey of the national peak body No to Violence said just 3.6 per cent of national domestic violence funding was spent on early intervention. He said the system was heavily focused on helping victim survivors, but it should also invest in engaging men earlier. "That's the space where we need to be stepping into," he said. "When someone at a hospital has a man present and they can identify that this man is at risk of committing or being violent, that there is a referral pathway directly from there for that man to get to tap in to services."
He said those services were very hard to find and very hard to get into. "We need to be filling that massive gap," he said. The gap is the story. The funding follows the crisis, not the warning signs.
What people at the bottom already know
The NSW Domestic Violence Death Review Team, which analysed more than 20 years of domestic violence homicides in a report tabled in parliament in 2024, found two in three women killed were killed by an ex-partner or at the point of separating from their partner. The same report found three-quarters of the men who killed a female partner had used three or more different types of domestic violence against her during the relationship, behaviour that is often controlling rather than physical.
Coercive control became a criminal offence in NSW in July 2024. According to BOCSAR's latest coercive-control data, police have recorded 682 incidents since the offence was criminalised, and 42 charges have been laid. The report found nearly half the victims, 47 per cent, had a prior history of domestic violence recorded by police, and 31 per cent had previously experienced domestic violence involving the same alleged offender.
Mr Lacey said early warning signs of escalating behaviours can emerge during visits to a GP, hospital or other services. "There are signs around drinking heavily, or going through a major life event, which can put more pressures on them," he said. "That is generally a critical opportunity to identify the risk that exists and try to intervene before it escalates." He said men who recognised those patterns in themselves could act on them. "It's up to us as men to seek that help when we feel we need it, that is really important," he said.
Dr Hurley said families were often the first to notice something was wrong, but noticing was not the same as being able to fix it. "It's OK for members of the family to look at the nuanced behaviour of members having a mental health episode, but that isn't easily equated into solving the problem," he said.
Domestic Violence NSW CEO Delia Donovan said getting various government departments talking to each other was a key part of the solution. "We need to make sure anyone responding to anyone impacted by domestic violence … really understands the nuance of domestic and family violence and it has to sit within every organisation's work plan," she said. She said this included sporting codes, schools, corporate businesses and early childhood centres. "We still don't have a society that really understands domestic and family violence, and we still have a society that victim-blames," she said. "Until we can all look inwardly, government top-down, all the way through to community, we won't change this."
Ms Donovan said there had been 52 women killed this year and that without proper resourcing, "we're not going to touch the sides of it."