It's domestic terrorism. It's criminal. Yet we still fail at stopping it

Now before I get the #notallmen crew responding to this. Yes, men are victims of violence. They are victims of violence perpetrated by men. Women are overwhelmingly violated by men.

In the last decade alone, we have seen a 20 per cent increase in acts intended by men to cause injury, a 50 per cent increase in sexual assault and related offences by men, an 18 per cent increase in abduction and harassment by men.

The biggest change we've witnessed in this country is the criminalisation of what's described as coercive control.

New research from the Australian Institute of Criminology tells us that the vast majority of victim-survivors support criminalisation.

But it also tells us that if we want change in this country - if we want a country where it is no longer necessary for police to be called out every five minutes to incidents of family violence - there is so much more to do than criminalise coercive control.

Here's how we define it. It's when someone uses "patterns of abusive behaviour against another person". And those patterns undermine freedom and independence. It might be physical, it might be psychological, it might be financial. But it builds up and it creates lasting damage.

Kate Fitz-Gibbon at Monash with a team of researchers interviewed 130 victim survivors - and overwhelmingly, these women backed criminalisation. One woman said there was not enough emphasis in Australia on the criminality of abuse: "We already have our own definitions of what abuse is, what violence is, and it can be words, it can be actions, it can be so much; we know this. But we actually have to start educating the rest of society that these behaviours are not OK; these behaviours constitute violence even before you raise your fist. We have to change the conversation."

Amen to that. But here's the kicker. Criminalisation of coercive control won't fix the problem. Yes, there was a perception that having an offence might improve police and legal system responses to intimate partner violence.

"But it's absolutely clear that we are going to need a significant uplift in specialist training across our justice system to support the implementation of coercive control," says Fitz-Gibbon.

The rates of family violence in Australia are unacceptable. We must also remember the criminal justice system is only a reactive tool.

It's not preventative. Yes, offences might prevent future harm - it might even prevent escalation of harm within an already abusive relationship, says Fitz-Gibbon. But getting the justice system process right is just one element of what needs to be done.

We absolutely have to ensure that we're investing in prevention and early intervention because we don't have any strong evidence that new laws or criminal justice system responses have an effective deterrence effect.

Plus, the new research tells us that a number of victim-survivors were already acutely aware that criminal justice reform can have negative impacts on marginalised communities, including First Nations victim-survivors.

That group, as we know, is already negatively and disproportionately affected by all stages of the criminal justice system. Would a new offence just make that worse? And what's the point if there is nothing being done to address the trauma for victim-survivors of going through the court process?

NSW was the earliest adopter of coercive control legislation but new data from the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research shows that since the legislation was introduced in July this year, 56 incidents have been recorded by police. Of those, just two had court action commenced by August 31. And this month, the first NSW man charged and convicted under the state's new coercive control laws avoided jail time.

Fitz-Gibbon welcomes the expansion implementation approach used by NSW for coercive control legislation but there's so much more to do to stop violence against women.

"I'm not sure that our commitments in this space are commensurate with the scale of the crisis. I still don't think we're we're acting at the level required to tackle how significant and widespread domestic family and sexual violence is across all Australian communities," she says.

Yes, of course we need to build awareness and improve understanding in every single area where people live, work and play.

"We also know that if we intervene in one setting in someone's lives, messages are undone when they move into another area of their life if the same messages are not repeated.

"We need to be intervening at scale and across all areas of our community."

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What about starting with the way the police force responds when called out to incidents of family violence? There is no question that training for police needs to be a hell of a lot better.

"We must train and continuously educate police across their careers to actually be skilled at responding. Our understanding of coercive control, of all forms of domestic, family and sexual violence, is constantly evolving. But do we have that continuously evolving education approach for the most important front-line responders, our police?"

Fitz-Gibbon says NSW is leading on implementing the new laws. And Queensland is rolling out a significant policing training package. But she says all jurisdictions should be doing everything they can.

One woman told the researchers that she thought criminalising coercive control might encourage help-seeking behaviours.

"It might help with the support networks and I guess just hoping that it will eventually stop it altogether, but that's probably a bit unrealistic ... It's a form of domestic terrorism ... It does get inside you and it changes who you are. It changes what you could've been and it is so damaging, but yes, it definitely should be illegal. It should."