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Rapists could be jailed for life and domestic abusers who murder current or former partners would face longer sentences under a suite of changes the Carroll government is promising to try to reduce violence against women.
An Australian-first manslaughter charge for perpetrators whose use of family violence causes someone to take their own life would also be introduced if Labor wins in November – making the phenomenon known as “slow femicide” a new offence.
The definition of family violence would also be broadened to criminalise abandoning a victim in medical need, following the coroner’s recommendations after the death of Victorian women Narelle Simmons and Belinda Jones, both of whom died after being abandoned by abusive partners while in urgent need of medical care.
As a federal parliamentary committee continues to examine the links between family violence and suicide, Victoria’s move could more accurately include deaths directly caused by coercive control or other forms of family violence in tallies of murdered women.
A standard sentence of 30 years would be created for the murder of a current or former partner, an increase of five years on Victoria’s standard murder sentence, and the maximum penalty for rape would be increased to life.
As One Nation continues to discuss reducing women’s reproductive rights – prompting Opposition Leader Jess Wilson to promise that her government would not change abortion laws – Premier Ben Carroll and Attorney-General Sonya Kilkenny announced violence-against-women justice response reforms so broad-reaching they took even the women’s sector surprise.
Melbourne University law Professor Heather Douglas, the co-ordinator of the National Domestic and Family Violence Bench Book whose research has heavily influenced family violence justice legislation, said the headline proposals did not include any detail, and she hoped there would be consultation about their development and implementation.
“There is nothing there [yet] … the idea is to create a new offence and amend definition of family violence, and introduce this new form of manslaughter, but they really don’t have views about what this would mean at this stage,” Douglas said. “They are saying this is something they would need to consult widely on.”
As to why so many reforms aimed at boosting women’s safety were announced at once and without deep expert or sector consultation, Douglas said: “It’s an election year.”
Criminalising coercive control was considered for many years – and rejected by the Allan and Andrews governments – before the Carroll government announced it would change the law in August. The announcement came after Wilson vowed to introduce that change – despite concerns the laws could be used against innocent women falsely accused of coercive crimes.
But the case for keeping laws up to date with community expectations and dangerous practices has been illustrated by the Allan government’s criminalisation of non-fatal strangulation. In the first year of the landmark offence, 1000 people were charged with non-fatal strangulation, choking or suffocation of partners of family members.
Releasing what they described as the “toughest penalties ever for rapists and sex offenders” on Sunday morning, the government committed to new maximum penalties for all serious sexual offences, and to allowing courts to consider patterns of sexual abuse by an accused as evidence at trial.
Currently, an accused person’s previous history of sexual offending is strictly protected and heavily restricted during the initial guilt-determination phase of criminal trials under so-called “rape-shield” laws.
The government’s statement said this had “prevented people accused of multiple acts of sexual abuse from being prosecuted”.
In research published in June, Heather Douglas called for thorough investigation of suicides in the context of family violence, saying Australia was falling behind other countries in dealing with a group of victims who are often missing from official figures.
She told The Sunday Age that somewhere between one-quarter and half of suicides involved domestic and family violence, “and where women have succeeded, in this situation it does look like we haven’t collected these statistics in any coronial courts”.
In the United Kingdom, more coroners are “increasingly prepared to say that the perpetrator’s behaviour contributed to the suicide of the victim and that is assisting police or prosecution services to then prosecute manslaughter” using existing homicide laws, she said. More training for Australian coroners to recognise the significance of family violence contexts in their suicide inquiries would be helpful, Douglas said.
Carroll said the reforms were part of his tough-on-crime agenda, “and that means being tough on family and sexual violence”. “We must act on the violence that is killing a Victorian woman every two weeks,” he said.
Kilkenny said the changes would hold perpetrators to account and “set the standard for what Victorians will never tolerate”. The comments reflected community anger over a string of headlines about sexual maltreatment of Australian women in recent months, and distress among advocates and others about One Nation leader Pauline Hanson’s remark that domestic violence was a “two-way street”.
Other new proposed Victorian measures include changing the Evidence Act to stop defence barristers using humiliating and invasive questioning techniques – echoing 2021 recommendations by the Victorian Law Reform Commission about the need to stamp out re-traumatising treatment of victim survivors by barristers using victim-blaming questions.
Despite the Victorian government investing more than $3.8 billion in family violence prevention and response since the 2015 royal commission, recorded police incidents reached a new high in 2024-25.
Victorian Crime Statistics Agency data showed an 8 per cent increase on the previous year; police recorded 106,430 total family violence incidents during 2024–25. For the first time, the Family Violence Database reported the proportion of intervention orders breached, revealing in the five years to 2024-25, almost one in four (24 per cent) had been breached.
Under the proposed changes, penalties for repeat breaches of family violence intervention orders would be doubled from a maximum of five years to 10.
Dr Joumanah El-Matrah, chief executive of Victoria’s family violence sector body Safe and Equal, welcomed the efforts to strengthen laws, saying victim-survivors and their families deserved a legal system that recognised the full extent of the harm they experienced and perpetrators had to be held to account.
“Recognising the links between prolonged family violence and suicide is an important step towards addressing a gap in our current laws,” she said.
“We have long advocated for greater recognition of the relationship between family violence and suicide and stronger responses across family violence, mental health and suicide prevention systems.”
Proposed reforms to sexual violence laws were also welcome, El-Matrah said, and “no one seeking justice for sexual violence should be subjected to humiliation or further trauma through the court process”.
But as well as law reform, broader support for survivors was required, including enough properly funded specialist services and legal support to meet demand. In August, Safe and Equal released Equity Economics data showing that in 2024-25, demand for help exceeded available system capability so much that 5000 women who asked for support could not find it.
“These reforms should be accompanied by sustained investment across the family and sexual violence sectors so that stronger laws translate into better outcomes for victim-survivors in practice,” El-Matrah said.
Asked if the tougher penalties for rape and all sexual abuse offences would act as an increased deterrent, Melbourne University’s Douglas said the move served as a public statement denunciating rape but in practice it would mean sentences were pushed up by about five years from the current median of five to six years.
“There is an argument about community protection, especially if these are killers or serious rapists that they’re kept behind bars – but this is a very knee-jerk law and order response.”
- If you or anyone you know needs support, you can contact the National Sexual Assault, Domestic and Family Violence Counselling Service on 1800RESPECT (1800 737 732), Lifeline 131 114, or Beyond Blue 1300 224 636.
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Wendy Tuohy is a senior writer focusing on social issues and those impacting women and girls.Connect via X or email.From our partners
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