The National Plan to End Violence Against Women and Children 2022 – 2032 (National Plan) is Australia’s strategy to end gendered violence in one generation. This is an ambitious but worthy goal. It recognises that gendered violence remains a national emergency but it is not inevitable. With the right investment, leadership and action, gendered violence is preventable and we all have a role in making that happen.
As Victoria’s dedicated agency for the primary prevention of family violence and violence against women, Respect Victoria brings a prevention systems lens to the development of the Second Action Plan.
Our submission emphasises that Australia has a strong and growing evidence base on what works to prevent gendered violence, led in large part by work in Victoria. The key challenge is now ensuring the evidence is translated into coordinated, sustained implementation at the scale required to achieve population-level change.
The recommendations and advice that follow outline practical actions to strengthen implementation of the Second Action Plan and accelerate progress toward ending gendered violence in one generation. They draw on Respect Victoria’s statutory role as Australia’s only state-based agency dedicated to the prevention of family violence and all forms of violence against women, as well as implementation experience and findings from our 2025 Three Year Report to Parliament, Maintain the Momentum.
In Part 1, our submission outlines core principles that should inform the design and implementation of the Second Action Plan. These include maintaining a strong focus on gender inequality as the primary driver of gendered violence, adopting a life course approach as an organising framework for action, and recognising the distinct but complementary roles of primary prevention and early intervention as part of the entire continuum of addressing gendered violence.
In Part 2, we set out specific recommendations for strengthening prevention across a number of priority areas in the Second Action Plan, including engaging men and boys in violence prevention, preventing technology-facilitated abuse, expanding dedicated action to prevent violence affecting LGBTQIA+ communities and supporting children and young people.
In Part 3, we consider the broader national primary prevention system and the essential enablers for success of the Second Action Plan. We make recommendations to strengthen Australia’s national primary prevention system, including opportunities to fund prevention more effectively and support stronger coordination, evidence-building, evaluation and workforce development. The role of place-based, community-led prevention approaches are also explored in this section.
Finally, Part 4 focuses on opportunities for the Commonwealth Government to better embed primary prevention of gendered violence across its policies, functions and reform agendas to maximise impact through a genuine whole-of-government approach.
This submission should be considered alongside the significant body of work already underway in parallel to the National Plan, including through Our Ways – Strong Ways – Our Voices: National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Plan to End Family, Domestic and Sexual Violence 2026–2036, work to address misogyny and gender-based violent extremism and broader reforms to address child sexual abuse occurring outside domestic and family violence contexts. While these initiatives have distinct purposes, strong alignment between the Second Action Plan and these streams of work will maximise their collective impact, ensure reform coherence and support a more coordinated national approach to preventing gendered violence across the Australian community.
Respect Victoria looks forward to working with the Commonwealth, state, territory and local governments, the family violence sector, community-led organisations, victim-survivor advocates, researchers and communities across Australia to develop the Second Action Plan and support its successful implementation.
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Respect Victoria acknowledges Aboriginal peoples throughout Victoria as the First Peoples and Traditional Owners and Custodians of the lands and waterways. We pay our respects to their Elders, past and present. We proudly acknowledge Aboriginal communities throughout Victoria and their ongoing strength in practising the world’s oldest living cultures. We recognise the significant and ongoing impacts of colonisation and commit to working alongside First Nations communities to effect change.
Respect Victoria acknowledges the significant impact of family violence, violence against women and all forms of gendered violence on individuals, families and communities. We recognise the strength and resilience of the children, young people and adults who have, and are still, experiencing this violence.
We pay our respects to those whose lives were taken, and to their loved ones. We keep at the forefront in our minds all those who have experienced gendered violence and abuse, and for whom we undertake this work.
Respect Victoria is Australia’s only dedicated organisation for the prevention of family violence and violence against women. Our vision is a Victorian community where all people are safe, equal and respected, and live free from family violence and violence against women. To achieve our vision, we lead and support evidence-informed primary prevention and act as a catalyst for transformational social change.
Primary prevention aims to stop violence from occurring in the first place, by changing the culture that drives it. We drive coordination and effectiveness of the prevention system. We build and promote primary prevention knowledge and evidence. We keep prevention on the public and policy agenda. We guide prevention wherever Victorians live, work, learn and play. We raise awareness that violence against women is preventable and influence community conversations to fuel social change.
We are an independent voice, with functions, powers and duties enshrined in legislation.
The following submission uses the term ‘gendered violence’ to mean any form of physical or non-physical violence or abuse enacted against a person or group of people because of their sex, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression. While people of all genders can experience gendered violence, the term is most often used to describe violence against women and girls, because the majority of cases of gendered violence are perpetrated by men against women’.1 The term gendered violence also explicitly includes violence against LGBTIQA+ people, noting the shared and overlapping drivers of violence against women and violence against LGBTIQA+ people, particularly trans and gender diverse people, and the importance of uniting efforts to prevent both forms of violence which we have explored in detail in a recent submission to the Victorian Parliamentary inquiry into anti-LGBTIQA+ hate crimes in Victoria in Victoria (10). Where appropriate we may also use the term domestic, family and sexual violence to align with terminology used in the National Plan.