CANBERRA, July 19 (Xinhua) -- Australia's national research center on crime and criminal justice has called for domestic violence perpetrators to be treated like extremists and monitored.
In a report published on Friday, the Australian Institute of Criminology (AIC) proposed a Domestic Violence Threat Assessment Centre (DVTAC) to gather intelligence on, monitor and intervene against domestic violence perpetrators considered high-risk of committing intimate partner homicide (IPH).
The proposal is modeled on Fixated Threat Assessment Centres, which have been used in Australia and around the world to monitor the threat posed by lone-actor extremists.
Under the AIC plan, high-risk domestic violence perpetrators would be treated as "fixated persons" in a multi-agency approach that would bring together law enforcement, mental health support and domestic violence experts to share information and prevent IPH.
"Recent research has viewed some IPH perpetrators as being motivated by fixation and grievances," the AIC report said.
"These fixated perpetrators hold an intense preoccupation with an individual, which may be driven by a grievance."
IPH is one of the most common forms of homicide in Australia, with the murder or manslaughter of an intimate partner accounting for almost one-quarter of all homicides recorded in Australia between 1989-90 and 2022-23. Women are the victims of three-quarters of IPH incidents in Australia.
Since the early 1990s, an average of 49 Australian women have been killed by a current or former partner every year.
Tens of thousands of Australians joined protests around the country in April and May rallying against gender-based violence following the violent deaths of 27 women in the first four months of the year.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese described violence against women as a national crisis at the time and asked federal, state and territory attorneys-general and police ministers to find better responses to high-risk domestic violence offenders.
The AIC report, which was delivered to federal Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus, suggested that individuals could be referred to the DVTAC if they had made threats to kill or shown other behavior indicative of a fixated threat.
It said that intensive surveillance of high-risk offenders would help implement case management and mental health support to de-escalate the risk of further offending and facilitate long-term behavior change as well as help victim-survivors of domestic violence escape high-risk environments. ■