Rosie Batty and Kate Fitz-Gibbon
The case for a federal minister for children

Australians have again taken to the streets in their thousands over the past few months to demand more action in response to numerous killings of women in the first half of 2024, most allegedly by men known to them. Six children have also been murdered during this period, according to Sherele Moody’s Australian Femicide and Child Death Map – again, most allegedly by people they knew.

They are a four-year-old boy in Tasmania, a one-year-old boy in Victoria and, in New South Wales, a 10-year-old girl, a 16-year-old boy, a seven-year-old boy and two-year-old Rowan Roome. Each one of these young lives matters.

The 10-year anniversary of Luke Batty’s murder passed earlier this year. Despite a decade of increased political attention and reform, many of the recommendations of the Victorian coronial inquiry into his killing remain relevant nationally and critically needed across Australian states and territories. It is unfathomable that children are still repeatedly falling off policy agendas relating to domestic, family and sexual violence.

Last year, the Australian Child Maltreatment Study found neglect and physical, sexual and emotional abuse were widespread. Reflecting the gendered nature of this violence, the study showed girls were at greater risk of most types of maltreatment and experienced higher rates of sexual and emotional abuse than boys.

Childhood experiences of abuse and family violence increase a young person’s risk of poor mental health, suicide, disengagement from school, disability and other chronic health problems. In this supposedly “lucky” country, family violence remains the leading cause of youth homelessness, and death by suicide the leading cause of death among 15- to 24-year-olds.

Children’s deaths in the context of domestic and family violence are preventable and early intervention is possible. We are, however, missing opportunities to prevent harm and to reduce deaths within current approaches, policies and practices that were built primarily with adults in mind and within which child victim-survivors are often overlooked and silenced. Reform is urgently needed.

So it was, in many ways, promising to see a clear recognition of this need in the National Plan to End Violence against Women and Children 2022-2032. Released in October 2022, the national plan clearly embedded the importance of recognising and responding to children as victim-survivors of family, domestic and sexual violence in their own right. This acknowledgement reflects increasing calls for reform of system responses to ensure age-appropriate and child-centred practices for children and young people at risk of, experiencing and escaping family violence.

Nevertheless, recent policy announcements and reform processes repeat the long-evidenced problem of neglecting to reflect the needs of children and young people in their own right. Yet again, children remain largely invisible.

One example is the recently announced Leaving Violence Program. This program is only available to adult victim-survivors – people under 18 years of age experiencing family violence in their homes or their intimate partner relationships are not eligible to access it. An open letter by all Australian and New Zealand Children’s Commissioners, Guardians and Advocates (ANZCCGA) published at the end of last month calling out this exclusion was met with silence.

Speaking to ABC Radio National recently in the wake of the death of two-year-old Rowan Roome in a murder-suicide by his father, James Harrison, journalist Jess Hill discussed how the NSW coercive control legislation may improve judicial understandings of the serious risks facing children who experience this form of abuse in their homes. Hill stressed that timely and effective risk assessments were needed to support the courts to better recognise the range of ways in which children were harmed through coercive control.

Australian states and territories are each at different stages in committing to and implementing coercive control laws. In some cases, the introduction of a new offence and associated implementation activity may help improve responses to children experiencing and affected by coercive control. However, the introduction of a new offence in and of itself is not required to achieve this. As part of their bipartisan commitment to delivering on the activities of the national plan, all states and territories should be embedding policies and practices that are more risk-sensitive and age-appropriate across the plan’s domains of prevention, early intervention, response, recovery and healing.

At present, however, few Australian states and territories have developed child-specific risk identification, assessment and management frameworks for family violence. This means that all too often the frontline services that come into contact with children affected by family violence, including crisis services and justice agencies, are not adequately equipped to understand the risk those children individually face. All too often, children feel invisible in the systems they seek help from and are responded to merely as an extension of their protective parent, as opposed to being recognised as a victim-survivor in their own right.

The Commonwealth’s National Principles to Address Coercive Control in Family and Domestic Violence expressly recognise that children and young people have unique experiences and perspectives as victim-survivors, which should be reflected in policies and initiatives. Meaningful action on this is long overdue – we must move beyond aspiration and rhetoric.

Australian political leaders require the courage to think in transformative and tangible ways about what it will take to secure a safer future for children and young people. The status quo is unacceptable for the current generation, and the next generation deserves better.

Importantly, there is still no one in Canberra with a dedicated focus on Australian children. At various times over the past decade there have been calls for a federal minister for children – now is the time for this appointment. Children are effectively omitted from policies that affect them by virtue of not having a clear leadership seat at the table. It is not a matter of whose voice is the loudest wins but whether they have a voice at all. We are reminded of the continued relevance of the findings of the Victorian Royal Commission into Family Violence, which described children as the “silent” victims of family violence.

Delivering safer outcomes for children requires taking into account numerous portfolio priorities and complex systems. A dedicated federal minister would have the mandate to do this and could oversee the comprehensive reform package needed to realise the ambition of a holistic response to children as victim-survivors of domestic, family and sexual violence in their own right. Part of this role would involve strengthening laws and policies and developing the national frameworks and guidance required to uplift state- and territory-level practices. There is also a critical opportunity to integrate the systems and services that often fail to speak to each other – frontline services, justice agencies, the family court system, child protection systems among others. Federal leadership in such a role would also benefit the important work that is done in early intervention and prevention, including through respectful relationships programs. 

The role of a federal minister for children would overlap with those of other ministers, but in beneficial ways. It would complement the work led by Anne Aly as federal minister for youth and early childhood education, and would also link in with the program led by Jason Clare as minister for education. A federal minister for children would work closely with both Amanda Rishworth, as minister for social services, and Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus. The federal role would follow on from the Victorian government’s introduction of a minister for children in October 2023.

A dedicated federal minister would serve as a champion for children’s rights, and a conduit enabling children’s voices and experiences to inform federal decision-making. If effectively carried out, the role would better ensure that the elimination of all forms of violence against children stays top of mind at the highest levels of government in Australia.

Some solutions a dedicated federal minister could champion are straightforward from the outset. The federal government could immediately extend the Leaving Violence Program to include young people. Shared learning across state and territory borders would support the evidence-based development of child and young people risk identification, assessment and management frameworks and practice guidance in every Australian jurisdiction. While some states and territories have more recently begun to develop child-specific risk assessment tools, this policy reform work is still only in its early stages, despite having been a cornerstone recommendation of the coroner’s findings in the inquest into Luke’s killing in 2015.

Australia’s national plan includes the often-cited ambition of ending gender-based violence in one generation. Yet somehow, two years into the delivery of that plan, we have neglected to focus on the needs of the current generation. It is time to correct that – and to deliver the much-needed action and dedicated funding to secure a safer future for Australian children and young people.