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On the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, the federal government has announced a 40 per cent boost to funding for the national domestic violence crisis line to meet surges in call demand, said Social Services Minister Tanya Plibersek.
“We set up 1800RESPECT in 2010 and it received 11,000 calls that year. In the last financial year, it received 342,000 contacts. So it’s not just calls now, it’s video chats and SMS as well, and online counselling, and of course, the need has grown really exponentially.
“Today we’re announcing a 40 per cent funding increase to make sure that we can keep up with that demand. We know that most calls are answered within 20 seconds, well over 90 per cent of calls are answered within 20 seconds. That’s a great achievement, but as those numbers grow, we need to keep up with demand, and that’s why we’re increasing the funding,” Plibersek told the ABC this morning.
An Australian woman was killed every four days in 2024.Credit: Marija Ercegovac
The government is also working to amend social security law, she said, “so that it can’t be weaponised against victims of domestic violence by perpetrators”.
“We’ve seen, for example, in the past, perpetrators using banking systems transferring one cent at a time so that they can send an abusive or threatening message to their ex partner. We’ve had to work with banks, for example, to make sure that bank systems aren’t being used to continue to abuse and frighten victims of domestic violence.”
An alarming number of Australian women have been killed in recent years by domestic and family violence, and the number of victims keeps rising. Find out more about their lives.
