Gaol, ankle bracelet technology - whatever it takes to free the victim from the basher. I know the basher lobby isn't interested in doing that, groping for excuse after excuse all amounting to a specious claim that the victim brought it on herself (or himself if you want to stick with the narrative that DV is women bashing men). And all being pleas to let the bashers get at the victims.

Anderson was a violent criminal (as well as a kiddieporn collector) who needed to be stopped. He proved it with a cricket bat and a knife.

This current public focus on domestic violence will, hopefully, give effect to an overwhelming view of normal people that DV can be stopped only by effectively and reliably blocking bashers' access to those whom they bash. Those who don't want bashers banged up will need to come up with ways that will achieve the same result both immediately and reliably. Nothing other than imprisonment without parole has been suggested on this thread that comes even close.

We'll see what value we, as a society, place on the human rights of battered wives (or whatever gender you'd like to ascribe to the victims).

The procedure described by Loudmouth is commendable, but it answers a different need from those who are suffering bashings NOW - hundreds, maybe thousands of them. They can't retrofit their lives to the day their relationships began. Maybe the thing that some couples might gain from intervention in their early days (and it would have to be routine) might be a discovery that one of the partners is a mongrel who thinks he has a natural-born right to bash his "property" into submission. That could lead to a timely exit by a future victim. Emancipation one by one, while the violence continues Australia-wide without end.

If these current inquiries lead to bypassing the urgent problems that victims are suffering every day, then the nationwide disgrace of physical domestic assault up to and including homicide will continue without even a blip.

Hi JUles,

Yes, you're right, I have no solution to severe problems, BUT surely it makes sense to put programs in place which anticipate the possibilities of marital instability, and ultimately DV ? To try to minimise the problems before they erupt ?

Okay, perhaps you're right, let's not try that. Let's just wait until problems are so great that any solutions are impossible, and then we actually don't have to do anything but whinge about them. That's much more fun, you can really get a lot of sh!t off your chest that way, slagging off other people.

Carry on.

Joe

Planto, 1 in 3 you say. Well perhaps you had best move and see how the rest of the world lives because where I'm from the numbers are nothing like that, not among the folk I associate with anyway, which by the way may hint to where a large part of the preventable problem is caused because you can't legislate against stupidity.

It's now a very costly one that has somehow been dumped on Joe tax payer to fund, and given I am one such Joe tax payer, I've had a gut full of my taxes being wasted on lost causes.

While I'm the first to agree there are innocent victims, you can't help people who refuse to help themselves.

Of cause if we had a decent judicial system, things would be very different.

No, Loudmouth, we don't, as a nation, satisfy ourselves with slagging off at criminals who have brought us to what our leaders have rightly called a crisis, we seek ways to STOP THEM through the weapons that we have available - legislative powers.

How may legislation be strengthened to bring down those enemies whom Alexander Downer once adroitly termed "the things that batter"?

It's not hard see how to tie the hands of pro-criminal elements in the legal system by setting out what they have to do to protect vulnerable citizens from assault. Legislated minimum sentences. The cops have by and large come to accept the message about dealing with domestic assault, now the prosecutors, magistrates and judges need to be forced, by law, to back up the police service's hard work.

All praise to the good work being done to help people work at their domestic relationships. But additional to, never INSTEAD of, confronting the bashers and disempowering them.

Taxes? Schmaxes. I've paid taxes all my working life and watched the money being squandered by Lib governments in foreign colonial adventures from Malaya in the 1950s to the Middle East today and none of it defending our own country. Our people have enemies right here at home.

Hi Jules,

"All praise to the good work being done to help people work at their domestic relationships. But additional to, never INSTEAD of, confronting the bashers and disempowering them."

Of course. It's not a matter of either/or - whatever works, and the earlier the better. We all enter marriage full of hope, we can't know what the future might bring. And women then often find themselves in weak positions vis-à-vis their husbands, if they are pregnant or raising very young children: he has the job, control of the money, while she is more or less totally dependent on him, and much more socially isolated on the whole.

Then, for some couples, it goes downhill from there. So yes, come down hard on bashers, usually men, who use their position and physical strength to browbeat (I heard one bloke today going at it), stand over, and threaten, and knock their dependent spouses around.

Perhaps they can be shamed into doing the right thing ?

No easy solutions.

Joe