Editorial
Isla’s memory must be honoured with action
“We are primed to wait for the next murder; one that will shake the public and create sufficient media noise for politicians to respond.”
When journalist Jess Hill and criminologist Michael Salter published these words in April in a paper on domestic violence, they cited the murder of Luke Batty by his father on a cricket pitch in Tyabb in 2014, public reaction to which drove the push for the 2015 Victorian Royal Commission into Family Violence. Reforms worth $3.7 billion were to follow, and in January 2023, the Victorian government announced that all 227 of the royal commission’s recommendations had been implemented.
Isla Bell had dreams of being a marine biologist.
The cruel death of Isla Bell, details of which emerged this week, is very different in its particulars. But as the lives of women and children are claimed again and again by male violence, it is impossible to view the case of the 19-year-old from Brunswick in isolation. It is now commonplace to talk about this situation as a “national crisis”. But has our response been commensurate with this sort of language? Are the actions we have taken so far the right ones?
In the immediate aftermath of such crimes, the temptation for media and wider society is always to focus on the story and the path of the person taken from us. Animal Justice Party MP Georgie Purcell noted that Bell had supported her online commentary on femicide, but added: “I want to say more about the person I am told she was as a friend, a daughter, an aunty – but that actually shouldn’t matter.”
Only in recent years have we begun to treat the behaviour and situations of perpetrators as a primary focus. The 2015 royal commission emphasised the importance of increased monitoring and insight. There are many obstacles to such an approach. The obvious one is resourcing. For example, would it be possible to monitor and indeed work to change the trajectory of every man against whom an intervention order is issued?
Police in this state have standalone domestic violence units, but the force’s request for a register of offenders in its submission to the royal commission was not taken up. Calls to fit trackers to such offenders, a move reminiscent of the way terrorism suspects are handled – something Australia’s domestic and sexual violence commissioner, Micaela Cronin, has also proposed – would require legislation, as well as raising concerns over competing human rights claims.
There is also the question of how male voters and male pundits would react to these sorts of measures, with the narrative of a “war on men” already gaining traction in some quarters.
The prime minister has committed to ending domestic and sexual violence in a generation, and said it would require an “all-hands-on-deck approach”. Cronin has urged that a national body connect law enforcement with service providers to learn from coronial inquests and death reviews. Properly funded research and information-gathering cannot wait. Yet too often we see support for frontline services being pared back, as was the case with Family Safety Victoria last year.
Now is not the time for cuts to frontline services. In fact, the opposite is required.
One comparison Hill and Salter make is with the way HIV was tackled in this country: with a selective focus on those sectors of society most affected rather than a universal one, and practical messages and actions rather than lectures on values. There remains an essential role for work that changes attitudes, but perhaps a more proximate example of a health crisis is that of COVID-19. Are we prepared as a society to put that kind of money into ending violence against women?
Every family that loses a mother, a daughter, a sister, hopes that their loss can be given some meaning by being a turning point, even a signpost that an end to such sickening and heartbreaking crimes is somewhere in sight. Isla Bell’s family is unlikely to be any different. But the responsibility for changing tomorrow’s headlines and fighting this scourge isn’t theirs. It is ours. We must demand that our leaders put the legislation and the money on the table now.
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