The rate of women killed by an intimate partner in Australia increased by nearly 30% in 2022-23, compared to the previous year, according to data released by the Australian Institute of Criminology on Monday.
In 2022-23, 34 women were killed by a current or previous intimate partner – eight more than were killed in 2021-22 – with the rate of these deaths increasing by 28% compared to the previous year, from 0.25 to 0.32 per 100,000.
The data has been released as the prime minister has declared violence against women to be a national crisis after the alleged murders of 26 women at the hands of men in the first four months of the year.
In 2022-23, 60 women were killed by men, nine women were killed by women and six killed by a person whose sex is unknown.
While an uptick on the previous year, the rate of female intimate partner homicide was still the third-lowest rate in the more than 30 years since these records began in 1989-90. The rate of women killed by their partners has decreased by 66% since that time.
Dr Samantha Bricknell, a research manager at the Australian Institute of Criminology, said that the increased rate of intimate partner homicide needed to be considered within the context of the downward trend of the data over 30 years.
Bricknell said Covid restrictions and lockdowns also had a “suppression effect” on intimate partner homicides. The number of intimate partner killings of women dropped from 37 in 2019-2020, to 27 the following year, and 26 in 2021-2022.
“I mean a fact is a fact – we’ve had a 28% increase in the rate and a 31% increase in the number of female victims of intimate partner homicide,” she said. “That’s not to take away that we’ve had [that] … but we’re just not sure at this point, whether this is a reflection of an increase in female victimisation from intimate partner homicide, or just a factor of a change in the pattern, as we’ve emerged from Covid.”
Patty Kinnersly, chair of violence prevention organisation Our Watch, says: “Those figures are confronting, but it’s even more confronting in the context of what’s happened in the start of this year with 26 of the 27 women allegedly killed by a man.”
“As we know, violent murders are only the tip of the iceberg. There are tens of thousands of women living in controlling unhealthy relationships.”
Nationally, there were 232 homicide incidents in the year from 1 July 2022 to 30 June 2023, involving 247 victims. This was an increase of 14 incidents on the previous year. However, 2022-2023 still had the third-lowest homicide rate in Australia since 1989-1990. The national homicide rate has seen a 52% decrease in that time.
Four men were killed by an intimate partner in 2022-23, putting the rate of male intimate partner homicide at its lowest since 1989-90.
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Homicide events include murder (82%), manslaughter (15%) and other cases (3%) where the most serious offence was not stated or known. The majority of victims are male (69%).
Men are also far more likely to commit homicide, according to the figures, which show that in cases where the sex of the perpetrator was known, 86.4% were committed by men and 13.6% were committed by women.
First Nations people were far more likely to be the victims of homicide than non-Indigenous people – with a homicide victimisation rate around seven times higher than that for non-Indigenous people. Sixty-three percent of Indigenous female victims were killed by a current or former partner; this compares with 52% for the non-Indigenous female victims.
Domestic homicides, which include all cases where the victim was an intimate partner or relative of the offender, were the most common category of homicide in 2022-23, with 79 deaths (34% of all incidents). There were 64 instances of acquaintance homicide (28%) and 34 incidents of stranger homicide (15%).
Most deaths (56%) took place in a residential setting and the most common place for someone to be killed was their own home (33.6%).
Ninety percent of homicides in 2022-23 were cleared by police – that is an offender was charged or died. This is similar to the clearance rate of previous years.
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