States and Systems Violence

Justice for Our Women

Colonisation established the social, political and legal foundations for the racialised and gendered oppression of Aboriginal women and children. The continuation of colonial patriarchy—embedded in justice systems, policing, media, research, and social services—produces systemic racial bias, misidentification, and the ongoing dehumanisation of Aboriginal women. As documented by multiple inquiries and national reports, this dehumanisation results directly in preventable deaths, systemic violence, state failures of care, and the silencing of Aboriginal communities.

Aboriginal women in Australia continue to experience homicide victimisation at up to seven times the national average of all Australian women. 

Despite decades of evidence, the systems designed to protect women remain shaped by colonial assumptions, racialised threat perceptions, and gendered stereotypes that compromise the safety and survival of Aboriginal women and children.

System Failures Resulting in Preventable Deaths

The DFSV Yearly Report (2025) highlights that:

• 46 women were killed by intimate partners in 2023–24, with Aboriginal women disproportionately represented

• systemic racism contributed to the deaths of at least 151 Indigenous women, most of whom engaged with services before their deaths

• Inquiry after inquiry identifies the same failures, yet little changes

These failures constitute structural violence—state actions and inactions that directly produce harm.

Defining States and Systems Violence

State violence is not just what happens in a cell, in a police car or during an arrest.

State violence is the harm caused to Aboriginal women and children by the laws, policies, institutions and practices of the state — including what the state chooses not to do.

State violence includes:

• police assaults, invasive searches and excessive force;

• misidentification, racist profiling and punitive bail decisions;

• child removal, refusal of safe housing, and denial of healthcare;

• failures to investigate threats, disappearances and deaths;

• data practices that erase or undercount Aboriginal women’s experiences.

It is the violence of decisions made in parliaments, cabinets, briefing rooms and offices, long before an officer arrives at a door.

Systems violence is how that harm is built in and repeated. Systems violence is the designed, predictable harm that comes from the everyday operation of state institutions — police, courts, prisons, child protection, housing, health, education, media and data systems.

Systems violence happens when:

• policies and “business as usual” produce the same outcomes for Aboriginal women again and again;

• racial profiling, misidentification and disbelief are normalised;

• oversight bodies are weak, captured or silenced;

• governments keep funding the same structures knowing the damage they cause.

Systems violence does not depend on individual intent. It is the system doing what it was built to do: control Aboriginal bodies, land and knowledge, and keep colonial order intact.

Legitimising State Violence and Denying Women’s Intuition

Across inquiries, class actions and investigative reporting, a consistent pattern emerges: Aboriginal and other women tell police they are scared they will be killed or seriously hurt, and the system refuses to believe them. This is not “human error” or individual oversight. It is a structural practice that treats women’s intuition as irrational, over-emotional or untrustworthy, while treating perpetrators’ narratives and police convenience as credible.

Dismissing women’s explicit articulation of fear is a form of state violence. It denies women of authority over their own lives, downgrades risk at the exact moment it is escalating, and clears the way for preventable homicides.

For Aboriginal women, this denial is intensified by racial profiling and colonial stereotypes that mark them as angry, unstable or offending, rather than as primary victim-survivors.

Examples from across jurisdictions show how state violence is legitimized, when women tell the state “I am scared; he will kill me”, and the state responds by minimising, blaming or doing nothing, that is not a neutral mistake.

It is a deliberate choice about whose knowledge counts. For Aboriginal women, this denial of intuition is an extension of colonisation: a refusal to recognise our women as credible witnesses to danger in their own lives.

When state and systems violence work together, they do more than injure individual women.

State and systems:

• dehumanise Aboriginal women

• normalise Aboriginal women’s deaths and disappearances as background noise, not national emergencies;

• discredit Aboriginal women’s intuition and fear, treating our warnings as irrational or “mutual conflict”

• turn victim-survivors into offenders through misidentification, racial profiling and punitive bail;

• separate women from their children, Country and culture, cutting across kinship and cultural perpetuity;

• drain communities of time, energy and hope by forcing us to fight the same battles just to be heard;

• Erode rights to freedom, safety and self-determined futures.

Failure of Inquiries and Investigations

The Senate Inquiry into Missing and Murdered First Nations Women and Children is criticised for:

• failure to centre Aboriginal women

• lack of accountability

• inadequate recommendations

• continued institutional hostility toward Aboriginal women’s voices

• political dismissal of Aboriginal women as “irrelevant” in national conversations on violence

This reproduces colonial patterns of silencing, where state mechanisms reassert control over Aboriginal knowledge and experience.

EMH as Witness to State and Systems Violence

Aboriginal women are inherent knowledge holders with the authority to determine their own futures through the exercise of cultural perpetuity and collectively determined initiatives to safeguard familial and community safety, health, housing, education, Culture, Country and Community. Acts committed that intentionally inhibit the full realisation of the right to live free from violence and discrimination constitute unlawful violence.

EMH can attest that ‘Silence is Violence’ as we witness women and children’s full enjoyment of culture, connection and basic human rights obstructed by systemic barriers every day.

From our frontline work, our data and the evidence of many others, the pattern is clear:

• Police misidentify Aboriginal women as the “person using violence” and treat our trauma responses as risk.

• Courts and bail laws then use that misidentification to remand our women and entrench criminalisation.

• Child protection and housing systems take children, deny secure housing and call it “safety”.

• Women are pulled into complex processes without guaranteeing timely, culturally safe support by service systems, crisis response services. This includes, The Orange Door, state-funded entry points into integrated services designed to keep women alive and safe.

• Data systems lack the sophistication to adequately measure cross-sector outcomes and currently do not have the capability to capture critical points in the service system where it matters most to prevent murder and harm. 

• Women's voices and experiences are missing from solutions due forced erasure and marginalisation

• When these systems consistently produce harm for Aboriginal women and children, they are not neutral.

• Our women and children experience states systems as perpetrators of violence and silence.

  
  

The Call for Justice for Our Women

Elizabeth Morgan House are asserting Aboriginal women’s sovereignty, demanding that states acknowledge systems violence, and insisting on a redistribution of power, capital and voice.

We demand the naming of systems that harm our women and children and accountability for what governments must do to end systems assisted violence and loss of life.

Gender equity for Aboriginal women is an inherent and sovereign right. It is central to justice, safety, and the full expression of self-determination. True equity ensures that Aboriginal women — as knowledge holders, decision-makers, and community leaders — define the systems that shape their lives. It dismantles the colonial and patriarchal structures that have long silenced women’s voices and perpetuated cycles of harm. This principle is not symbolic; it is structural. Gender equity demands transformation in how power, data, and resources are distributed, and how truth is recognised in the lives of Aboriginal women and children who remain disproportionately impacted by violence and systemic inequity.

Gender Equity, when attributed to Aboriginal Grassroots Women, allows the materialisation of impactful, sustainable and adaptable solutions to pivotal community issues to emerge.  It brings collective cultural integrity that counters colonially inherited systems and laws which reproduce violence against Aboriginal women and children through societal prejudice and injustice. This is particularly evident in the number of Forcibly Disappeared, Murdered and Missing Women and Children and the deliberate silencing of Aboriginal women’s voices on community priorities of safety and justice. We must Fund Prevention Through Women’s Leadership by empowering culturally grounded, community-led solutions. Colonial erasure ends by centering Aboriginal women’s knowledge and leadership in all inquiries and investigations. This begins by transforming media narratives, public memory, and government storytelling that Make Aboriginal Women Visible for public good.

EMH continually work to advocate for free prior and informed consent, women’s collectives, intentional engagement, data sovereignty and economic empowerment. In this work we uphold women’s inherent knowledge, expertise and experiences that create real change. 

Misidentification, Racial Profiling and Bail

Our evidence shows misidentification is not rare. Aboriginal women who seek help are too often labelled as offenders or having their family violence intervention orders contested by police in which the primary aggressor submits a cross-intervention order leaving women to make application on her own. Once that label exists, it spreads across police, courts, child protection and housing.

Racial profiling research confirms that Aboriginal people, including our women, are more likely to be stopped, searched and have force used against them, even when “hit rates” are lower. New suspicionless search powers in Victoria hand even more discretion to a system already shown to be biased.

At the same time, the 2025 bail reforms have moved away from the principles of Poccum’s Law, which was developed to stop low-level, survival-based allegations turning into remand and death in custody. The new bail settings increase the risk that misidentified Aboriginal women will be locked up rather than kept safe and supported through healing and recovery.

Colonial Patriarchy, Technology, and Online Abuse

Technology-facilitated abuse has become a primary mechanism of coercion and control, with pornography, misogyny, and extremist recruitment creating new avenues of racialised and gendered violence. The Rapid Review identifies:

• increasing online recruitment into misogynistic extremism

• need for national action on online misogyny

• the role of technology companies in enabling harm

Aboriginal women, who already experience compounded surveillance and policing, face heightened risks as digital platforms replicate colonial power structures. Educating women and children about online safety is paramount to reducing potential harms.

Coercive Control

Coercive control is not only enacted by individuals in intimate and family relationships. It is also enacted by the state—through surveillance and bureaucratic decision-making that restrict Aboriginal women’s autonomy and punish our resistance. When states repeatedly use power to dominate Aboriginal women’s lives, to determine where we live, whether we are believed, whether we are safe, and whether we can keep our children, it is perpetrating coercive control.

Coercive control by the state is not accidental. It is a continuation of colonial practice: control of Aboriginal bodies, families, movement, identity, resources, and knowledge. It is the violence of “process” and “policy” that appears neutral on paper but operates as domination in practice. It is the slow violence of decisions made without us, about us, and against us—where “risk management” becomes a justification for removing rights, and “service responses” become a pathway into deeper surveillance, criminalisation and loss.

After considerable anecdotal data, EMH piloted a risk-factor tracking instrument for case managers during the month of September. We noted 54 reported instances of “controlling behaviour” affecting 66 unique clients.

EMH considers this data, appearing in a singular month, an urgent call-to-action for education and advocacy regarding coercive control and serious consideration in the design and safeguards against misidentification with any stand-alone coercive control laws”

Safety measures must be ensured to negate absolving responsibility when new laws are created and enforced. Legislation must limit ambiguity, mitigate overcriminalisation, and set enforcement age at 21 years based on mental age. Without these safeguards, the cycle of reactive law-making will continue — addressing symptoms while leaving structural injustice intact — and our peoples will remain subject to systems that criminalise rather than protect.

The Crimes Act Amendment (Coercive Control) Bill 2025 could be welcomed news for some. However, due to lived and ongoing experience of state violence and perpetrators institutional protections, the stated intention of such laws is under scrutiny. Protection cannot be separated from the systems enforcing it. This is especially relevant as between Jan 2019-June 2024 Victoria Police investigated 683 cases of police officers and public servants for crimes against children, sexual offences including rape, sexual assault, sexual harassment, predatory behaviour. When systems continually cause harm, communities questioning whether new powers designed to protect will be repurposed through biased systems into tools of organised crime, surveillance and punishment. Kneejerk political responses, delivered through rapid introduction of new legislation creates the appearance of action but fails to address symptoms of deeply embedded societal issues.

The complexity is not fully understood. Communities’ expertise points to unforeseen repercussions that continue to disadvantage and negatively impact our communities. Aboriginal women, families, and frontline organisations consistently warn that without culturally grounded implementation, unintended consequences — including misidentification of victim-survivors as perpetrators — will persist.

We must name and regulate systems violence in national and state frameworks, recognising that state institutions can be perpetrators when they harm Aboriginal women and children. This is possible through establishment of independent oversight with authoritative accountability mechanisms beyond police discretion. This includes a First Nations-led independent investigative body with real powers to investigate murdered and forcibly disappeared Aboriginal women and children, police failures and non-implementation of recommendations.

Cultural knowledge and lived experience must be recognised as expertise, not progressive ideology. These are not aspirational ideas. They are the minimum required to meet existing human rights obligations and the commitments governments have already made.

We will continue to listen, educate, advocate and organise. Everything needed including the solutions and pathways already exist. EMH will continue to build upon the firm foundations of grassroots action alongside Aboriginal women and children now and into the future.