As we celebrate International Women's Day 2025, the time has come to redouble our focus on actively seeking and implementing solutions. While awareness campaigns have played a significant role in highlighting the challenges faced by women worldwide – gender inequality, unequal pay, reproductive rights, gendered violence, and coercive control – it is clear we have a long way to go to address them. We must channel our collective efforts into creating sustainable and lasting change that addresses gender disparities in tangible, impactful ways. It's time to turn conversations into actionable plans that empower women and achieve true equality.

A significant amount of my work at Nous is currently focused on domestic and family violence. In that context, Australia has seen significant and admirable awareness-raising efforts over many years, from the bravery of Rosie Batty to the award-winning journalism of Jess Hill. We have a national plan to end violence against women and children within ten years. Our understanding of gendered violence has changed as we have learned more about the causes and impacts of violence and grappled with how to prevent it. 

Plenty of women continue to step into the awareness space, fighting against the criticisms and eye-rolling attitudes of those who would see these gains rolled back. Increasingly, some men are reflecting on these issues and becoming allies, rather than defensively jumping in and claiming #NotAllMen. There is of course a constant need to counter rearguard actions like #NotAllMen, being firm in our insistence that their role is in part to reflect on their own biases.

While the change we have seen in the broader political and philosophical mindset does represent significant progress, this is not yet the whole-of-society shift in attitudes and behaviours that we ultimately need. In any case, while engaging in the difficult conversations is important, when it comes to actually making progress in addressing those issues, we have been much less effective. Increased awareness is resulting in more reports of domestic violence, but there has still been an increase in intimate partner violence homicides over the past three years. On average, according to Our Watch, one woman is killed every nine days by a current or former partner.  

Similarly, while have made some progress in gender equality – in areas such as workforce participation, legal rights, and political representation – we have failed to address the core issues such as attitudes towards gender roles and stereotypes, safety for First Nations and other vulnerable women, and healthy masculinities for boys and men, all known drivers of intergenerational cycles of violence.

When I think about this year’s International Women’s Day, I find myself thinking about the commitment required to devise solutions that address and overcome structural barriers. This requires critical reflection on some hard and often frustrating questions. Why are we seeing an increase in violence despite greater levels of awareness and understanding? Why are these issues so politicised rather than the subject of bipartisan support? It is not enough to simply blame the patriarchy here. It requires harder, more hands-on work than that. These questions are about fundamental cultural change and a commitment to structural and systemic reform. 

As our understanding of women’s issues evolves, efforts are being made to address them. Awareness campaigns have helped, but we need to be much clearer about where we’re really at as a society and what is it that we really need to do to address these problems. What has been missing is a national commitment to addressing the root causes in favour of a piecemeal approach that is too often politicised. What we end up with is a range of reactive funding commitments to plug the big gaps, rather than long-term bipartisan commitment to generational shift. We need to focus on the structural and cultural factors that sustain gender inequality, including policies supporting economic empowerment and pay equity, increased political leadership and representation, and policies that recognise the value of unpaid and caring roles that are mostly done by women.

I would be remiss if I didn’t also mention children. Because, while women are certainly victims of domestic and family violence, what is clear is that, for too long, we have lumped children in with women rather than consider their individual experiences. While we have been able to make the shift to thinking about domestic and family violence as a gendered issue, and while there are strategies that consider the unique struggles of First Nations women and those from culturally and linguistically diverse communities, we still struggle to think about the rights of children and young people, and about their experiences and perspectives.

As the adult men and women of tomorrow, children represent a large part of the answer as to how we can stop violence in a generation, as committed to by the national plan. Forty to fifty-five per cent of children who are victim-survivors of domestic violence go on to be adult victim-survivors, or perpetrators, of violence. We have the opportunity to support them to address their trauma and also educate them about healthy masculinity, consent, and respectful relationships. Changing the way we think about children and their perspectives within the context of DFSV violence may just be the key, not only to better understanding and helping children and young people in the present, but also to helping the women of tomorrow. This International Women’s Day, I feel like this might just be our next big challenge.

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