news

Australian police deal with a domestic violence matter every 2 minutes.

By CLARE BLUMER

Australian police deal with an estimated 657 domestic violence matters on average every day of the year. That’s one every two minutes.

Those figures are based on data provided by police services around the country about how often their officers work on domestic violence cases.

Overall, the count is 239,846 per year around the country.

There is no standard definition of domestic and family violence across all jurisdictions in Australia and no standard way for counting the number of police call-outs to situations related to domestic violence.

The details of the data being captured varies across jurisdictions and can include:

  • attendance at suspected domestic and family violence incidents;
  • domestic and family violence court orders made by the police;
  • domestic and family violence assaults (encompassing threats and physical violence); and
  • associated agencies reporting domestic and family violence to the police.

The breakdown of data is as follows.

Date range Description by hour by day by week by year
Victoria 2014 Family incidents 8 187 1,307 68,134*
Queensland 2013-14 Domestic and family violence occurrences 8 181 1,266 66,016*
NSW 2014 Domestic violence related incidents 7 159 1,115 58,140*
Tasmania 2013-14 Family violence arguments and incidents 0 11 78 4,071*
WA 2013-14 Domestic assaults 2 41 289 15,095*
ACT 2013-14 Police attending domestic violence incidents 0 9 63 3,309*
NT 2014 Domestic violence assaults 0 12 81 4,224*
SA 2015 Domestic-related taskings 2 57 400* 20,857
Australia     27     657    4,600 239,846

* Figure provided by state and territory police. Other numbers are calculated based on this figure and rounded to nearest whole number.

This post originally appeared on ABC News.

 © 2015 Australian Broadcasting Corporation. All rights reserved. Read  the ABC Disclaimer here

 

Related content:

“I was the victim of same-sex domestic violence. And I am lucky to be alive.”

The domestic violence no one talks about.

Domestic violence: Aboriginal women are 38 times more likely to be hospitalised.

Waleed Aly grills Malcolm Turnbull over domestic violence funding.