This Conference Declaration was created in collaboration with the 382 attendees of the 2026 Australian national conference to end men’s use of family violence.

In the face of global and national political challenges to the work to end gender-based violence, Australia is at a critical juncture. Far too little is being done far too late to intervene with men using and at risk of using family violence. Instead, there is an over-reliance on late-stage criminal legal responses that enables violence to escalate, leaves victim-survivors facing increased risk and heightened levels of abuse and fails to meaningfully prevent harm.

As a result, more than a quarter of women over the age of 15 have experienced Intimate Partner Violence and 39% of children have experienced family violence. Over the past decade, at least 362 women have been murdered by an intimate partner and 123 children killed by a parent. The impact of this violence is disproportionate and gendered with First Nations women and children, often at the hands of non-Indigenous men, and women and children with disabilities among those most impacted.

Together, the cost of this violence is more than $28 billion per year, yet, comparably, Australia invests a fraction of this to stop family violence at its source. Governments and communities across the continent must act now to address the scale and devastating impacts of family violence.

This violence is not inevitable, it is preventable.

At the halfway mark of the second National Plan to End Violence Against Women and Children (2022-2032), Australia has five years to radically change course if it is to reach its goal of ending gender-based violence in a generation.

To do this, we need to disrupt hierarchies of power that sustain the status quo. We need to act in solidarity to strengthen our social fabric and build communities, institutions and families on the values of respect, safety, dignity, diversity, freedom, justice and free from violence.

Throughout this conference, victim-survivors, advocates, practitioners, researchers and policymakers have shared what is needed to end family violence. Delegates committed to work in solidarity to:

1. Establish a dedicated and appropriately resourced national strategy to end men’s use of family violence.
2. Prioritise victim-survivor knowledge – including that of children and young people, practitioner insights and intersectionality in practice improvements, policy reform and research.
3. Centre First Nations relational ways of understanding and responding to family violence for community-controlled, self-determined solutions as a foundation for all-of-government and all-of-community responses.
4. Invest in early intervention. Identifying and engaging boys and men who use, or are at risk of using, family violence much earlier to prevent and stop it.
5. Stop the online promotion of misogyny and denigration of women and children. Hold the tech industry accountable for profiting from violent and harmful algorithms and content that encourages and enables men’s use of violence.
6. Invest in broadening the scale and breadth of responses to ensure men and their families get appropriate, effective services to increase safety, accountability and change.
7. Challenge narratives that make men’s use of violence an individual’s problem. Attempts to end it must address the way gender, misogyny, colonisation, racism, classism, ablism, homophobia and transphobia – collectively and intersectionally – shape the use and experience of violence.
8. Recognise and invest in building and retaining the specialised workforce that delivers prevention, early intervention and responses to men using family violence, including its crucial support for victim-survivors through family safety contact work.
9. Replace criminalisation of children and young people using family violence with early trauma and family violence informed, strength-based support, and surrounding environmental changes, to create long-term safety and positive life pathways.
10. Drive structural reforms to stop violence at the source and end systemic enablers of men’s use of family violence. Key areas include: family court, legal systems, and child protection, especially in relation to children and young people.
11. Build and share evidence-base from practice and research knowledge on pathways into and out of using violence to shape policy and practice.
12. Commit to the ongoing integration of evidence and research into policy and practice, respecting data sovereignty, supporting the sharing of evaluations and insights as the basis for funding decision-making.

This declaration was put to the 2026 National Conference on Thursday 12 March by Mark O’Hare from Stopping Family Violence, seconded by Alex from SPEAQ and endorsed unanimously by conference delegates.