Women's Legal Services Australia estimates that every week it turns away 1000 women, transwomen and non-binary people who are seeking legal help due to under-resourcing, while perpetrators weaponise gaps in the law to continue abuse.
Elena Rosenman, the body's chair, is set to make the case that legal services are central to the national effort to end gender-based violence when she joins a roundtable discussion with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Social Services Minister Tanya Plibersek in Canberra.
"Every safe parenting order, every intervention order, every woman supported to leave a violent relationship safely is violence prevented from escalating, a child kept safe, and crisis costs avoided downstream," she said.
Her legal body is calling for all levels of government to recognise specialist legal assistance in its submission to the second action plan under the National Plan to End Violence against Women and Children 2022–2032, which it released to AAP.
Legal assistance services must be recognised as "core and specialist frontline services", with a reportable commitment to ensure access to legal help, the submission said.
The legal body highlighted several other priorities for the second action plan, including for the Commonwealth government to audit systems abuse occurring in family courts.
Family violence allegations were present in 86 per cent of parenting matters before the Federal Circuit and Family Court of Australia, and 77 per cent of cases involved claims of abuse against children, it said.
"The commencement of family law proceedings can be a dangerous time in which violence escalates," the submission stated.
"Yet the adversarial nature of proceedings and high numbers of victim-survivors forced to self-represent provide fertile ground for users of violence to weaponise the system and prolong coercive control, while the needs of children are too often subordinated.''
Adrianne Walters, the legal body's executive director, said perpetrators were exploiting every tool available to them, and technology was evolving faster than legal systems could respond.
"We have an opportunity to build safeguards into our legal systems now, rather than waiting for the harm to compound," she said.
The legal body's submission also called for the creation of a new substantive family violence visa to support migrant and refugee women trapped in violent relationships, with access to social supports so that "no woman is forced to choose between violence and deportation".
It called for the rights of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander victim-survivors to be central in the plan, and long-term support for specialist sexual violence legal services, with funding currently due to expire in December 2027.
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