Submission

Submission to the Sentencing Advisory Council – Mandatory Treatment for Sex Offenders – Research Paper Draft

Submission to the Tasmanian Law Reform Institute – review of the Law Relating to Self Defence 2015

This submission promotes calls for a gendered lens to be applied to imprisonment and detention to consider the unique experiences of women in the Tasmanian Prison System.

Engender Equality, a dedicated family violence service committed to fostering safe and supportive environments, seeks to express concern regarding the proposed Miscellaneous (Conversion Practices) Bill 2024 in Tasmania. As advocates for the well-being and safety of individuals and families impacted by family violence and gender-based violence, we express our reservations about the bill’s current form and its potential implications.

Engender Equality and the lived-experience group, Advocates for Change, give feedback on the the development of the National Principles to Address Coercive Control.

Tasmania requires a new Family and Sexual Violence Action Plan that is both strategically directed towards, and sufficiently resourced to deliver, community-based prevention and response activities that meet the needs of Tasmania’s highly dispersed, largely rural, socially and economically disadvantaged population.

In many ways the draft Strategy achieves its objectives in reflecting critical life domains in which women’s experiences are far from equal – in relation to safety and economic security, for example. In our assessment, however, it falls short of translating these objectives into realisable outcomes for the women we know and work alongside across Tasmanian communities.

Engender Equality calls for an adequate understanding of the role that organisational culture plays in enabling child sexual abuse in institutional settings and proposes that hierarchical allocation of power within bureaucratic systems reduces the opportunities for individual accountability, with the result of diminished transparency. Our submission has been researched and written by Dr Morag MacSween and is informed by over three decades of experience as a service provider, advocacy organisation and strategic partner in the Tasmanian family and sexual violence sectors.

Developed in conjunction with Dr Morag MacSween, our submission to the Royal Commission focuses on the experience of people with disability in relation to violence, abuse, neglect and exploitation caused by family and relationship violence. This intersection is too often invisible in public debate.