A critical frame analysis of Victoria's Royal Commission into Family Violence

Abstract

The 2015-16 Victorian Royal Commission into Family Violence was an important site for contestation over the framing of domestic and family violence (DFV). It had a powerful effect on DFV policy in Victoria; the Government accepted all 227 recommendations and committed significant funding to their implementation. In this thesis, I employ a feminist interpretive approach, using critical frame analysis to uncover where and how gender was included in problem framing at the Commission. In the context of fierce public and scholarly debate about the problem definition and appropriate policy prescriptions, my research considers: how did key policy actors frame the problem of DFV in their contributions to the Commission? How did the Commission frame the problem in its report and recommendations? What understanding of gender seemed to predominate? Using an embedded case study design, I focus on four themes that concern individual risk factors or particular population groups: alcohol and other drugs, mental health, children, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. As the thesis outlines, through these themes it is possible to identify intersectional concerns that complicate a traditional gender power analysis of DFV.

My findings indicate that the Commission and many of its contributors framed DFV as largely a problem of male perpetrators and female victims. However, structural gender inequality framing was rare in the dataset. Further, an awareness of gender asymmetry in perpetration often occurred as part of a women-centred problem framing that did not explicitly interrogate deeper gendered conditions underlying DFV. As a result, I suggest that an understanding of gender as process rather than only as category could be useful in a 'family violence' policy environment where the problem diagnosis includes violence between all family members. This is firstly because gender as process retains a gendered analysis without only signifying men and women and the power imbalances between them, and secondly because intersectionality, which is crucial to a rich understanding of the way that multiple inequalities affect the perpetration and experience of violence, requires a structural rather than a categorical understanding of gender. I conclude with an intersectional model of gender, power and family violence.