On June 2, 2024, a woman in her 70s was the forty-third woman to be murdered in Australia. She joins a long list of women – Molly Ticehurst, Rebecca Young, Samantha Murphy, Hannah McGuire – to have been killed in domestic violence incidents in 2024 alone. The Prime Minister has called it a ‘national crisis’, but those words don’t seem big enough to capture the dreadful truth: that more than half of the women murdered in Australia in the last financial year were killed by an intimate partner or ex-partner.

The laws of every single state and territory already make domestic violence a criminal offence. As is breaching a domestic violence or protection order, stalking, intimidation, as well as acts of sexual assault and sexual violence. With each death, our governments appear keen to rush through new laws: laws prohibiting coercive control, laws imposing ankle monitoring bracelets, and laws taking firearms off domestic violence offenders.

So, why aren’t they working?

It might be because of the concept of semiotics of law: the way that written legislation conveys or communicates ideas or objects, and what they mean in doing so. For example, we have criminal offences which punish acts of ‘domestic’ violence. Appending the term ‘domestic’ to acts of violence against women can connote that the acts of violence only occur inside the home or are acts in the private sphere. The stigmatising notion of domestic violence occurring ‘behind closed doors’ has been one of the biggest challenges to raising and encouraging police action on these crimes.

This is one of the reasons for the emergence of different legal terms, such as ‘interpersonal violence’ or ‘familial violence’. The purpose has largely been to capture acts of violence between de facto partners as well as members of the family such as children or grandparents. Yet these terms diminish the insidiousness of the offences. ‘Interpersonal’ implies the acts are exactly that – ‘personal’ – between the parties, and not for public discussion. ‘Familial’ on the other hand dismisses the occurrence of violence against women in casual or non-committed relationships.

Some academics and practitioners – myself included – have suggested that the correct approach to recognise the life-changing horror and pain inflicted on survivors is to term such offences ‘domestic terrorism’. Just like terrorists, domestic violence perpetrators use violence (or the threat of violence) to achieve their goals. Just like terrorists, perpetrators justify violent acts as a legitimate response to manipulated or over-inflated slights, and often are encouraged in their violence by others of similar motivations.

Unsurprisingly, the notion that domestic violence is anything like terrorism is a bitter pill to swallow for government and law enforcement.

Again, this is semiotics at work. Not a week goes by that we don’t hear stories in the media about men disobeying their domestic violence protection orders. Where is the outrage? For those, Australian society seems curiously short-sighted. Yet when these same offences are committed by immigrants released from detention, we clamour and shout at our politicians to protect us in our homes. After all, an immigrant who commits acts of domestic or sexual violence is far more of a threat than an Australian who does the same thing … right?

Unfortunately, this is where the law is actually part of the problem. Every lawyer is taught the importance of defining the words in our legislation, which can mean the difference between winning and losing a case, between a client going to jail, or walking free from court. But this slavish devotion to interpretation, without recognising the semiotics of the law, causes gigantic impacts on the safety of women.

For a perfect example of the warping power of legal semiotics, consider the distinction made in some public cases between the suggestion of ‘violent rape’ and ‘non-violent rape including refused consent’. In my view, this implies a spectrum of rape with ‘violent’ rape leaving the survivor in tears at one end while ‘non-violent’ or ‘inadvertent’ rapes sitting at the other. The words used in criminal law encourage that dichotomy by recognising circumstances of aggravation like the use of a weapon, detaining the victim, or rapes of persons with a disability or cognitive impairment. In the same way, the word ‘rape’ – derived from the Roman act of raptus, where women were snatched or carried away by conquering soldiers – has been replaced by legalistic terms like ‘aggravated sexual assault’ and ‘penetrative acts without consent’.

These words (and the content they convey) ignore the fact that the very act of rape involves violence. Every rape involves the abuse and exertion of power by a perpetrator to dominate and suppress the will of their target. Whether a survivor fights back, calls police, screams, or does none of these things is entirely irrelevant: any sexual act done without consent is violent by its very nature. They violate a survivor’s sense of trust and safety, leaving many unable to ever have meaningful relationships.

If we want to fix violence against women, we need to start calling it what it is. ‘Domestic’ violence isn’t any less terrifying or lethal than ‘domestic’ terrorism, it’s just more common. A man who rapes a woman doesn’t commit ‘sexual assault’. He forcibly violates her for sexual gratification. Part of our challenge needs to be to convince our legislators that the words they choose in the laws they pass can have drastic, and possibly life-changing, results for the persons who are caught up by their operation.

Catherine Walker-Munro is the Community Connect representative of the Nerang Neighbourhood Centre. The views expressed above do not represent any other organisation, agency or government.