Until recently, family or domestic violence were considered a personal issue, not a societal problem.
But the statistics are clear; many in Australia are victims of violence at the hands of a family member.
One in six women and one in eighteen men have experienced physical or sexual violence by a cohabiting partner.
Dr Nada Ibrahim, a domestic and family violence expert at the University of South Australia's Centre for Child Protection, says that family violence can take many forms.
"The issue of family violence, it's actually an umbrella term that is used for any kind of violence that happens in a domestic setting or a family setting. So, family violence can incorporate things like violence between partners, so intimate partner violence. It incorporates child abuse, it incorporates elderly abuse, it incorporates sibling abuse, parental abuse, so any form of violence that happens in a domestic setting."
Victims of family, domestic and sexual violence are overwhelmingly women.
And when we talk about violence, it's not just physical. Violence can take many other forms, including psychological abuse, financial abuse, harassment, or coercive control.
Dr Ibrahim says some people still have outdated notions of violence and are unable to recognise that violence can be unintentionally expressed or inflicted in many ways, beyond just physical means.
"Sometimes, a particular culture might not identify domestic violence outside of physical violence. They may identify physical violence, which is not tolerated or accepted in communities because of its visibility, but they might find it really, really hard to identify some of the challenges of domestic and family violence. Particularly identifying things like verbal abuse, psychological abuse or financial abuse or social abuse, where they're isolated from communities."
