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Domestic & Family Violence

Service, Silence and the Long Afterward: Family Violence in the Australian Defence Force

22% of current and 29% of recently transitioned ADF members reported intimate partner violence exposure. Why military life delays disclosure, and whose accounts the data never heard.

Jacqualine Roche

Jacqualine Roche

— 6 min read
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A pair of black combat boots on green grass.
Photo by Nastia Petruk on Unsplash

Versión en español: Servicio, silencio y el largo después: violencia familiar en la Fuerza de Defensa de Australia

Part 3 of the "Never Too Late" series

Introduction

The first two parts of this series set out a general argument: delay in reporting domestic violence is predictable, and an account given years later still counts. This part tests that argument against one institution.

The Australian Defence Force is a useful case because its structure makes the mechanisms visible. Military life creates particular pressures on families — deployment, relocation, trauma exposure — and particular reasons not to speak. Many of those reasons are tied to the member's career. When the career ends, the calculation changes.

This article is about family and domestic violence and intimate partner violence. Sexual misconduct within the Defence workplace is a related but separate issue, addressed briefly at the end.

Development

What the data show

The most detailed Australian evidence comes from the Transition and Wellbeing Research Programme, a large study of ADF members and families conducted in 2015 for Defence and the Department of Veterans' Affairs. Secondary analyses published in 2023 found that IPV exposure in a current relationship was reported by:

  • 29% of members who had transitioned out of the Regular ADF between 2010 and 2014
  • 22% of current full-time members
  • 46% of partners of transitioned members
  • 24% of partners of current members

Emotional abuse was the most commonly reported form, followed by physical abuse. Rates of self-reported exposure were similar for men and women among both current and transitioned members.

A separate component of the programme, the Family Wellbeing Study, used a stricter threshold and found lower overall figures, but the same direction: partners of ex-serving members reported IPV at more than double the rate of partners of current members (8.4% compared with 3.1%).

More recent data come from specialist homelessness services. In 2024–25, around 1,500 clients of those services were current or former ADF members. Almost one in four (23%) had experienced family and domestic violence, and one in ten cited it as the main reason for seeking help. An earlier linked analysis, covering 2011 to 2017, found that more than half of female ex-serving members who used homelessness services needed domestic and family violence support.

Risk and protective factors

Higher rates of IPV exposure, for both members and partners, were associated with financial hardship and with trauma exposure. Social connection and access to resources were associated with lower rates.

A narrower analysis looked at transitioned members who used violence, based on around 265 linked couples. High proportions of those members reported harmful drinking (69%), suicidal ideation (63%), depression (59%) and post-traumatic stress disorder (58%). These figures describe people who used violence, not those subjected to it, and they show association rather than cause. Mental health conditions help explain risk; they do not transfer responsibility.

Research also identifies factors specific to military families:

  • Separation and reintegration around deployment.
  • Frequent relocation, which can isolate partners from their own networks and make them economically dependent on the serving member.
  • Trauma experienced during service.
  • Institutional culture. The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare notes that the military environment has been described as hypermasculine, with help-seeking at risk of being read as weakness — a norm that reinforces stigma and under-reporting.

Barriers to disclosure

Research on veteran families identifies reasons for silence that are distinct to the military context:

  • Financial, housing and health dependence on the serving member.
  • The serving member's reputation within the military.
  • The possibility that the member could be demoted or discharged, and the family could lose the benefits that come with service.

Each of these ties the partner's security to the member's career. Reporting risks damaging the income, the housing and the health cover the partner relies on.

The institutional response

Three government strategies frame the response. The Defence Strategy for Preventing and Responding to Family and Domestic Violence 2023–2028 commits Defence to coordinating its response to FDV, providing victim-survivors with safety planning and referral to specialist services, holding people who use violence responsible and referring them to perpetrator services, and training personnel to recognise and respond to FDV. The DVA Family and Domestic Violence Strategy 2020–25 covered the veteran community over the same period. Defence and DVA have since released a joint Defence and Veteran Family Wellbeing Strategy 2025–2030, which addresses the wellbeing of serving and veteran families more broadly.

Practical supports include:

  • Defence Member and Family Helpline (24/7), which can help victim-survivors develop a safety plan for themselves and their children.
  • The Defence Special Accommodation for Emergencies Scheme (SAFE), which can provide short-term safe-house accommodation when a family member decides to leave or during a crisis.
  • Open Arms – Veterans & Families Counselling, free and confidential support for current and ex-serving personnel and their families, including relationship and family matters.

Analysis

Three points emerge when this evidence is read through the lens of the series.

First, the barriers to disclosure are career-bound, so disclosure is likely to be delayed. Dependence, reputation and the fear of discharge are all tied to the member's continued service. While service continues, the cost of reporting is highest. After transition, some of those costs fall away. It is consistent with this pattern — though the data cannot prove it — that partners of ex-serving members report IPV at markedly higher rates than partners of current members. Transition may be both a period of heightened risk, given the mental health and financial pressures documented around it, and a period in which disclosure becomes possible. Either way, it is a point at which the "years later" account becomes likely.

Second, the evidence base is old and narrow in specific ways. The main prevalence figures date from 2015. The screening tool used, the Woman Abuse Screening Tool, does not capture financial abuse, stalking or coercive control — the forms of harm now central to how IPV is understood, and the ones Part 2 showed Australian states are only now criminalising. The findings are also drawn mainly from male members and their female partners.

Third, the people most likely to come forward late are the people the research did not ask. The IPV questions in the 2015 programme were asked only of people in current relationships. Partners were included only if the member agreed to them being contacted, and former partners were excluded. That design leaves out exactly the group this series is concerned with: people who have left the relationship, often with the member's career no longer a constraint, and who may now be ready to describe what happened. Their accounts are not in the headline numbers. The figures above are therefore best read as a floor, not a ceiling.

This is where Part 1's argument becomes concrete. Researchers and policymakers can only work with the accounts they receive. In the ADF context, the missing accounts are identifiable — former partners, and members who experienced violence and have since left service — and each account given late, whether to a service, a researcher or the police, narrows the gap.

For reporting purposes, violence by a serving member is a criminal matter for state or territory police, and the Australian limitation rules and coercive control laws set out in Part 2 apply.

A note on sexual misconduct

Sexual misconduct in the ADF is a documented systemic issue, and the Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide examined it in its 2024 final report. It is distinct from FDV where it occurs in the workplace between colleagues. But the categories overlap: sexual violence by a partner is a form of IPV, and the 2015 research asked about it directly. Defence's Sexual Misconduct Prevention and Response Office (SeMPRO) provides confidential support to members and their families affected by sexual misconduct. A future article could examine that system on its own terms.

Conclusion

The ADF evidence confirms the pattern this series has traced. Family violence in military households is common, and the structure of military life both raises the risk and raises the cost of speaking about it. Those costs are tied to service, so they tend to fall only when service ends — which means many accounts will arrive late, if they arrive at all.

The institutional response is real: Defence and veteran strategies, a 24-hour helpline, emergency accommodation and counselling for current and former families. What is weakest is the record. The main dataset is a decade old, it misses the forms of abuse now considered central, and it did not hear from former partners.

That gap is not fixed by research design alone. It is fixed by accounts — including the ones given years later.

If you need support

Emergency: 000 · Defence Member and Family Helpline (24/7): 1800 624 608 · Open Arms – Veterans & Families Counselling (24/7): 1800 011 046 · Safe Zone Support (anonymous, 24/7): 1800 142 072 · 1800RESPECT: 1800 737 732

Sources

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