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Community perceptions of domestic violence
Community perceptions of domestic violence
Crime facts info no. 138
ISSN 1445-7288
Canberra: Australian Institute of Criminology, December 2006
A recent VicHealth publication (VicHealth 2006) reported on a survey of contemporary community
attitudes among 2,800 Victorian respondents to violence against women. The Australian Institute
of Criminology analysed and recently reported on the results (Taylor & Mouzos, 2006). There were
2,000 adults aged 18 years and older who were randomly interviewed by telephone for the main
sample along with an additional oversample of 800 persons from Chinese, Vietnamese, Italian and
Greek backgrounds. In the report this oversample was referred to as respondents from selected
culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds (SCALD). As the following chart demonstrates,
male and female respondents in the main sample were significantly more likely than the SCALD
sample to say that forcing a partner to have sex is always domestic violence. Persons from the
SCALD sample were more likely to answer 'don't know' than the main sample. The report shows
that these differences in attitudes were reflected across a range of other questions.
