One in five young people report using violence against family members. Mothers are the primary targets. Most perpetrators are boys.
Violence against mothers remains dangerously under-recognised in Australian policy, despite overwhelming evidence of its scope. Our submission to the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women and Girls lays bare the problem: thousands of mothers cannot escape male family violence because they fear losing custody of their children, thousands lack legal protection when accessing safety services, and thousands experience a particularly overlooked manifestation of male violence: abuse perpetrated by their own sons.
AAWAA has submitted evidence to the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women and Girls documenting three interconnected mechanisms through which men harm mothers: men control women’s bodies, weaponise their children, and trap them through poverty. What makes this violence distinct is that it targets women specifically because they are mothers, and institutions frequently enable it rather than prevent it.
Sons learning from fathers
Son-to-mother violence is a pattern that policy consistently ignores. Australia’s first comprehensive national study found that one in five young people reported using violence against family members, with mothers as the most frequent targets. The majority of perpetrators are boys and young men.
This violence manifests from sons as verbal abuse, physical violence, emotional abuse, and financial exploitation, often with early onset: 60 per cent had begun using violence by age 10 or younger. Yet it barely registers in policy responses. Australia’s National Plan to End Violence Against Women and Children 2022-32 contains no specific reference to male violence against mothers, let alone male adolescent violence against mothers as a distinct manifestation.
The pattern is clear: sons are learning to abuse their mothers by watching their fathers do it.. This intergenerational transmission of male violence is rendered invisible in policy and research, despite being prevalent.
Economic dependence and control
The broader context matters. Mothers experience a documented ‘motherhood penalty’ where women’s earnings fall by 55 per cent in the first five years of parenthood. And research calculates that approximately 7,700 women annually return to abusive male partners specifically because they cannot afford housing. This impacts mothers in particular because male abusers exploit this economic dependence systematically: a woman who complies with a man’s threats because he controls finances and threatens custody loss, and who has no independent economic means, does not freely consent. Yet legal frameworks treat such compliance as autonomous choice, turning coercion into contract.
Naming the problem: violent males
Naming males, including sons, as the primary perpetrators of violence against mothers is vital. Male violence must not hide behind passive language. Mothers are not ‘experiencing violence’: Men are perpetrating it. Mothers are not ‘killed by violence’: it is partners and sons who kill mothers. Sons are learning it from fathers. Institutions are enabling it. This precision matters. When policy obscures who is violent, it becomes impossible to address the violence systemically.
Our submission calls for comprehensive reform: legislation criminalising reproductive coercion, removal of male perpetrators (including adolescent males) from homes, protection for female-only services, and economic security enabling mothers to leave violent male relationships. But first, mothers must be recognised as a distinct group vulnerable to sex-based harm perpetrated by men and boys, and that violence must be named for what it is.
Until mothers are named as a group targeted for sex-based harm by men and boys — partners and sons — policy will continue to enable the violence it claims to prevent.
Read the full submission below for the evidence, detailed recommendations, and comprehensive analysis of how violence against mothers operates across intimate relationships, commercial industries, and state institutions.
