Domestic and family violence is an epidemic. In 2024, the prime minister declared it a national crisis.

Official statistics show time and time again that this violence is overwhelmingly perpetrated by men. This is unlikely to be news to most of us– we see it play out in our communities, online, and on our screens.

But this isn’t just an Australian problem. The Indo-Pacific region, where Australia and 41 other countries are located, has some of the highest rates of domestic and family violence in the world.

Which raises this question: if we know this is a crisis, and we know who the majority of perpetrators are, why aren’t we seeing a clear reduction in domestic and family violence?

Our research suggests we might be falling short on our long-term investments in our approaches to engaging men who are using violence.

Mapping the full picture

We did a large study of the academic literature, casting a wide net to map out what kinds of programs for men using domestic and family violence are out there. This wasn’t to judge which programs are best, but to understand the full picture.

We screened more than 20,000 articles and found 50 articles discussing 42 unique programs across 14 Indo-Pacific countries, including Australia, India, Bangladesh, and Nepal.

Almost half of the 42 interventions were Australian. This isn’t because Australia leads the world in this work necessarily, but because academic publishing itself tends to favour English-language, Western........

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