Kids are victims, not bystanders
By any measure, Western Australia is confronting a slow-moving crisis in childhood wellbeing.
Last week's report in The West Australian (19/3), alongside my newly released Profile of Children and Young People in WA 2026, paints a troubling picture — declining mental health, rising developmental concerns, and systems that are too often reacting too late.
But buried within the data is a truth we have yet to fully confront — children are not just witnesses to family and domestic violence, they are victims in their own right.
The 2026 profile clearly states that children exposed to FDV are not passive observers; they experience trauma directly, with more than 10 per cent becoming direct victims themselves.
At the same time, media reports indicate WA Police recorded more than 42,000 domestic violence-related offences in 2024–2025, an 18 per cent increase from the year before.
These are not abstract numbers.
They represent children going to school exhausted after sleepless nights, toddlers absorbing fear before they can speak, teenagers navigating violence at home while expected to function as if nothing is wrong.
And yet, our policy frameworks still largely treat children as secondary to the "primary victim" — usually an adult, and in most cases a woman. This is not just outdated — it is harmful.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics data showing WA is the nation's FDV capital, with a 20 per cent increase in the past year, is alarming. This surge highlights the broader decline in wellbeing among WA's young people — too many children are falling through the gaps, and in many cases, FDV is central to that decline.
Family violence is not a side issue in child development — it is a driver. It is the leading reason families seek homelessness services in WA, and it underpins a large proportion of child protection cases. The impacts ripple outward: poorer mental health, disrupted schooling, increased risk of contact with the justice system. These are not separate problems — they are connected outcomes of early trauma.
Despite this, services for children experiencing FDV remain extremely limited. We invest heavily in crisis responses — policing, courts, tertiary services — but far less in child-focused, trauma-informed support at the point of exposure. We talk about early intervention, but we hesitate to name one of the earliest and most damaging experiences a child can have — living with violence at home.
If we are serious about providing upstream solutions, then children affected by FDV must be at the centre of reform, not at the margins.
That means recognising them formally as victim-survivors in all legislation and service design relating to children and young people. It means embedding specialist child support workers in FDV responses — the recent Cook Government investment is welcomed, but it must go hand in hand with system reform. It means ensuring schools, health services and community organisations are equipped not just to identify harm, but to respond to it.
It also means listening.
Later this year, I will release findings from the Speaking Out Survey, which involved my team engaging with more than 17,000 WA children and young people in person last year to find out about their wellbeing. Children are capable of articulating their experiences — if we create spaces for them to be heard. Too often, however, their voices are filtered through adult narratives or lost entirely in bureaucratic systems.
We cannot continue to build systems that see children only in relation to the adults around them. A child who hears violence, who fears it, who lives with its consequences — that child is a victim.
Once we see children as victims in their own right, the question is no longer whether we should act, but why we haven't already.