Sexual Violence

The Hon. J.S. LEE (15:02): My question is to the Minister for Human Services regarding sexual violence. Can the minister please provide an update to the council about how the Marshall Liberal government is putting more resources and measures in place to address sexual violence.

The Hon. J.M.A. LENSINK (Minister for Human Services) (15:02): I thank the honourable member for her question. Indeed, as she indicates in her question, the Marshall Liberal government is putting more resources into this, courtesy of the funding that we have received from the federal government to assist in awareness campaigns. This comes on top of the Break the Cycle campaign, which was launched in June and which is a very powerful set of advertisements that are targeted particularly towards perpetrators, where the advertisements help to identify their behaviour as particular domestic violence behaviour.

As we do know in our community, while the understanding of domestic and family violence has improved, there are still people in our community who do not recognise that what they are experiencing is violence. We have a website, which is www.breakthecycle.sa.gov.au, which has a large number of resources both for perpetrators and for people who are experiencing domestic violence as victims. During that particular time, we ran advertisements, not just through mainstream media but also on media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok.

In the most recent campaign that we have, we are also using the Tinder platform, so that people can recognise that their behaviour is inappropriate and that some of the attitudes that we know do exist in our community need to be challenged. These particular ads were launched last week, just in time for the festive season, as people potentially are going to be out and about in the public more and mixing more, to assist them to recognise and to reach out and help seek assistance.