In mid-2015, Rosie Batty gave a speech calling for family violence to be taken as seriously as terrorism.
A year and a half earlier her 11-year-old son, Luke, had been murdered by his father.
"Let's start calling it 'family terrorism' and then perhaps we will see that investment of funding where it needs to be," she said.
At the time, many commentators were slightly sceptical, calling the comparison a "misery competition" or a "hierarchy of misery", and nearly a decade later not much has changed.
Despite a clear link between terrorism and family violence, we treat them as separate things.
And yet, according to the Australian Institute of Criminology, in the last three decades more than 1,500 women have been killed by intimate partners in Australia, compared with nine people killed in acts of terrorism.
Is it time we spent as much on preventing domestic violence as we do on preventing terrorism?
The abuse playbook
Domestic violence and terrorism started gaining mainstream attention around the same time — in the 1970s.
Australia's first women's shelter was opened in Sydney in 1974, and as survivors told their stories to the refuge's staff, they made a startling observation.
The stories were eerily similar.
It was almost as though abusers were following a script, or were getting together secretly to discuss tactics.
Former ABC journalist Jess Hill wrote extensively about the phenomenon in her book, See What You Made Me Do.
She said researchers discovered that abusive men seemed to be unconsciously following a similar set of tactics to those used by North Korean torturers during the Korean War.
They're tactics also used by cult leaders, sex traffickers and hostage takers.
It's not just abuse, it's a process of thought reform and entrapment.
Abusers try to isolate their victim from friends and family. They try to control where their victim goes, their spending, and what they wear.
Abusers also degrade the victim — insulting their appearance, their intelligence, and implying that they're insane.
They also imply that everything that's negative about their home life, including the abuse, is the victim's fault.
The abuse is so relentless that victims become exhausted by fear, and just give in to the demands.
In many abusive relationships, the violence is only sporadic. But the threat is always there. Or the threat of even worse violence — against their children, their pets, their home, or themselves.
This is obviously when the comparisons to terrorism become easiest to make.
Abusers do something horrific, hoping to change other people's behaviour through terror.
The fact that the pattern of behaviour was so easily identifiable gave hope to the idea that maybe, some common cause could be found for domestic abuse, and the problem could be addressed at its root.
So researchers tried to figure out the difference between men who beat their partners, and men who do not.
Can we prevent abuse?
Early on, two prevailing theories about why some men abuse their partners emerged.
One theory was that abusers are mentally ill. They suffer from sociopathy, or they have been traumatised by their childhood.
The other theory is that society itself is broken. Men are brought up with a sense of entitlement, and that to be a real man they must remain emotionless, empowered, and master of his domain.
When they realise life doesn't work like that, they strike out against their spouses in an insecure rage.
And yet after 50 years of research, it seems like neither theory is complete.
We still haven't identified a simple explanation for why domestic violence exists.
Some men who are mentally healthy are violent or controlling toward their partners.
Some men who would consider themselves to be feminists also are violent or controlling toward their partners.
Conversely, millions of men who have mental health problems and/or misogynistic views, would never dream of hurting their partner.
Countries with great mental health services and high levels of gender equality still have a serious domestic violence problem.
So, what's the solution?
The simple, common denominator that causes some men to do this horrific thing doesn't seem to exist.
Changing bail laws, or putting age verification limits on pornography, or closing the gender pay gap, or saying "real men don't hit women", or giving harsh punishments to abusers won't entirely deal with the problem.
Just like improving airport security, locking cockpit doors, killing terrorist leaders, toppling governments, or increasing or decreasing the number of guns in society won't entirely deal with terrorism.
The causes of terrorism are just as diverse and complex.
The solution to both is a lot of policy change, across a lot of different areas, all at a great cost.
Australia has spent literally tens of billions of dollars protecting its citizens from terrorism in the last few decades. The US has spent trillions.
In this week's federal budget, $466 million was allocated to women's safety measures for the 2024-2025 financial year. That's about a fifth of what the government's spending on counterterrorism and national security agencies.
Keep in mind, in the last 30 years, more than 1,500 women have been killed by their intimate partners in Australia. Nine have been killed by terrorists.
Everyone agrees that this is a crisis, but apparently can't agree on how much we're willing to spend to end it.
