Australia’s masculine policing culture is failing women and children

Australian policing has been in the spotlight in the past few weeks.

There were concerning scenes in New South Wales during protests against Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s visit, while Queensland Police’s commitment to curtailing domestic and family violence was queried when a specialist unit was scrapped.

These issues might appear to be separate, but they both highlight a masculinity problem within Australian policing.

It may be time for an Australian version of the United Kingdom’s 2023 Baroness Casey Review, which exposed worrying behaviour and cultural issues inside the UK’s Metropolitan Police Service.

Violence and a lack of support

In Sydney, the policing of protesters against the visit of Herzog led to serious questions about the use of force.

Protesters were pepper sprayed and forcibly penned in by police, leaving a 69-year-old woman with four broken vertebrae.

Despite NSW Premier Chris Minns defending the actions of police in Sydney, the Law Enforcement Conduct Commission announced last week its plans to investigate the violent clashes.

Meanwhile in Queensland, a tribunal revealed this month that the Queensland Police Service (QPS) had refused to discipline an officer accused of serious domestic violence against his heavily pregnant partner, citing “no tangible benefit” to doing so.

Less than a month earlier, the QPS scrapped its specialist domestic and family violence command unit.

This comes at a time when domestic and family violence incidents reported to police in Queensland increased by more than 220% between 2012 and 2024, with many victims left waiting hours or days for help.

Each of these events is of significant concern in its own right.

But put together, they present a far more troubling picture and raise the question of whether Australian policing has a problem with gender.

Not simply in how it responds to violence against women but in how an increasingly masculine institutional culture shapes what policing looks like, what it prioritises and ultimately who is protected.

Worrying cultures

Following the 2020 murder of Hannah Clarke and her three children by her former partner, and the 2021 Women’s Safety and Justice Taskforce’s “Hear Her Voice” report, the Queensland government established a Commission of Inquiry into policing responses to domestic and family violence.

Its report found a culture of “sexism, misogyny and racism” across the service, with “negative attitudes towards women” that “inhibits the policing of domestic and family violence”.

In NSW, a 2023 Law Enforcement Conduct Commission review of police responses to domestic and family violence found such incidents account for 40% of all police work. That is around 500 incidents every day.

Yet, the review found basic failures in recording, training and victim support. It also found 60 officers were involved in domestic and family violence incidents. Some were investigated more than once.

In more than three quarters of cases, those officers were investigated by colleagues from their own command. In most, there was no record of whether their firearms had been removed.

In Victoria, 683 Victoria Police staff were investigated for alleged sex crimes and family violence offences between 2019 and 2024 – the majority of whom were uniformed officers. Chief Commissioner Shane Patton called the figure “alarming”.

This follows the Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission’s 2015 Independent Review which found an “entrenched culture of everyday sexism” and a “high tolerance for sexual harassment” across the force.

These reports all identify cultures of misogyny, sexism and basic operational failures in responding to violence against women.

But what none of them quite names is what sits behind all of it: men, and a deeply entrenched culture of masculinity.

As Amanda Keddie – a Deakin University professor who has researched gender equality in police forces – argues, the hierarchical and masculinised cultures within policing have been “taken for granted and unquestioned”.

They remain unnamed in report after report, even as they shape every failing those reports describe.

The UK’s problems were exposed

The UK’s Baroness Casey Review gets closer to naming it.

Commissioned after the 2021 abduction, rape and murder of Sarah Everard by a serving Metropolitan Police officer, Casey found a rampant “boys’ club culture” that privileged white male officers while sidelining women, Black and gay colleagues.

She found “some of the worst cultures, behaviours and practices” were in the Met’s specialist firearms units, where “normal rules do not seem to apply”.

At the same time, services for violence against women and girls were hollowed out, with rape kits stored in broken freezers held shut with bungee cords.

Casey called it “symbolic of an organisation that has lost its way”.

The Met had been shaped by men, for men.

What can be done?

Australia is not the UK. But the patterns are unmistakable.

A culture of masculinity isn’t an abstract concept.

It is visible in the tactical, coercive and militarised policing of protesters in Sydney.

It is visible in the decision to scrap a specialist domestic violence command in Queensland while demand surges.

And it is visible every time an officer who perpetrates violence against women is investigated by his own colleagues.

As Keddie writes:

gender inequality will not be addressed without transforming the hierarchical and masculinised cultures of policing organisations.

The Casey Review offers a blueprint: specialist units for violence against women, independent oversight of police-perpetrated abuse and mandatory standards on vetting and misconduct.

In Australia, this means working to systemically change police cultures that were built by, and for, a narrow demographic which does not reflect the diversity of the communities they are meant to serve.

It means resourcing specialist domestic violence commands rather than dismantling them, holding officers who perpetrate violence to account, and recruiting and promoting in ways that genuinely reshape who polices and how.