June 2026

We often categorise the world to make sense of it – to make complex social problems feel more manageable. If we can name an issue, define its boundaries and frame it in a familiar way, we feel more capable of addressing it.

Yet, sexual violence is widespread, deeply harmful and profoundly complex. While it resists simple categorisation it is often framed this way. For victim-survivors, this can mean not being fully recognised by the systems they turn to - navigating fragmented pathways to support, and responses that do not reflect the realities of their experiences.

In Australia, nearly one in seven adults has experienced sexual violence since the age of fifteen. Sexual violence is gendered, with women and girls disproportionately affected and gender inequality remaining a key driver of harm. However, sexual violence cannot be understood through gender alone. It is experienced across the community, including by men, children and young people, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, people from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds, people with disability, LGBTQIA+ communities, and people living within institutional or otherwise marginalised settings.

Across policy, practice and public discourse, sexual violence is commonly conceptualised through a set of established lenses. It is understood as gender-based violence, as a form of domestic and family violence, as a public health issues and a violation of human rights. Each of these frameworks is grounded in evidence and lived experience. Each has strengthened understanding, shaped reform and improved prevention and response.

The challenge, however, is that each is partial. Each captures important dimensions of sexual violence, but none fully account for its complexity. The consequence is clear: when sexual violence is narrowly defined, victim-survivors experiences are pushed to the margins of systems not designed with their realities in mind.

So how are we conceptualising sexual violence?

Sexual violence is a form of gender-based violence, locating harm within systems of inequality and social and cultural norms that condone or minimise violence. Addressing gender inequality and gendered power dynamics remain essential to prevention. But gender alone cannot explain the full range of drivers, contexts or experiences of sexual violence and do not account for the intersecting factors that shape vulnerability, perpetration, and barriers to support.

Similarly, framing sexual violence as synonymous with, or as a subset of, domestic and family violence has strengthened recognition of serious and co-occurring harms across a range of meaningful relationships. Yet a substantial proportion of sexual violence is experienced outside of these contexts – within workplaces, institutions, social settings, homes, online environments, and from peers, friends, acquaintances, teammates, colleagues, figures of authority and systems. When sexual violence is primarily framed through a domestic and family violence lens, these experiences can become less visible, and responses less aligned with the realities of violence and harm.

Other frameworks such as public health and human rights offer critical insights. They draw attention to prevalence, long-term impacts, dignity, accountability and system responsibility. Yet each frames the issue in particular ways, shaping what is brought into focus and what is left out.

When these frameworks are relied on in isolation, they can narrow how sexual violence is understood and how systems respond. The effect is not simply conceptual. It is structural. Sexual violence does not follow a single pattern or result in a single set of needs. Experiences are shaped by intersecting factors, alongside social and cultural norms, and specific dynamics of perpetration, harm and accountability. When systems are organised around discrete and fragmented categories, recognition often depends on whether experiences fit those categories. For many victim-survivors, this does not reflect reality. It means navigating systems that were not designed with their experiences in mind.

Where systems cannot hold this complexity, gaps emerge.

These gaps are visible in fragmented service pathways, in exclusionary eligibility criteria and in responses that do not reflect the full spectrum of sexual violence. They are also evident where certain forms of violence, such as workplace sexual harassment and assault, technology-facilitated abuse, or sexual violence in institutional settings, are obscured within policy frameworks, limiting recognition of the distinct drivers, contexts and responses.

It is not a question of which framework is right. Rather it is a question of how they are held together. How they maintain responsibility, promote accountability and drive action. How they recognise sexual violence as multi-dimensional. As gendered and structural, shaped by inequality and power. As also situational and contextual. As experienced across the life course and a wide range of settings. As both a public health issue and a matter of human rights. Sexual violence requires a range of coordinated, reinforcing responses, but cannot be reduced to any one of them.

Holding these truths simultaneously is not straightforward. It challenges established policy boundaries, funding structures and service models. It requires coordination across portfolios, systems and sectors that have historically operated in parallel, while also maintaining the value of specialist expertise.

This complexity is not an obstacle to progress. It is a condition of it.

Specialist sexual violence services have long worked within this reality – supporting people whose experiences of harm do not sit neatly within a single category, and navigating systems that are not always designed with those experiences in mind. This practice points to a clear direction: responses must be built around the realities of sexual violence, not solely around the frameworks used to define it.

This means designing systems that are responsive to sexual violence across settings, populations and the life course. It means ensuring that support is accessible whether violence is experienced within families, institutions, workplaces, communities or online. It means strengthening coordination across policy and service domains, while continuing to address structural drivers, intersecting inequalities, and the conditions that enable and perpetuate harm.

If we want real change, we need to hold multiple truths at once. Sexual violence is gendered and structural. It is both public health crisis and a human rights failure. It is shaped, reinforced and perpetuated by social, cultural, political and economic conditions. It is shaped by design.

When our frameworks are too narrow to hold the depth of lived reality, it is not people who would have to adapt.

It is our systems.