Jenna Price | Fewer Australian women are being murdered but we have a massive problem

But James and McShera are outliers. Fewer women are getting murdered by their partners. If you look at long-term trends over the last decade, homicide as a result of intimate partner violence is decreasing. Yes, you read that right.

Hard to face up to these deaths as they come even if there are fewer of them than there were 10 years ago. You can only see the decrease as good news.

But here is the hardest thing. We have no clue why these deaths in Australia are decreasing. No real evidence-based clue at all, says Hayley Boxall, research fellow at Centre for Social Research and Methods at the Australian National University, previously of the Australian Institute of Criminology.

"We would like to think it's because we are doing more in terms of primary prevention work, addressing the kinds of attitudes which condone violence, addressing gender roles."

You can hear the "but" in her voice.

What we know from international evidence, Boxall says, is that deaths are decreasing because of improvements in medical treatment. Women in the past used to die as a result of their injuries. Now they are more likely to survive because treatments have changed.

So I ask the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare what it knows.

A lot. Too much.

Every day. Every single day. More than 20 people are hospitalised each day because they have been assaulted by a partner or family member. The vast majority of those who end up in hospital are women, just about three-quarters. We don't know the gender of the perpetrators because that's a hole in the data not yet plugged.

Sally Mills, acting community services group head at AIHW, kindly wrangles these figures for me - and she won't tell me what the new figures, to be released at the end of November, will say. As if me knowing a few weeks earlier would do anything except to confirm my fears. Or, unlikely, allay them.

I can tell you hospitals don't admit you unless there is a dire need. They are too short of beds, too understaffed, to keep people in hospital unless they need to be.

Speaking of hospitals, here's something else you may not know. There's a bunch of people who go to hospital but they don't stay, maybe won't stay. They go to emergency so someone will tend to their wounds but then they go home.

We don't count them in any methodical way. There is no national dataset to tell us how many women and men end up in emergency because of an assault by a partner, says Mills.

Here's our epidemic right here.

Hospitals could provide one extra set of figures to measure our real injury burden - but what they provide nationally right now is at the severe end. That's the women and men who end up in hospital.

For a decade now, I've been involved with Counting Dead Women, which keeps track of the number of women who die violently each year. It's slow, methodical. Not every death of every woman is there. We do our very best not to overinflate the figures. No point making things worse than they already are.

And I for one will be ecstatic when the figure is zero.

But even now, these deaths are not the ones which tell us how our culture is going, how our country is going, how our community is going.

Let me say this. Until the murder of Aboriginal women makes the homepages of our major media sites, we have an urgent problem. The media are often at the whim of authorities and investigators releasing timely information and photos to facilitate coverage. But this absence tells us that our community values some lives more than others.

It's what Boxall of ANU calls the "lesser dead". And add to that, those women who are not the cultural norm. Sure that phrase sounds clunky - but let's be honest here. We don't greet those deaths with the same shame and pain.

Antoinette Braybrook, CEO of Djirra, an Aboriginal community-controlled organisation providing both legal and non-legal support to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people experiencing family violence, says that this year alone seven Aboriginal women have been killed.

"Where is the outrage in the media when those lives have been taken? Our lives are not valued."

Sure, be delighted that deaths are declining, even as we witness the deaths of five women in these terrible two weeks. But don't imagine the problem is going anywhere.

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All those community attitudes which lead to men hurting women, they are all still there. The raging misogyny. The fury at women who won't do as they are told. You can see, even on social media, the way women are targeted.

And the cheerleading for men who are accused rapists, men who express violent ideas, men who make hurting women into a national sport or try to make a joke of it. Men who think feminism is a risk to their own identity.

Between 2010 and 2018, rates of sexual assault victimisation recorded by police for Australians aged 15 and over rose by more than 30 per cent. About 200,000 Australians a year experience sexual assault, says the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

There are so many good and decent men but they are not winning in the public sphere. Nor, sadly, in the private one. Twenty hospitalisations a day tells us what's really going on. Imagine if we knew the full story.

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