3 quarters of Australians feel more threatened by domestic violence than terrorism

Almost three quarters of Australians believe that domestic violence poses a bigger threat to society than terrorism, a new poll has shown on Monday.

The study, conducted by Essential Research, revealed that 74 percent of people think that domestic violence is a more pertinent issue for Australia than terrorism.

Professor Cathy Humphreys from the University of Melbourne believes the public is beginning to wake up to the very real threat that violence, especially against women, poses to society.

"I think that research shows how ahead of the game the population is compared to our politicians," she said in an interview with Xinhua.

"They realize that that real people... women are dying and in some cases children too and that is the real threat."

In the national budget, released in May, more than 900 million U.S. dollars was allocated to fight terrorism in Australia and abroad. Meanwhile, the fight against domestic violence received a meager 22.5 million U.S. dollars.

Humphreys said it was simply not good enough to ignore the alarming issue of violence, which has resulted in the death of more than one woman per week in Australia.

"Why would you cut funding when we've had 33 women die this year? This is a real, major threat," she said.

"If we had one person per week dying due to terrorism, then the government would be acting. We'd have a very different situation.

"It's as though these women and their lives don't count, and we want them to count."

She said while terrorism was a modern day issue, the lopsided attitude of the government was ignoring women and children that feel threatened by abusive men and women.

"Yes, terrorism is a real, external threat but we have some very real, internal threats that are not being dealt with adequately," she said.

"That's not to say terrorism isn't a real thing, but look we've got women and children dying. Why aren't we doing something about this in a more concerted way?"

"We need to be alert to external terrorism threats, but not at the expense of the funding to domestic violence services."

She said major reform was needed to not only protect women through legal aid and easy-to-access, safe housing in emergency situations, but also to educate those that believe violence is acceptable.

"Clearly there are a lot of men that think it's acceptable to be violent. How are we going to counter this type of terrorism? We need to say more vehemently that violence against women is wrong."