No more empty shoes

You already know this sentence. You’ve heard it on the radio, seen it scroll past on TV, skimmed it in your news app on the tram,

“A woman has been found dead in her home. Police are not looking for anyone else.”

Eleven words. No perpetrator. No history. No agency.

A woman has been found, as if she misplaced herself. Police are “not looking for anyone else”, as if the absence of a search means the absence of a man.

We barely notice it now. But that sentence, and thousands like it, is part of why women keep dying.

And that is why I want to talk about grammar.

Because the way we talk about men killing women is not a stylistic quirk. It is a moral failure.

Let’s start with what we know, not what we feel.

In 2024, police in Australia recorded 448 victims of homicide and related offences, a 9% increase on the previous year. Almost two in five of those homicides were flagged by police as family and domestic violence.

The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare reports that in 2023 there were 67 intimate partner homicides in Australia (excluding Western Australia). Of those victims, 52 were women and 9 were men, roughly six women killed for every man.  New data from the Australian Institute of Criminology shows that almost half of all women who were homicide victims in the last financial year were killed by a current or former intimate partner.

Over a 35-year period, from 1989 to mid-2024, there have been 1,710 female victims of intimate partner homicide in this country.

Read that again, 1,710 women.

Last week, if you’d walked through Martin Place in Sydney during the “No More Empty Shoes” vigil, you would have seen rows and rows of women’s shoes laid out on the stone, one pair for each woman killed by domestic and family violence in 2025, and small shoes for the children and even animals also lost. Their shoes stood where they can no longer stand themselves.

On paper, we now have a National Plan to End Violence against Women and Children 2022–2032. It is the overarching policy framework meant to “end violence against women in one generation”, with governments of all stripes signing up to that goal.

The crisis has a name, a plan, vigils, dashboards and targets.

And yet, in the daily language we use, in the headlines, the nightly news, the conversations at the dinner table, we still pretend that what is happening to women is mysterious, private, inexplicable.

The numbers tell us something very simple, women are not randomly “found” dead. Overwhelmingly, they are killed by men they know.

So why won’t we just say that?

Ethics usually talks about rights, duties, harms, justice. Today we need to talk about verbs.

“A woman has been found dead.”
“Her life was tragically cut short.”
“The incident is being treated as a domestic matter.”

These sentences sound calm, professional, responsible. They are anything but.

Look at what they do.

“Has been found” shifts the focus from the killing to the discovery. The main event, grammatically, is what police or neighbours did, not what the perpetrator did.

“Her life was cut short” turns a decision into an accident, as if fate itself reached down with scissors.

“The incident” could be anything, a gas leak, a fall, a misunderstanding. “Domestic matter” makes it sound like a private quarrel, best left unseen.

Now compare those phrases with these,

“A man killed his partner.”
“He strangled her.”
“He ignored an intervention order and stabbed her in front of their children.”

Same reality. Very different moral universe.

The first set of sentences treats men’s violence against women as a natural disaster, something that happens to women. The second makes clear it is something men do.

Passive language is not neutral. It does moral work. It hides the person with agency, the person who could have chosen differently.

When you and I accept those neutral-sounding sentences without question, we join in that hiding.

Think about the last story like this that you saw.

Chances are, she was described primarily in terms of her roles, “a 32-year-old mother-of-two”, “a much-loved teacher”, “a respected nurse from Melbourne’s north”. These descriptions sound respectful, but they reduce her to how she served others. She becomes a function, mother, worker, carer.

Then we learn that “her life was tragically cut short”. We may get a school photo, a candlelight vigil, a few quotes from distraught friends. And that’s it. She is flattened; her uniqueness is compressed into one stock image of “yet another victim”.

He, by contrast, often receives a complicated biography.

He was “a quiet bloke”, “troubled”, “struggling with his mental health”, “never violent before”. Neighbours are “shocked”. Colleagues say he was “reliable”. If he played footy, we will probably hear about that. If he had a stressful job, we will definitely hear about that.

In the recent inquest into the killing of 21-year-old Lilie James, the state coroner found that her ex-boyfriend meticulously planned her murder, rehearsing his movements on CCTV, luring her into a bathroom at their workplace, bringing the weapon, and then reporting her body before taking his own life. She described it as “calculated, premeditated” domestic and gendered violence, and warned the media against describing such killings as ‘out of character’ until the full pattern of coercive control is understood.

That warning is not just for journalists. It is for all of us.

Because we are eager to say, “he snapped”, “he just lost it”, “no one saw it coming”. These phrases make us feel safer. If it was all a sudden snap, we don’t have to reckon with the years of controlling behaviour beforehand. If it was “out of character”, it can’t possibly be anyone we know.

But again and again, when coroners and domestic homicide reviews dig into these killings, they find the same thing, warning signs, risk factors, prior reports, patterns of control.

The story we like to tell, of the good man who suddenly “snapped”, is comfortable fiction. Our language keeps that fiction alive.

From the time girls are teenagers, we teach them to fear the stranger in the dark.

Don’t walk home alone. Don’t get into a car with a man you don’t know. Don’t wear headphones. Check your back seat. Share your location.

Meanwhile, the statistics that barely get reported tell them something far more frightening, the most likely person to kill a woman is not a stranger at all, but a current or former intimate partner. And in Australia, four times as many women as men are killed by an intimate partner.

The real danger, in other words, is usually the man whose toothbrush is in the same bathroom.

Yet look at how we respond. The rare stranger attack becomes a rolling media event; the far more common domestic homicide becomes a short “police are not looking for anyone else” item on page five.

We are telling women the wrong story about where danger lies. We are telling men the wrong story about who “counts” as a violent man.

Our language fixates on monsters in the shadows and ignores the men in plain sight, the ones who sit next to us at work, who chat at the school gate, who shake our hands at the club.

Until we change that story, we cannot possibly change the behaviour that flows from it.

If you want to hear the moral power of language, listen for the questions people ask after another woman is killed.

Why was she walking home alone?
Why did she go back to him?
Why did she let him in?
Why didn’t she leave sooner?
Why didn’t she stay away?

We have become very good at doing risk assessments on dead women.

But we don’t ask, with anything like the same intensity,

Why did he feel entitled to control her movements, her money, her phone?
Why did he breach the intervention order and think nothing would happen to him?
Why did his friends ignore the way he spoke about her?
Why did our systems let him keep his weapons, his bail, his access?

Those first questions, about her choices, are not neutral curiosity. They are the product of years of stories that quietly suggest women are responsible for managing men’s danger.

The public rarely invents those questions from scratch. We learn them from somewhere. We learn them from the way violence is reported, from the way we joke about “psycho exes”, from the way we talk about “good blokes under a lot of pressure”.

We learn them from you and me repeating those same lazy lines at the pub or around the barbecue.

Language doesn’t just describe our attitudes. It drills them into us.

When we hear “police are not looking for anyone else”, we should hear a second, quieter sentence underneath,

“We already know who did it, and we probably could have predicted it.”

In case after case, when domestic homicide review teams or coroners go back through the timeline, they find women who called police multiple times; neighbours who reported screaming; prior assaults; breached orders; patterns of coercive control.

Sometimes, as recent reporting on the deaths of older women has shown, there are decades-long histories of abuse by sons or other family members that are dismissed as “family problems” or “carer stress”.

These are systemic failures, not random bolts from the blue. They are failures of policing, of courts, of health and housing systems. They are also failures of us, as citizens, for tolerating this as background noise.

But look at how we frame them.

We say, “the system failed her” and move on, as if the system was a single faulty machine rather than a network of human choices.

We say “we need a conversation” about men’s violence against women, as if we have not been having the same conversation for decades.

We say, “we’re shocked”, when what we actually are is relieved that it wasn’t someone we love.

What we do not say, often enough or loudly enough, is this,

A man killed her.
He should have been stopped.
Our systems had information and did not act on it.
We have seen this before.
We will see it again unless we change.

That is not being “emotional” or “biased”. It is being honest.

The National Plan to End Violence against Women and Children sets out four pillars, prevention, early intervention, response, recovery, and demands a “whole-of-society” effort to end gender-based violence in one generation. It explicitly recognises that our culture, our attitudes, norms, beliefs, drives this violence.

The media are named directly as a key part of that cultural landscape. Our Watch’s national guidelines explain how responsible reporting can challenge the condoning of violence, shift blame away from victims, and show that violence is gendered and preventable.

But the media are not the only storytellers. We are.

Every time we repeat “she was found dead” instead of “he killed her”, every time we describe a man’s violence as “snapping”, every time we say “family tragedy” instead of “murder”, we are undermining the very plan we claim to support.

You cannot have a national strategy built on the idea that violence is a choice and an injustice, and a national vocabulary built on the idea that it is a sad, inevitable misfortune.

One of them has to give. At the moment, it is the strategy.

Why does this matter so much?

Because human beings live inside stories. We decide who deserves our empathy, our anger and our protection based on the sentences we hear again and again.

If the woman is always the one “found dead” and the man is always the one “struggling” or “quiet” or “under stress”, we learn to feel sorry for him and vaguely sad for her.

If a killing is always “a tragedy that has shocked the community”, we learn to see it as something that happened to us, a blow to our image of ourselves, rather than something done by one of us to one of us.

If domestic killings are always “incidents”, we learn to treat them as background noise, not as scandals.

Language trains our moral instincts. It tells us where to look and where not to look. It tells us when to cry, when to shrug, when to move on.

You and I are being trained every day.

We do not get to opt out of that training. We only get to decide whether to keep absorbing it passively, or to resist it.

This is where you come in, not as a passive audience, but as citizens.

You cannot single-handedly rewrite the news, but you can do more than you think.

First, notice.

The next time you hear “a woman has been found dead”, pause. Ask yourself, why that sentence? What is missing? Who is missing? What would the sentence sound like if we were brave enough to tell the truth?

Second, refuse the lazy phrases in your own speech.

When you talk about these stories with friends, don’t say “she was killed after a relationship breakdown”. Say “he killed her after she left him.” That small change moves responsibility from her decision to his.

Don’t say “he just snapped”. Say “he chose to use violence he had already threatened.”

Third, challenge the victim-blaming question when you hear it.

When someone asks, “why did she go back to him?”, answer, “because leaving is the most dangerous time, and our systems don’t protect women well enough.” When someone asks, “why did she stay so long?”, say “let’s talk about why he was allowed to keep hurting her.”

It will feel awkward. That’s how you know you’re doing something important.

Fourth, demand better language from your media.

When you see a headline that sanitises male violence or implies blame for a victim, don’t just roll your eyes. Write to the outlet. Complain to the ombudsman. Cancel a subscription if you have to. Tell them why.

And when you see coverage that gets it right, that names what happened plainly, gives context, centres the woman’s humanity, thank them. Editors notice complaints, but they also notice praise.

Finally, talk to the boys and men in your life about this honestly.

Men are not a side issue here. We are the main characters in this story, whether we like it or not. Most men will never lay a violent hand on a partner. But the men who do are not aliens. They grow in the same cultural soil as the rest of us, the jokes, the silences, the excuses, the stories we tell about “crazy exes” and “bunny boilers”.

When we bristle at phrases like “men’s violence against women”, insisting on “not all men”, what we are really saying is, I care more about my innocence than her safety.

We have to be better than that.

So, let’s go back to where we started,

“A woman has been found dead in her home. Police are not looking for anyone else.”

Here is what that sentence is usually trying not to say,

“A man has killed his partner in their home. Police already know who he is.”

Here is how it might sound if we combined accuracy with courage,

“Police allege a man killed his partner in their home last night, in what appears to be another case of domestic violence. It comes as new figures show that nearly half the women killed in Australia last year were murdered by a current or former partner.”

Same woman. Same man. Same house. But now we are telling the truth about all three.

When that kind of sentence becomes our norm, in newsrooms, in conversations, in classrooms, we will know we are finally treating this issue as the moral emergency it is, rather than as a series of sad, isolated tragedies.

Until then, every time we say, “a woman has been found dead”, we are not just reporting the news. We are rehearsing our own helplessness.

We cannot fix everything with words. If that were true, the National Plan and all our vigils would already have done the job. We need funding, laws, enforcement, housing, services, training.

But we also cannot fix anything without words. Language is the water our politics swims in. It is the soil from which policy grows. It is the story in which young men learn what is normal, what is excusable, what “just happens”.

So, the question is not whether language matters. It is whether we are willing to accept that our language matters.

When the next story breaks, and there will be a next one, you will have a choice.

You can sigh, think “how tragic”, and scroll on. You can let the same sentence wash over you and drain the event of its truth.

Or you can stop, name what happened, and refuse to participate in the softening of reality.

A woman is dead.
A man killed her.
A country already knew this was happening.

If we cannot bring ourselves to say even that much, we should stop pretending we are serious about ending this violence.

If this article has raised issues for you or someone you know, help is available. 1800RESPECT is Australia’s national domestic, family and sexual violence counselling, information and support service. It is free, confidential and available 24/7 on 1800 737 732 or via online chat at 1800respect.org.au. In an emergency, always call 000.