World-first trial testing whether counterterrorism strategies can prevent domestic homicide

When you go looking for them, the similarities between lone-actor terrorism, mass shootings and intimate partner homicides are chillingly obvious. Many attacks are carefully planned in advance. The majority are perpetrated by men. And a significant proportion of perpetrators have documented histories of violence against women.

But researchers are increasingly homing in on another common thread: some of the perpetrators of these seemingly disparate acts of violence are motivated by grievances — they are preoccupied with a sense of injustice, loss or injury. They feel like victims.

Australia has established several Fixated Threat Assessment Centres that team up police, mental health practitioners and other experts to monitor and manage the risk of lone-actor terrorists and individuals who are fixated on public figures.

Now, a world-first research project is hoping to do the same with domestic violence — to prevent family and intimate partner homicides with similar strategies to those being used to tackle terrorism and lone-actor attacks.

The Fixated Grievance Perpetrator Intervention Pilot brings together experts in forensic psychology and psychiatry, criminology, policing, perpetrator intervention and victim support. Led by Swinburne University and the Australian National University, the team's ultimate aim is to design a multi-agency unit that can identify and intervene with people whose grievance against a partner or relative may spur them to use harmful behaviours like coercive control, stalking and, in extreme cases, lethal violence.

With $21.8 million funding from the federal government, the pilot will be rolled out in two different states and evaluated by the Australian Institute of Criminology. If it works, experts involved say it could transform the way communities understand and respond to a dangerous subset of abusers who are often missed by existing systems.

A catalyst for extreme violence

Chief investigator Troy McEwan, professor of clinical and forensic psychology at Swinburne University's Centre for Forensic Behavioural Science, says the new project sits at "the cutting edge" of research and science. Emerging evidence suggests a proportion of family and intimate partner homicides are motivated by grievance — a 2022 study by McEwan and her colleagues found 20 out of 38 reviewed cases of fatal family violence were "grievance-fuelled" — but more research was needed to understand how common it was.

"These people really feel they have been wronged, and that they are owed something by their partner or ex, and potentially by the wider community or society," McEwan said. "When this sense of grievance is attached to an abnormally intense fixation, it can combine with other factors to become a catalyst for extreme violence."

The idea for the project was first floated in 2024, following a shocking spate of homicides of women and children. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese declared Australia was grappling with a "national crisis" of gendered violence, and national cabinet agreed to deliver "innovative new approaches" to better identify high-risk perpetrators and intervene early to stop violence escalating. This included trialling so-called Domestic Violence Threat Assessment Centres to monitor those at high risk of using lethal violence.

A growing body of research has found lone-actor terrorists and mass killers like school shooters are similarly propelled to violence by personal grievances or vendettas triggered by a perceived injustice. That many of these offenders have histories of domestic violence and misogynistic attitudes towards women has helped scholars build a compelling case that fixated grievances also underpin some incidents of fatal family violence (the perpetrator of the 2014 Sydney Lindt Cafe siege, for example, had been charged with organising the murder of his ex-wife and had a documented history of violence against other women).

One of the challenges with this group of perpetrators, McEwan said, is that they are often only recognised in hindsight — after a homicide, say — and many haven't had contact with police or the criminal justice system beforehand. In many cases, though, they have interacted with other services; for instance, doctors or mental health practitioners who could have picked up on risk factors, if they'd known what to look for.

"What we ultimately want is a way for professionals and non-professionals — people in the community — to be better able to identify [individuals with] a fixation on a grievance and have somewhere to send those cases," McEwan said.

Red flags, tight timelines

But one of the project team's first objectives is to define the group of people they're focused on: who are they, and what kinds of characteristics and behaviours are red flags? Their early work suggests one important factor is a sense of hopelessness, which can lead to an escalation from stalking or psychological abuse to more severe physical or lethal violence.

Also on the list, McEwan says, is suicidality, and "catalyst" events like significant losses or stressors: losing custody of children, losing a job, or having to sell a property — perhaps on top of a relationship ending, which is a common source of grievance to begin with.

One instructive case is that of Kelly Thompson, who was stabbed to death by her ex-partner, Wayne Wood, in February 2014. The escalation in Wood's behaviour happened over a "tight timeline" of just a couple of months, McEwan said; he'd made threats to harm Thompson and himself, he was stalking her, was preoccupied with the idea she was seeing other men, and was trying to control her via police-facilitated property collections. He was also grappling with big changes in his life: his relationship had ended, he was recently unemployed, he was living with his brother and being edged out of his business.

"With hindsight … you can see [Wood] was increasingly not coping with the end of that relationship, and was increasingly angry and frustrated to a point of hopelessness," McEwan said. "He became suicidal, his stalking behaviour increased in intensity … then eventually, very sadly, he broke into Kelly Thompson's house and killed her and killed himself as well."

Still, individuals who are driven by these intense grievances are a "very small subset" of people who commit acts of terrorism or intimate partner homicide, says co-chief investigator Emily Corner, associate professor at the Australian National University's Centre for Social Policy Research. What is key, though, she says, is that a "grievance-fuelled" perpetrator of terrorism is more similar to a "grievance-fuelled" perpetrator of intimate partner violence than they are to all other terrorists.

"It's like a Venn diagram where grievance sits in the middle of all these different forms of targeted violence," says Corner, who studies terrorism, mass murderers and fixated individuals.

What interests her most about the new project, Corner says, is that "it is actively pursuing viable options for reducing harms against women and children, and it's not just following the current systems we have".

"For me, if the overall aims come to fruition, then it has the potential to completely change how intimate partner and family violence is dealt with, and really save lives," she said. "I think it has the potential to be really world-leading."

A familiar perpetrator

Dale Wakefield, chief executive of GenWest and a member of the project's external expert panel, said she was "deeply familiar" with the kind of perpetrator the pilot was looking to target. Their grievance was often triggered by a relationship breaking down, she said, at which point their behaviour could become suddenly and frighteningly unpredictable.

Her team at GenWest, which supports victims of family violence in Melbourne's western suburbs, will often then see a ratcheting up of coercive control, systems abuse and stalking.

"Where we often see it played out is through family court and a range of other processes where people get very fixated on … a very binary view of what winning and losing is in these circumstances, rather than trying to get to a mediated outcome that is best for everybody," Wakefield said.

And because the family violence workforce is so stretched, she said, any instrument that could help practitioners better assess risk was helpful. "Often we are privy to a whole lot of information, and having … a tool that clearly demonstrates risk and can help us escalate it to the right place where action can be taken … will be a really important piece."

For McEwan, one of the most "unusual and exciting" aspects of the project is the breadth of expertise in the team and the opportunity for collaboration across different disciplines. That, and the fact the federal Attorney-General's Department has realised the importance of the work and backed it with significant funding over several years.

"This is the government saying, 'We need to actually do something that's different and revolutionary,'" McEwan said. "That's heartening to me, that there's genuine effort being put into doing things better, in an evidence-based way — not just thinking something is a good idea then throwing money at it without testing to see whether it can actually reduce harm."