How many more women have to be beaten to a pulp, strangled, stabbed, shot, drowned or set fire to before Australia gets serious about confronting the many causes behind our rapidly worsening epidemic of gendered violence?

This week’s alleged murder of Molly Ticehurst at the hands of her former partner Daniel Billings has shocked our city, state and nation. Her killing is so horrific, so senseless, and so outrageous that it may finally force a cultural reckoning on our bizarre unwillingness to come to grips with the very well-known realities of male violence.

Molly Ticehurst died in the regional NSW town of Forbes.

An already appalling cycle of death has worsened over recent months. Until recently, an average of one woman was killed per week in Australia. In 2024, that figure has risen to closer to one every four days. These figures don’t include the many more women injured each week. How much more evidence do we need that our current state and national approach to this scourge of domestic, family and sexual violence is not working?

Ticehurst’s alleged murderer is innocent until proven guilty, but the fact that he has been charged, and the surrounding circumstances, remind us of two realities.

The first is that Australia has still not tackled the underlying social drivers of violence against women. As Malcolm Turnbull once observed in 2015, disrespecting women does not always result in violence against women “but all violence against women begins with disrespecting women”. This is an enormously hard topic to tackle because there are no easy – or quick – answers to fixing what White Ribbon rightly describes as the deeply ingrained attitudes, social norms and inequalities that give rise to men’s violence against women.

The second reality revealed by Ticehurst’s alleged murder is that the NSW judicial system is broken, particularly the way it treats men accused of serious crimes. Bail laws are too weak and protections in place to protect vulnerable women too ineffective.

Billings had been released on bail just 15 days before the alleged murder over a series of allegations of sexual assault against Ticehurst. He had been charged with three counts of sexual intercourse without consent, four counts of stalking and harassment, two counts of damaging or destroying property and one count of animal cruelty.

Yet a Dubbo court registrar placed him on an interim apprehended violence order and released him on $5000 bail. This was an indefensible decision but not an isolated one. Examples of violent offending while on bail are everywhere. Lindt cafe gunman Man Monis was on bail at the time of his assault despite being before the courts on two separate and serious matters: more than 40 sexual assault charges involving seven alleged victims; and as an accessory to the murder of his former wife.