Gender-Based Violence: A Global Security Issue

Security policy has traditionally been built around the state: its borders, its military capability, its ability to deter external threats. Gender-based violence rarely features, despite being one of the most persistent and predictable forms of harm in the world, in peacetime and exacerbated during conflict. Treating gender-based violence solely as a private, social, health or humanitarian issue without recognition of it as a security one has consequences: it shapes what gets funded, what gets measured, and whose safety counts as a matter of state responsibility.

When it comes to policy, prevention and intervention, the gap between that recognition and practice remains stark, and the impact through violence, displacement and death, notably femicide, continues to rise alongside global military spending. By comparison, funding to address gender-based violence remains minuscule.  This event asks what it would mean to take that gap seriously: why gender-based violence functions as both a cause and a consequence of insecurity, and what a security framework would look like if it were built around who is actually being harmed.

This event is a collaboration between La Trobe Centre for Global Security and Reducing Gender Based Violence Network (ReGEN).

26th August, 2026
Room 2.10, Level 2, 360 Collins St Melbourne (La Trobe University City Campus)
5:30pm - 7:00pm AEST
Register for in person attendance
Register for online attendance via Zoom

Speakers:
Professor Elizabeth Miller (Deputy Director (Strategic Planning and Coordination), Integrated Center for Women's Health)
Desireé LaGrappe (Lecturer, School of Nursing and Midwifery, La Trobe University and Chair, ReGEN)
Dr Balawyn Jones (Senior Lecturer / Bendigo Law and Criminology Convenor, La Trobe Law School)
Professor Bec Strating (Director, La Trobe Centre for Global Security)
Dr Natasha Singh Raghuvanshi (Politics and International Relations, La Trobe University)
Emeritus Professor Dennis Altman (Vice-Chancellor's Fellow, La Trobe University)