This issue has come up repeatedly, and certainly the commission into murdered and missing indigenous women and girls has heard a lot of evidence about the impact of dual charging. We see this in our work all the time.
A man is charged. He says, “Oh, she did it too”, and then the woman is charged as well. If the woman doesn't have access to legal resources, if she has a prior criminal record, if she doesn't want to stay in jail, she will plead guilty and then what hangs over her is that any time a partner wants to allege that she was violent, she will now face a reverse onus. It will be incredibly hard for her to get out.
That's the reality. It's the reality that we don't think of when we have mandatory charging policies. Many police services have a mandatory charging policy on domestic violence. We put that in because police were not charging men, but what happens as a result is that whenever the man says she hit him, the police don't investigate; they charge. It's charge first and let the courts figure it out later, but if you don't get out of jail, if you're kept in custody, then the courts won't figure it out later because you're not going to wait that long.