MATTHEW BALL: My name is Matthew Ball and I’m a lecturer in the school of justice at QUT.

The research that I am undertaking at the moment is a project on understanding intimate partner violence in same-sex relationships and this is really an area that’s not focused on in areas of research because same-sex relationships are often invisible to the law and to the justice system and society in general. An so there are a lot of assumptions about intimate partner violence and who is a victim and who is a perpetrator and when there is violence in a same sex relationships we really don’t have the tools to deal with violence affectively in that context because we make assumptions about who is appropriately a victim and who is appropriately a perpetrator. We also don’t have a lot of knowledge about just how much it exists in Australia so part of the research that I am hoping to do is to try and build that knowledge base so that we can have more effective and appropriate interventions, not just from police but also from the criminal justice system and a broader social understanding of intimate partner violence for all relationships really.

I chose this area of research because I am interested in improving justice for groups that haven’t experienced justice before, and I’m also interested in it because it’s an invisible area so it’s an original piece of research and there isn’t much done in Australia and I think filling that gap in the research is a really important way of making contribution to justice.

The Faculty of Law is really supportive of this research and QUT more generally is as well, because we have a string stream of researchers who are interested in issues of gender and sexuality violence and policing. So we have a number of people who are interested in similar areas and there have been active appointments in the school to make sure that this research is carried on and seen as important.

We’ve got some great expertise in this school which has helped to develop this project and we are all given the intellectual space to advance the project that we work on. So we are supported quite significantly by the expertise and also by just the environment generally.

A great outcome of my research would be to change the attitude of society towards violence in same-sex relationships. It would be to recognise that men can be victims of violence, which is something that we don’t really have a conversation about in Australia, particularly victims of domestic violence. At the same time it would be a great outcome of my research if police were a little bit more aware of the complexities of dealing with violence in a range of difference contexts, not just same-sex domestic violence but in a range of different contexts and challenge some of the assumptions that they might hold, or stereotypes they might have about who is a victim and who is a perpetrator.