The Second Action Plan is unlikely to improve substantially on its predecessor if it intensifies the same gender-led organising model while adding services, coordination and enforcement. Additional activity does not itself demonstrate improved safety for women and children. Greater integration can reproduce the limitations of the existing model more efficiently unless the theory guiding assessment also changes.
The central proposition of this submission is that relational power abuse is not a gender category. It is a social and relational phenomenon expressed through conduct: a person uses violence, coercion, fear, dependency, a child, a valued relationship or an institution to dominate another person or destroy a safe and beneficial relationship.
Its forms, severity and population distribution vary. Its existence and responsibility in an individual case cannot be determined by sex, gender or another population characteristic.
Population evidence remains essential. It shows that women experience some serious and lethal forms of violence at higher rates, and should shape prevention, service capacity and initial screening. It also shows that men experience partner violence and abuse, including violence and abuse by female partners.
Population patterns cannot establish who used relational power abusively in a particular family. That requires case-specific evidence.
Relational justice therefore places domestic-violence coercion and parental alienation, a form of coercive relational exclusion, at the same level of analytical recognition. This does not assert equal prevalence, identical conduct or equal severity. It means that neither category is presumed true or dismissed in advance. Each is treated as a possible manifestation of relational power abuse and assessed through the same requirements of source attribution, evidence, context, proportionality and review.
The victim-perpetrator distinction is indispensable when describing an established and instrumental act, and assigning responsibility. It becomes misleading when converted into a permanent identity applied to every relationship and contested event. A person may be victimised in one context and use relational power abusively in another. Available evidence shows that coercive behaviours occur across gender boundaries and family configurations. Recognising that complexity does not mutualise all violence or erase asymmetry. It attaches responsibility to conduct rather than identity.
Children are not made safe simply by eliminating the parent accused of family violence, just as they are not made safe by preserving contact regardless of evidence. An allegation should trigger protection, inquiry and proportionate caution; it should not automatically become proof. Safety and relational continuity must be assessed together through the least relationally disruptive effective intervention.