A family violence intervention order is meant to be a line that can’t be crossed. In the year to June 2026, Victoria Police recorded 29,107 criminal incidents where breaching one was the main offence. That is 54% more than in 2017. Those breaches are not spread evenly: per person, they fall far more heavily on regional Victoria.

Content note: this report discusses family violence. Support is listed at the end.

1. Regional rates are now more than double, and the gap keeps widening

Try it: use the buttons to switch between the rate per 100,000 people and growth since 2017, where breaches are compared with all other crime. Hover for exact figures; click legend items to hide lines.

Source: Crime Statistics Agency (2026a), Tables 01 and 02. Breaches counted where “breach family violence order” (CSA subgroup E21) was the principal offence of an incident. Rates use population back-calculated from CSA rates. Metro means the 31 metropolitan Melbourne councils; every other LGA is regional.

2. The hotspots are country towns, not the city

Try it: use the layer control (top right) to switch between the 2026 rate and the change since 2017. Click any LGA for its numbers and the three suburbs or towns with the most breaches.

Source: Crime Statistics Agency (2026a), Tables 01–03; boundaries from Australian Bureau of Statistics (2022). 20 of the 20 highest-rate LGAs are regional. Latrobe, Benalla and East Gippsland each record more than 1,200 breaches per 100,000 people, roughly four times the metro average.

3. More family violence and a higher share of orders broken

Regional LGAs don’t only report more family incidents per person. A larger share of those incidents also involve an order being broken, which points to a protection system that is working less well outside Melbourne.

Try it: filter by area or population, or search for an LGA to highlight it. Bubble size shows population. Click a bubble to highlight it and double-click to reset.

Source: Crime Statistics Agency (2026a, 2026b), Table 01 of each. Family incident data covers the years ending June 2022 to 2026, so this chart uses 2026 only.

4. Who is affected, and who is breaching

In family incident records, the affected family member is the person the police consider at risk, and the other party is the person whose behaviour prompted police contact. The age and sex profiles of the two groups look very different.

Try it: use the dropdown to compare All Victoria, Metro and Regional. Hover over a bar for its count and share.

Source: Crime Statistics Agency (2026b), Tables 02–05. Counts exclude people whose age or sex was unknown, and LGAs where the CSA suppressed data for confidentiality. “Other party” is a police record category, not a finding of guilt.

5. Where it is getting worse

Try it: use the dropdown to change the ranking. Grey dots show 2017 and dark dots show 2026. Hover for the exact figures.

Source: Crime Statistics Agency (2026a), Tables 01 and 02. Only LGAs with at least 50 breach incidents in 2026 are shown, because rates for very small populations can swing wildly from year to year.

What this means

In 2017, a person in regional Victoria was 1.9 times as likely to live in an area where family violence orders were broken. By 2026 that figure was 2.1 times.

The places pulling away are mostly regional centres and the towns around them, such as Gippsland, the north-east, the Mallee and the Wimmera. These are areas with longer distances to courts, police stations and specialist services, and fewer places to go. An intervention order is only as strong as the system that enforces it, and outside Melbourne that system appears to be under the most strain.

Limitations. These are recorded incidents. They reflect reporting and police activity as well as offending, so a rise can partly mean better detection. Rates in small LGAs are volatile. The metro/regional split follows the 31 metropolitan council boundaries.

If this affects you: call 1800RESPECT on 1800 737 732 (24/7), or Safe Steps on 1800 015 188 (Victoria, 24/7). In an emergency, call 000.

References

Anthropic. (2026). Claude (Opus 5.5) [Large language model]. https://claude.ai

Australian Bureau of Statistics. (2022). Australian Statistical Geography Standard (ASGS) Edition 3: Local government areas [Data set]. https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/standards/australian-statistical-geography-standard-asgs-edition-3/jul2021-jun2026

Crime Statistics Agency. (2026a). Criminal incidents by local government area: Year ending June 2026 [Data set]. https://files.crimestatistics.vic.gov.au/2026-09/Data_Tables_LGA_Criminal_Incidents_Year_Ending_June_2026.xlsx

Crime Statistics Agency. (2026b). Family incidents by local government area: Year ending June 2026 [Data set]. https://files.crimestatistics.vic.gov.au/2026-09/Data_Tables_LGA_Family_Incidents_Year_Ending_June_2026.xlsx

Mackey, W. (n.d.). absmapsdata: A catalogue of ready-to-use ASGS (and other) sf objects [R package]. GitHub. https://github.com/wfmackey/absmapsdata

Sievert, C. (2020). Interactive web-based data visualization with R, plotly, and shiny. Chapman and Hall/CRC. https://plotly-r.com

Victorian Government. (n.d.). Metropolitan Melbourne. https://liveinmelbourne.vic.gov.au/discover/melbourne-victoria/metropolitan-melbourne

Acknowledgements

I used Claude (Opus 5.5; Anthropic, 2026), a generative AI tool, for limited assistance with brainstorming ideas, clarifying R syntax, and troubleshooting minor coding issues. All data analysis, visualisation development, interpretation, and verification were completed independently, with figures checked against the Crime Statistics Agency data tables.

Map boundaries were obtained from the absmapsdata repository (Mackey, n.d.). Interactive visualisations were developed using plotly (Sievert, 2020), leaflet, and crosstalk in R, with colours based on the Okabe-Ito colour-blind-safe palette and viridis “magma”.