A report by the Sydney Morning Herald, Brisbane Times and WA Today details data from the NSW Coroner’s Domestic Violence Death Dashboard, launched in June 2026. The dashboard covers 2234 homicide victims between 2000 and 2026, with 336 intimate-partner homicides. Of those, four in five victims (293) were women, and almost all of those women (99 per cent) were killed by their abuser. Among the 75 men killed in intimate-partner homicides, 65 were killed by a female partner and 10 by a male partner. The data also shows 73 per cent of men killed by their partner were the primary abuser in the relationship.
NSW Women’s Safety Commissioner Hannah Tonkin said the dashboard “honours the victims, their families and communities”. She added: “Sadly, we know that for every death, there are thousands more women and children experiencing violence across the country every single day.”
The dashboard’s release follows a horror winter for domestic violence in NSW. On September 19, three women, a 23-year-old in Wagga Wagga, a woman in her 90s in Bondi, and a 70-year-old near Tenterfield, were allegedly murdered within hours in separate domestic violence incidents. Three men were charged with murder.
The case of Nirmeen Noufl has drawn particular attention. Noufl stabbed her husband Mamdouh to death in October 2024, cut up his body with a saw, and disposed of the remains in bins around Sydney’s south-west. His body parts were never recovered. Noufl pleaded guilty to manslaughter, which prosecutors accepted instead of murder because of Mamdouh’s lengthy history of abuse. According to an agreed fact sheet, Mamdouh “was controlling of his wife and daughters. He held conservative Islamic views with respect to the role of women in the home and community and was strict in the application of these views to his female relatives”. Noufl told confidants she “had enough” of the abuse.
Justice Peter Hamill sentenced Noufl on September 18 to six years and nine months in prison with a non-parole period of three years. Already having served two years, she will be eligible for parole in October 2027. The sentence shocked Mamdouh’s family; his nephew said outside court that Noufl should be doing “25 to life”.
Sydney solicitor Robert Candelori, who has defended women who kill, said Noufl’s sentence fell towards the higher end for such cases. “This is an unenviable sentencing exercise for any judge given the macabre manner of disposal of the victim’s body, however, that clouds the basis of the plea,” he said. “There was evidence, corroborated by her children and other sources, indicating she was in a violent and abusive relationship for many years, which satisfied the subjective limb of self-defence.” Candelori also noted Noufl had serious mental health issues stemming from violent trauma and an abusive upbringing, including female genital mutilation at the direction of her mother. “In my opinion, her sentence was not lenient in the circumstances,” he said.
Other cases illustrate a similar pattern. In 2021, Bankstown mother Thi Bich Huynh stabbed her husband as he slept and was found not criminally responsible. In 2017, Cathrina Ann Cahill killed her fiance after a history of controlling behaviour and received eight years. Jessica Silva, who stabbed her ex-partner in 2012 in self-defence, obtained an entirely suspended sentence and was acquitted on appeal.
The debate over domestic violence as a “two-way street”, raised by Senator Pauline Hanson in July, is challenged by the dashboard data, which shows that women who kill male partners are almost always killing their abuser.
Support is available from the National Sexual Assault, Domestic Family Violence Counselling Service at 1800RESPECT (1800 737 732).