The chief executive of the newly launched body, Australia’s National Research Organisation for Women’s Safety (ANROWS), Heather Nancarrow, said there were gaps in data on violence against women and their children that she hoped to fill.

"The priorities for our research are on how to prevent violence before it even begins, which is about broad-based cultural change,'' she said.

"This is not limited to family violence – it's violence against all women. Another of the priorities is to find out what strategies are working best for people in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities.

"A lot of good work has been done by those communities and we want to know from them what works.''

In spite of the good work that has been done, research over the past seven years shows violence against women remains alarmingly high.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics Personal Safety Survey 2012 found one in five Australian women had been subjected to sexual violence and one in six had experienced physical or sexual violence from a current or former partner.

The ABS survey found no reduction in the rates of women who reported partner violence between the 2005 survey and one undertaken in 2012, despite numerous programs and initiatives launched in that time.

The Commonwealth and state and territory governments have promised to finance ANROWS.

In Canberra, calls for help to the Domestic Violence Crisis Service surged by almost 50 per cent over the past five years. The service received 13,959 calls to its emergency line last financial year, which was a rise of 47 per cent from 2008-09 figures.

Ms Nancarrow said there was also a lack of awareness around how common sexual assault was in Australia and the nation needed to face up to reality and tackle the problem.

"We have a huge problem with sexual violence. There is still a lot of victim blaming going on,'' she said.

"There's a tendency for people to see sex offenders as deviant monster kind of men, so when they are confronted by the reality of men like Robert Hughes (Hey Dad! actor) who seems normal – apparently family-friendly – he is not the monster people have in their head.

"We need to understand in the community that rapists are ordinary men, they are going about their daily lives in quite normal ways, and are abusing in a sexual way which is utterly unacceptable. We have to get across to people that these men are not some aberration and that it's more common than we think.''