Last updated 14 March 2022

Some terms in the Domestic and Family Violence Protection Act

  • A person applying for an order is the ‘aggrieved’.
  • A person responding to an order is the ‘respondent’.
  • A ‘domestic violence order’ is the name given to the official order or piece of paper issued by the court that sets out what the respondent can or cannot do.

Examples of domestic and family violence

The Domestic and Family Violence Protection Act 2012 (Qld) (DFVP Act) provides a non-exhaustive list of examples of behaviour of domestic and family violence (DFV) (s 8(2) DFVP Act):

  • causing personal injury to a person or threatening to do so
  • coercing a person to engage in sexual activity or attempting to do so
  • damaging a person’s property or threatening to do so
  • depriving a person of the person’s liberty or threatening to do so
  • threatening a person with death or injury of the person, a child of the person or someone else
  • threatening to commit suicide or self-harm so as to torment, intimidate or frighten the person at whom the behaviour is directed
  • causing or threatening to cause the death of, or injury to, an animal, whether or not the animal belongs to the person at whom the behaviour is directed, so as to control, dominate or coerce the person
  • following (surveillance) of a person without their consent
  • unlawfully stalking a person.

Also, the DFVP Act says that if someone encourages another person to engage in behaviour that would constitute DFV on the first person’s behalf, then the first person will be taken to have committed DFV (s 8 DFVP Act).