Reconfiguring Gravity: A Spatial Lens on Power and the Prevention of Violence
- Ghaith Krayem
- Jun 24
- 2 min read
Abstract
Across two decades of national plans, public campaigns, and prevention strategies, violence against women and children in Australia remains distressingly persistent. While the sector has made significant progress in identifying gender inequality, entitlement, and rigid norms as key drivers, the overall rates of violence have not markedly declined. This raises a difficult but necessary question: What might we still be missing in our understanding of prevention?
There is widespread agreement that at its core, family and sexual violence is about power, its misuse, its enforcement, and its reproduction across relationships and systems. If power is the central issue then how we understand power becomes critical to how we prevent violence. This article introduces a new conceptual tool drawn from the Reconfiguring Gravity framework: a spatial and relational lens that reimagines power not just as something held or enacted, but as something that shapes the space between people, collapsing options, distorting movement, and punishing distance.
Rather than replacing existing models, this lens seeks to deepen and extend them. It invites practitioners, policymakers, and community leaders to consider how violence can begin with the erosion of space, when one person becomes the fixed centre of gravity, and the other must choose between collapsing inward to maintain proximity or resisting that pull at great relational cost. It is often in this refusal to collapse, this act of ethical resistance, that gravitational power intensifies and violence takes form.
In parallel the paper introduces, and focuses on, the concept of ethical repositioning as a primary prevention strategy with men supporting those who recognise their own gravitational pull to shift their relationship to power before violence emerges. Prevention, then, becomes not only about shifting attitudes or behaviours, but about protecting relational space, disrupting collapse, and enabling the conditions in which no one must diminish in order to belong.
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