A woman has been killed in a suspected domestic violence assault in the Northern Territory.
Emergency services found the 22-year-old after responding to reports of a distressed man on O’Shea Terrace in Katherine on Monday night.
“Despite efforts to perform CPR, she was pronounced deceased by St John Ambulance shortly after,” NT police said in a statement on Tuesday.
The woman’s 36-year-old partner was arrested, with police describing the incident as a “domestic violence related death”.
Detectives are asking the public for help, particularly if anyone has CCTV footage.
The chief executive of Katherine Women’s Legal Service, Siobhan Mackay, said it was the second suspected domestic violence related death in the small town, 400km south of Darwin, since July.
“It’s shattering for us that work in the space,” she said.
“We’ve been crying out for so long, rattling all the doors we can, about the funding crisis that faces the entire domestic violence sector across the country.
“Every day that goes past without significant change in this space, women continue to be at risk of violence and death.”
Mackay said there was an urgent need to boost funding for immediate safe housing, long-term housing and services in the outback town.
“We don’t have short-term accommodation, we don’t have visitor-accommodation, we don’t have medium-term accommodation and public housing waitlists are somewhere between eight-to-10 years for a priority application,” she said.
Domestic violence in the local community was so rampant that it consumed “almost the entirety of the courts’ business”.
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“There are only eight matters on today’s court list that are not related to domestic violence,” she said.
Coroner Elisabeth Armitage found in 2023 that at least three women are killed by domestic violence in the NT each year.
Since 2000, there had been 81 deaths of women at the hands of their partners — 76 of whom were Indigenous.
The NT domestic homicide rate is seven times that of the national average.