This thesis engages in critical policy analysis in order to examine the ways in which certain representations of violence are problematised in and through social policy. Underpinned by an understanding of policy as discourse based on the recognition that social, or policy, problems are created in and through discourse, particular attention is directed towards the ways in which discourses of violence rely upon and reproduce particular constructions of gender. Policy analysis, then, is used here to interrogate the presuppositions about gender and violence which shape the political/policy agenda, thereby limiting ‘what is talked about as possible or desirable, or as impossible or undesirable’(Bacchi, 2000, p. 49). Focusing on the key federal policy areas of violence against women and children, health, and education, this thesis highlights, both, the extent to which discourses of gender and violence overlap and interrelate in policy constructions of violence and the implications that this has for Australian government responses to ‘violence’.