Background and context 

Ideally, the data captured incidentally through service delivery would be accessible to those responsible for system and service design, delivery and evaluation, across all states and territories, and the rights of all people to exercise ownership over their data would be upheld.

But this scenario is far from the current reality. No entity in Australia right now has a comprehensive sense of the scale and nature of domestic and family violence support needed across the country, or the service system’s capacity to respond.

We can’t address what we can’t measure.

Coming together to identify opportunities for collaborative evidence building and advocacy, specialist domestic and family violence peak bodies and services saw the potential for a ‘stepping stone’ initiative, to develop and test shared approaches across several states and territories that could then be scaled up to form a national picture.

Safety Measures is that initiative, delivered by a partnership between six organisations based across the Northern Territory, South Australia and Victoria: three sufficiently different jurisdictions – in terms of their policy landscapes, government and sector structures and service delivery contexts – with the combined potential to broadly reflect the sector’s diversity across the country.

Three of these are Aboriginal community-controlled organisations and three are non-Aboriginal peak bodies, representing a diverse range of services and organisations.

Collectively, Aboriginal Peak Organisations Northern Territory, Elizabeth Morgan House, Embolden South Australia, Ngaanyatjarra Pitjantjara Yankunytjatjara Women’s Council, Northern Territory Council of Social Services and Safe and Equal represent more than 100 specialist domestic and family violence service providers, which employ more than 1200 practitioners and support many thousands of women, children, families and communities each year.

This partnership is an opportunity to come together across communities, sectors and jurisdictions, not only to understand the system’s challenges but also to unearth solutions.