Measurement domains
Developing an evidence-driven view of domestic and family violence service accessibility and effectiveness requires an understanding of all aspects of victim survivors’ journeys through the system.
Where approaches to service system measurement typically focus on supply and demand, Safety Measures considers broader and more complex domains, with a focus on those that can be better understood from a specialist DFV service perspective.
Domestic and family violence prevalence
While we have general population prevalence data in Australia, particularly around intimate partner violence, this is limited for some communities and cannot be considered a proxy measure for how many people may need support from a domestic or family violence service.
Not all people who have experienced domestic or family violence want or need assistance from a specialist service. Many rely on informal support through family and friends, other professional support such as through GPs and mental healthcare providers, or they may choose not to disclose their experience to or seek support from anyone.
Specialist DFV service need
We also know that not all people who might need specialist DFV service support necessarily seek this out, often due to accessibility, acceptability or structural barriers.
Within Safety Measures we describe the domestic and family violence support that victim survivors would benefit from but are not necessarily seeking out as service need, though this is sometimes referred to as ‘latent demand’. Measuring and making sense of specialist DFV service need requires looking outside of the service system – at population surveys and qualitative efforts to try and uncover ‘hidden’ (from the system), non-helpseeking groups of victim survivors.
Specialist DFV service demand
Sometimes referred to as ‘manifest demand’, we consider specialist DFV service demand to be the subset of service need that becomes visible through people seeking or being referred for support. This includes people who know about and try to access these services directly, or via police, healthcare providers or other services. Pressure on the service system arises from the gap between this level of demand and the capacity of services to respond.
Within this, ‘unmet demand’ is limited to those who tried but could not access support, or whose support needs were not met through their engagement with a service. Specialist DFV service demand should therefore be observable in service and referral data.
Our SHS data analysis project is helping to
Specialist DFV service capacity
Seeking to expand our focus beyond how much and what kind of specialist DFV support is funded (or ‘supplied’), we are interested in the interrelationship between funding and other factors such as workforce retention, capability and conditions; organisational contexts and structures; service models, timeframes and targets; and practice, policy, cultural and theoretical frameworks which come together to influence the system’s capacity to meet demand for specialist DFV services.
Specialist DFV service impact
Measuring and making sense of DFV service impact is about understanding the experience that victim survivors have while engaging with a service, the outcomes – or changes in their circumstances as a result of their engagement with a service – and how these changes ripple out to impact change in the community and across our society.
We are working with service providers to explore how to measuring outcomes and impact in ways that are meaningful, useful, grounded in the realities of specialist DFV practice and centred on the experiences of victim survivors.
Language note
While terms such as demand, capacity, impact and other system-measurement concepts are common in policy and service planning, they can feel clinical, abstract and far removed from the lived realities of people experiencing domestic and family violence. The current language of systems does not fully hold the depth of harm or the urgency of safety needs for victim survivors. It also does not attend to the nuanced relational and trauma-informed work of specialist DFV services.
We use these terms as a practical necessity for describing and analysing service system dynamics. But we do so with an awareness that the experiences behind the data are human, complex and deeply personal. This awareness sits at the centre of our approach: measurement must support – not flatten – the expertise of specialist DFV services and the safety, dignity and freedom of the people they serve.