The Vision
Every person experiencing domestic or family violence in Australia should be able to access the support and safety that they need, when they need it.
Domestic and family violence services provide essential, life-saving support. But services are stretched, with victim survivors waiting weeks for a response in some regions, practitioners carrying overwhelming caseloads, and people’s engagement with services too often ending without their needs being met.
Specialist services nationally have been advocating for clearer data and evidence to improve system and service design. While we have a growing picture of the problem of violence, we don’t have a clear understanding of the system’s capacity to respond with support.
We can’t address what we can’t measure
No agency or government currently has a full, accurate sense of the scale and nature of support needed across Australia or the service system’s capacity to meet this.
Our objectives
Safety Measures seeks to develop a comprehensive, evidence-driven understanding of specialist domestic and family violence service accessibility and effectiveness in the Northern Territory, South Australia and Victoria, through:
Developing and testing scalable approaches for measuring specialist domestic and family violence service need, demand, supply, capacity and impact.
Increasing the specialist domestic and family violence service sector’s capacity to meet those needs and improving people’s experiences engaging with services.
Making sense of qualitative and quantitative data to tell a more nuanced story of people’s support needs and experiences with the service system, recognising their strengths and that violence is only one part of their lives.
Ensuring that these efforts recognise and are responsive to the incredible diversity of communities and contexts across this continent.
Informing genuinely evidence-based decision-making at all levels of government and community.
Summary
We urgently need a holistic and complete picture of people’s need for specialist domestic and family violence services and the system’s capacity to respond. Safety Measures is an innovative sector partnership across three jurisdictions to measure specialist domestic and family violence service accessibility and effectiveness and create models which could be scaled up nationally in the future.