By David Mandel, CEO and Founder, Safe & Together Institute
In Australia, a quiet revolution is taking place in the way family courts respond to domestic abuse. Since 2020, the Federal Circuit and Family Court of Australia (FCFCOA) has been implementing the Safe & Together™ Model across its entire system. What began as a training request for court report writers evolved into a court-wide transformation: judges, judicial officers, family report writers, Indigenous Family Liaison Officers, and triage counselors are now learning to apply a structured, perpetrator pattern–based lens to domestic and family violence cases. The results? A growing body of domestic abuse–informed court decisions shaped by a more nuanced understanding of children’s best interests in domestic violence cases and increased accountability for perpetrators as parents. While not true in every case, more survivors are reporting their experiences and efforts as protective parents being validated in the court experience.
But this isn’t just an Australian story. This is a global opportunity. From North America and the UK to New Zealand, Singapore, and Japan, the core challenges in family courts are strikingly similar: inconsistent handling of coercive control, over-reliance on parental alienation narratives, and a persistent failure to link perpetrators’ behaviours to child harm. The success in Australia shows what’s possible—and offers a roadmap for courts worldwide.
The Australian Breakthrough: A Broad, Sustained Commitment
What’s striking about the FCFCOA’s approach is that the implementation of the Safe & Together Model is just one element of a wider strategic effort to improve the system’s response to domestic abuse. The court has demonstrated national leadership through a multi-pronged reform agenda, including:
Establishing a senior executive leadership position dedicated to domestic and family violence, signaling a long-term institutional commitment.
Overhauling its triage and risk assessment protocols, improving early identification and safety planning for families facing high-risk dynamics.
Creating specialised case management lists for domestic violence and other high-risk matters, ensuring these cases receive the tailored, consistent handling they require.
Reforming court processes to minimise the potential for systems abuse and retraumatisation of survivors.
Supporting changes in the Family Law Act to reflect the realities of domestic abuse, including litigation abuse, economic abuse, and the use of pets as tools of coercive control.
Updating best-interest factors to ensure they are sensitive to the impact of coercive control and protective parenting.
These reforms reflect a cohesive, values-based strategy to centre child safety and survivor wellbeing while holding perpetrators accountable. In this context, the Safe & Together Model has not been a standalone intervention but a key instrument in actualising this broader commitment.
Whole-System Engagement: Beyond the Courtroom
The FCFCOA’s work has been significantly complemented by the simultaneous, nationwide embrace of the Safe & Together Model by many of Australia’s statutory child welfare agencies, family agencies, and other sectors. These agencies—responsible for protecting children and often providing reports to the court—have adopted the Model to better assess perpetrator patterns and recognise protective parenting by survivors. This alignment ensures that when evidence is presented in court, it is grounded in the same language, logic, and child-centred values as the court’s own internal decision-making processes.
This has been further strengthened by national training for Independent Children’s Lawyers (ICLs) using the Safe & Together Model. The Safe & Together Institute developed localised and tailored online modules for more than 1,200 legal representatives for children. This course material will help ensure that their advocacy is informed by the same framework used by the Court, which centres coercive control, child impact, and survivor strengths. This alignment among child welfare professionals, judicial officers, and legal representatives represents a rare and critical system achievement—one that many other jurisdictions continue to struggle to replicate.
What the Safe & Together Model Brought to the Table
While the FCFCOA was undertaking structural and legislative reforms, the Safe & Together Model provided the practice frameworks to support those reforms. Highlights include:
Role-specific training for judges, registrars, and court child experts.
Blended learning and eLearning tailored to legal roles and current Australian legislation.
Expert consultation on protocols, tools, and templates.
Live application and coaching to reinforce implementation.
Content development for emergent issues, such as testimony preparation and post-separation abuse.
The most recent manifestation of these efforts is newly updated online learning modules that will be used as refreshers for existing court personnel and will form a mandatory portion of the induction process for new court staff for the next three to five years. These elements ensure that the Model became a durable part of the Court’s infrastructure, not just a one-off intervention.
Global Relevance: A Mirror for Other Jurisdictions
Family court challenges in countries like the United Kingdom, United States, Canada, New Zealand, Singapore, and Japan mirror Australia’s pre-reform context: fragmented agency responses, limited understanding of coercive control, misuse of parental alienation, and inconsistent treatment of protective parenting. The Australian example shows how the Safe & Together Model can translate legal reforms into durable court practice change.
In the UK, family courts are under increasing scrutiny for their handling of domestic abuse, particularly through recent reports like the Ministry of Justice’s Assessing Risk of Harm to Children and Parents in Private Law Children Cases report. The Safe & Together Model aligns with the Domestic Abuse Act 2021, helping courts operationalise its mandates by moving beyond incident-based judgements to pattern-based, child-centred determinations. Cafcass Cymru’s adoption of the Model provides a replicable example for courts across England and Wales, offering a shared framework for social workers, judges, and child advocates.
In Canada, family courts are navigating how to integrate trauma-informed and culturally relevant practices into parenting determinations. The Safe & Together Model could support family court professionals in understanding how coercive control affects parenting capacity and child wellbeing. In jurisdictions like Ontario and British Columbia, the Model complements family law statutes that prioritise the child’s best interests by giving courts the potential to differentiate between survivor behavior and risk created by the perpetrator.
In New Zealand, family courts often deal with complex dynamics post-separation, where shared care arrangements can expose children and survivors to ongoing abuse. The Safe & Together Model’s emphasis on mapping perpetrator patterns would provide judges a reliable framework to assess safe parenting, especially within the context of the Family Violence Act 2018 and ongoing debates over the use of “parental alienation” in court.
In Singapore, the Family Justice Courts apply the Women’s Charter in divorce, custody, and family violence matters, and their Youth Courts treat the welfare and best interests of children as the first and paramount consideration, yet judicial responses to domestic abuse are still evolving. The Safe & Together Model could strengthen judicial understanding of coercive control and its impact on children, an area of growing relevance since Singapore expanded its legal definition of family violence to include emotional and psychological abuse in 2025.
In Japan, recent reforms have extended domestic violence protections to psychological harm, while advocates have warned that psychological control is difficult to prove and may continue after separation. The Safe & Together Model could offer Japanese judges a way to integrate pattern-based analysis into custody and visitation decisions, helping courts identify the non-physical abuse the new framework asks them to assess.
In the United States, states like California, Connecticut, and Hawaii, where coercive control is legally recognised, could benefit from the Safe & Together Model’s ability to structure court reports, expert testimony, and judicial findings around perpetrator behaviour and survivor protective efforts.
Across Europe, the Istanbul Convention establishes standards that include the protection of children from witnessing and being affected by domestic violence. Family courts in countries like Ireland, Finland, and Spain could benefit from how the Safe & Together Model’s focus on multiple pathways to harm might improve custody outcomes and court-mandated services.
In many of these jurisdictions, similar to Australia, the Safe & Together Model is already influencing child protection and other sectors, offering the same synergies as Australia.
A Roadmap for Action
The Australian experience shows that:
The Safe & Together Model is scalable and adaptable across legal and cultural contexts.
Court reforms are most successful when paired with aligned child welfare and legal advocacy strategies.
True change requires a mix of leadership, tools, and systemic alignment.
Now is the time for other countries to follow suit—by piloting joint training, adopting role-specific online learning, revising risk tools, and embedding the Model into both court practice and policy.
A Moment to Lead
Australia has demonstrated that it’s possible to align legislative reform, court practice, and community advocacy through a shared, survivor-centred framework. The Safe & Together Model has proven to be a critical instrument in making that vision real. For jurisdictions seeking to improve outcomes for families impacted by domestic abuse, the question is no longer whether the Model works—it’s how quickly they can adapt it to their own systems.
The opportunity is here. The tools are available. The leadership is needed.
Let’s move from ideas to impact—and build systems where children can be safe, survivors supported, and perpetrators held meaningfully accountable.
