It’s Time to Stop Looking Away: How Our Services Are Failing Domestic Violence Survivors—and What We Can Do About It

Perpetrator BehaviorSystems Change
Written By Jessica Sisler

By Jackie Wruck, Asia Pacific Regional Manager, Safe & Together Institute 

Here is a scenario that plays out every day across Australia: A family affected by domestic and family violence (DFV) comes to the attention of a child protection worker, a mental health clinician, or a housing officer. The professional assesses the situation—and almost without fail, their attention lands on the mother. Is she coping? Is she protecting her children? Why hasn’t she left?

Meanwhile, the man causing the harm walks out the door, largely unexamined.

This is not just a practice problem. It is a system-wide failure—one that Australian research has now clearly documented. The 2020 ANROWS report Improved Accountability: The Role of Perpetrator Intervention Systems found that services like mental health, alcohol and drug programs, and child protection regularly come into contact with perpetrators of domestic violence, but men’s use of violence is so often invisible in these settings that it goes unaddressed entirely.

The result? The burden of managing safety falls on the victim. It is left to her to report breaches, keep the system informed, and trigger responses, often at significant risk to herself. And the perpetrator moves freely between services, presenting as cooperative and reasonable while continuing to cause harm at home.

Why Accountability Is Harder Than It Sounds

“Holding perpetrators accountable” sounds straightforward. But the ANROWS research found that accountability actually takes two very different forms, and they often work against each other.

The first is external accountability: being held to account by the courts through protection orders and mandatory referrals to Men’s Behaviour Change Programs (MBCPs). The second is internal accountability: a man genuinely taking responsibility for his behaviour and choosing to change.

The problem is that the way our legal system currently operates can undermine the second form. Courts often issue protection orders by consent and without any admission of wrongdoing—a time-saving measure that backfires. Men walk away feeling the process was unfair or meaningless. Rather than acknowledging what they have done, they tell themselves they have been victimised by “the system.” When a referral to a behaviour change program follows, a man may attend to satisfy the court but feel no real motivation to change.

Making matters worse, when men drop out of these programs, there are rarely meaningful consequences. The ANROWS research found that once a man disengages, he effectively disappears from view. And who is left to chase it up? His partner, who must now report the breach to police, at the risk of escalating his anger and giving him yet another reason to blame her for his involvement with authorities.

This is a system that is failing the very people it is meant to protect.

A Better Way: The Safe & Together Model

So what does a better response look like? The Safe & Together Model offers a clear and practical answer.

The Model starts with a simple but powerful shift: Instead of asking “Is this mother doing enough to protect her children?”, it asks “What is the perpetrator doing, and how is it affecting this family?” That change in focus sounds small. In practice, it changes everything.

Keeping the Perpetrator in View

At the heart of the Model is what founder David Mandel calls perpetrator pattern–based practice. Rather than responding to individual incidents, practitioners are trained to document the full picture of a perpetrator’s behaviour over time. What tactics does he use to control and intimidate? How does his behaviour affect the children directly? Does he present differently to professionals than he does at home? Is he using the family court or financial systems as further tools of abuse?

When every service that encounters a perpetrator document and shares this kind of information, he has far fewer places to hide. The ANROWS research described this as building a “web of accountability,” and it is exactly what our current system lacks and should be working towards.

Seeing the Mother Clearly

The Safe & Together Model also challenges practitioners to change the way they see non-offending parents. A mother who seems disengaged, inconsistent, or reluctant to cooperate is often not failing—she is surviving. She may be navigating real and present danger every time she makes a decision about her family.

Rather than documenting her apparent failures, practitioners using this model are asked to document her strengths and the protective actions she has taken, even under extreme pressure. This is not about lowering standards. It is about accuracy. And it produces very different case files, very different court reports, and very different outcomes for families.

What Good Practice Already Looks Like

The ANROWS research found real examples of this kind of integrated, perpetrator-focused practice already working in Australia—in Melbourne’s Southern Metro region, southeast Queensland, and rural Western Australia. In one case, a child protection service employed a specialist men’s worker alongside a specialist women’s DFV worker. The two could conduct joint home visits—one engaging the perpetrator, one supporting the non-offending parent—at the same time. When conditions across protection orders, corrections orders, and child protection orders were aligned, perpetrators received consistent accountability messages with nowhere to hide.

These examples show what is possible. The challenge is making this the norm, not the exception.

What Needs to Change: Specific Actions for Specific Services

Good intentions are not enough. Both the ANROWS research and the Safe & Together Model point to specific changes that need to happen across each part of our service system.

Child protection must stop treating domestic violence primarily as a survivor problem and start treating it as a perpetrator problem. Every assessment should ask “What is the person using violence doing, and how is it affecting this family?” Supervision processes should require supervisors to ask the same question. Services also need to extend their reach to families who have not separated—the ANROWS research identified this as a heavily underserved group.

Mental health, alcohol and drug, and health services are a missed opportunity. The ANROWS research was clear: These services regularly encounter perpetrators but rarely identify them as such. DFV training—including how to recognise coercive control and document perpetrator behaviour—should be embedded across all these workforces, not left to specialist services alone. The research also recommends recruiting more male workers into human services to improve engagement with male perpetrators.

Men’s Behaviour Change Programs are being asked to do too much with too little. The ANROWS research found that courts and referring services expect MBCPs to “fix” men, but these programs are working against entrenched attitudes, in a short timeframe, in a society that still tolerates too much gender inequality. Two specific reforms are needed: First, assess whether a man is actually suitable for a group-based program before mandating attendance—not all perpetrators are appropriate for this format. Second, properly fund the partner contact and case management components of MBCPs. These are the elements that keep perpetrators visible, support their partners, and allow services to monitor risk, but they are consistently underfunded and undervalued.

Courts need to improve follow-up on protection orders. Once an order is issued, monitoring is too often inconsistent, and breaches go unchallenged. Courts mandating MBCP attendance must invest in tracking whether men actually do the work of behaviour change—because showing up is not enough, as we know—a reform recommended by the Victorian Royal Commission into Family Violence and still not fully implemented.

Housing services face a problem the research raises that is rarely discussed: When a perpetrator is removed from the family home and left without accommodation, the danger to his partner and children can actually increase. A man sleeping in his car with no support is invisible to services and potentially more volatile. Funding short-term crisis accommodation for perpetrators who are removed from their homes is not about prioritising them—it is about keeping them in the system where they can be monitored and engaged.

Across all services, the ANROWS research found that Men’s Behaviour Change Programs are collecting valuable data on perpetrators, but none of it is shared or aggregated nationally. Implementing a national minimum data set would allow services to track patterns, evaluate what works, and build the kind of evidence base that good policy requires.

The tools exist. The research is clear. What is needed now is the commitment to act on it—across every service that touches a family affected by domestic and family violence. Because as long as we keep watching the wrong person, we will keep getting the wrong outcomes.

Additional Resources

Jessica Sisler
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“It Hadn’t Stopped. It Had Just Shifted.”: What a Survivor Taught Me About Systems and Safety