Turning Shared Values into Everyday Practice: Why Safe & Together Fits Australia’s DFV Systems
By Jackie Wruck, Asia Pacific Regional Manager, Safe & Together Institute
Domestic and family violence (DFV) work in Australia is demanding and complex—particularly for child protection leaders, DFV service managers, and senior practitioners responsible for safety, documentation, and defensible decision-making. Practitioners are expected to keep children safe, support victim-survivors, hold people who use violence accountable, and work across multiple systems—often under intense workload and scrutiny.
Australia has made important progress over the past decade. DFV is now widely understood as a pattern of coercive and controlling behaviour, not just a series of incidents. Children are recognised as being harmed by DFV even when they are not direct witnesses. There is also growing recognition that victim-survivors are usually doing everything they can to keep themselves and their children safe.
The challenge is not a lack of understanding or commitment.
The challenge is turning these shared values into consistent everyday practice.
Many practitioners recognise the tension: Everyone agrees on the principles, yet assessments, case notes, and plans still drift back to scrutinising a survivor’s choices rather than documenting the behaviour of the person using violence. Different agencies hold different stories about the same family, and responsibility slowly shifts away from where the harm originates.
This is where the Safe & Together domestic violence framework fits particularly well in the Australian context—not because it replaces existing frameworks, but because it helps make them work together in practice.
Australia’s DFV Challenge: Shared Values, Uneven Practice
Across Australia, DFV policy and reform already reflect strong, evidence-based principles:
Domestic violence is patterned, coercive, and intentional
Children are harmed by DFV even if they are not direct witnesses
Victim-survivors are usually protective and resourceful
The person using violence is responsible for the harm
These principles are embedded in national and state DFV strategies, child protection frameworks, family law reforms, and tools such as MARAM and its equivalents.
Yet the gap shows up clearly in practice—particularly in documentation, supervision conversations, and how risk is described across systems.
Too often:
Mothers are described as “failing to protect”
Responsibility drifts away from the person using violence
Services hold conflicting narratives about the same family
Practitioners feel stuck between safety concerns, compliance pressures, and limited options
Safe & Together is designed to address this gap between what systems say they believe and what systems actually do.
What Safe & Together Is—in Plain Language
At its core, the Safe & Together Model is a way of working that helps systems:
Keep children safe with the non-offending parent
Clearly identify and document the behaviour of the person using violence
Partner with victim-survivors instead of scrutinising them
Build a shared, behaviour-based understanding of risk across services
It does not require new legislation, new risk tools, or additional layers of paperwork. Instead, it changes how existing work is done—how harm is described, how responsibility is framed, and how decisions are justified.
In a sector experiencing reform fatigue, workforce instability, and high documentation demands, this matters.
3 Critical Practice Shifts
Taken together, Safe & Together supports three critical shifts in Australian DFV practice:
From survivor scrutiny to perpetrator behaviour
Casework centres on what the person using violence is doing, how those behaviours harm children and family functioning, and what is required to change.From fragmented narratives to shared risk language
Different agencies are better able to align assessments, plans, and decisions using a common, behaviour-focused framework.From child protection through separation to child safety through support
Systems are better equipped to keep children safely connected to their non-offending parent wherever possible, rather than defaulting to family disruption.
This aligns strongly with child-centred, trauma-informed, and evidence-based practice—without creating new harm through blame or destabilisation.
Putting Responsibility Back Where It Belongs
One of the most persistent challenges in DFV work is the gradual drift of responsibility. Even when practitioners understand that perpetrators cause harm, day-to-day practice often ends up focusing on a survivor’s decisions, engagement, or capacity to manage risk created by someone else.
Safe & Together counters this by making perpetrator behaviour visible and central—in assessments, case notes, and plans—and by linking that behaviour directly to harm to children and adults.
This approach supports Australia’s growing emphasis on perpetrator accountability, men’s behaviour change responses, and integrated system responses. It gives practitioners a shared language to do what policy already asks of them.
Cultural Safety and Thoughtful Implementation
Safe & Together is not a one-size-fits-all solution. In Australia, effective use of the framework requires cultural adaptation, strong partnerships with Aboriginal-controlled organisations, and ongoing reflection on power, history, and system-created harm.
Its impact depends on whether systems invest in partnership, local leadership, and reflective implementation—rather than treating it as a one-off training.
For Australian systems facing workforce pressure, accountability demands, and reform fatigue, the question is no longer whether these principles are right.
The question is whether everyday practice tools exist to deliver them consistently—across documentation, supervision, and decision-making—without increasing risk or blame.
Safe & Together supports practitioners to do what they came into this work to do: Keep children safe, support victim-survivors, and respond meaningfully to violence, while keeping responsibility clearly with the person choosing to use harm.
Additional Resources
Safe & Together Institute’s domestic abuse–informed trainings
Safe & Together Institute’s upcoming events
David Mandel’s book Stop Blaming Mothers and Ignoring Fathers: How to Transform the Way We Keep Children Safe from Domestic Violence
