An Aboriginal-Led Look at the Safe & Together Model

Aboriginal people experience domestic and family violence at disproportionately high rates, and Aboriginal-led health organisations have spent decades building their own effective, culturally grounded ways of responding to it. The ALFIES Project, funded by the NSW Ministry of Health and led by an Aboriginal-majority research team from the University of Melbourne, set out to examine how the Safe & Together™ Model’s principles compare with the existing practice of two Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisations: Waminda South Coast Women’s Health and Wellbeing Aboriginal Corporation and Katungul Aboriginal Corporation Regional Health and Community Services.

After a culturally tailored two-day Safe & Together training, workers described real overlap with practices they’d already built: partnering with victim-survivors from a strengths-based position was, in their words, the strongest alignment, and the Model’s Perpetrator Pattern Mapping Tool helped them document a person’s pattern of coercive control while also validating a mother’s protective actions. Workers also valued the Model’s focus on working with the whole family, engaging men as fathers, and pushing back on the gender bias that too often blames mothers for a partner’s violence.

The research is direct that the Safe & Together Model wasn’t originally built with the Australian experience of colonisation, dispossession, and institutional racism in mind, and it names four specific things the Safe & Together Institute needs to address: embedding a deeper understanding of intergenerational trauma and culture into its training, giving more contextual guidance for working with the whole family and community, providing more practical detail on engaging a person using violence within Aboriginal communities, and reconsidering language in its tools, including the word “perpetrator.”