Independent Evaluation: Safe & Together Helps Divert Families From Unnecessary Child Protection Referral

University of Melbourne researchers Professor Cathy Humphreys and Deb Nicholson evaluated Victoria’s Multi-Agency Triage (MAT) project, a five-day-a-week collaborative triage model for police family violence reports that brought together Child Protection, specialist family violence services, and men’s services in one room. Funded by Victoria’s Department of Health and Human Services, the triage process was guided by three frameworks, including the Safe & Together™ Model, which the evaluation credits as instrumental to one of the project’s central achievements: keeping the perpetrator in view throughout risk assessment.

Over the evaluation period, the MAT team triaged 3,224 police family violence reports involving children, identifying 7,342 children affected by family violence. Just over 10% of these cases were referred to Child Protection for investigation—meaning nearly 90% of families received a coordinated response without unnecessary statutory intervention, a shift researchers called both efficient and ethically significant given the stress child protection referrals can create for women and children.

The evaluation found that structured use of the Safe & Together Model helped the multi-agency team resist “mother-blaming” patterns during triage—the tendency to scrutinise a mother’s parenting, mental health, or relationship history when there wasn’t enough information about the perpetrator. Team members described a measurable shift toward documenting perpetrators’ patterns of behaviour and parental deficits rather than defaulting to survivor scrutiny, and the project built a dedicated risk-assessment tool from the Model’s core principles to support this focus.