Rewriting Domestic Violence Evidence With Safe & Together

Child protection assessments have long focused on what a mother did or didn’t do to leave a violent partner, while the person who caused the harm barely appears in the paperwork at all. A peer-reviewed article in Current Issues in Criminal Justice, co-authored by a Queensland child safety lawyer and a University of Sydney researcher, traces how a five-year period of reform, including Safe & Together™ Model training for the department’s staff, changed the way Queensland’s child protection workers and government lawyers document domestic violence for court.

The authors compare real (composited, for ethical reasons) examples of case evidence before and after the shift. Earlier assessments described a mother’s “poor partner choices” and mental health history while barely mentioning the father’s behaviour. Later ones name his specific pattern of coercive control directly, strangulation, controlling her finances and phone, isolating her from support, and document her repeated efforts to protect her child, producing a very different picture for the court.

Queensland’s Child Safety department trained more than 1,000 staff in the Safe & Together Model starting in 2015, ran a four-year “Walking with Dads” trial focused on engaging fathers who use violence, and extended the same training to its in-house government lawyers so caseworkers and legal staff shared a common language in court. The department’s staff also took part in several Australian research projects that found the same pattern elsewhere: perpetrators routinely left out of child protection case files nationwide.