Sectors We Serve
How We Help
To ensure domestic abuse practices and policies support the goal of keeping the child and survivor safe and together, we partner globally with sectors touching on domestic abuse and child wellbeing.
From those working in child protection, substance use and mental health services, and the judicial system to those who support women, men, or families, the Safe & Together Institute works hand-in-hand with these agencies to create the domestic abuse–informed practice tailored to each professional and cultural context.
Working Together
A domestic abuse–informed agency will not only see improved outcomes for adult and child survivors but also internal practice improvements leading to greater worker safety and satisfaction, organisational stability, and increased efficacy in working with community partners. Our shared success sees both child and adult survivors, as well as your professionals, become more safe, stable, self-determined, and satisfied.
Each sector we work with receives trainings, organisational and systems assessments, tools, and support to create systems change. By learning your specific and agency-wide needs, we tailor our concrete tools and meaningful solutions to assist your agency to be domestic abuse–informed, while also improving your internal policies, procedures, and practices to increase worker safety and satisfaction and reduce costs. By creating a common language, values, and goals, we can then focus our collective efforts for better outcomes for families.
Learn more about how Safe & Together can help your organisation.
Child Welfare
The Safe & Together Model helps child welfare and child protection agencies build domestic abuse–informed practice, keeping the focus on perpetrator behaviour, its impact on children and family functioning, and survivors’ protective efforts. It provides a common language and framework for working with families, supporting children to remain safely together with survivors whenever possible while reducing victim-blaming.
Keeping children safe is a goal the Model shares with child welfare systems. When domestic abuse (or domestic violence) is present, cases can become more complex, particularly when it intersects with mental health, substance use, and other challenges. Professionals are not always equipped to navigate these intersections, and traditional approaches can place responsibility on survivors through “failure to protect” practices.
For agencies, this approach can contribute to fewer unnecessary out-of-home placements, reduced placement costs, stronger partnerships with domestic abuse services, and better support for the workforce. By embedding domestic abuse–informed practice across your organisation, you can strengthen your own system while helping influence policy and practice among the community partners you work alongside.
Advocacy/Women’s Sector
The Safe & Together Model gives domestic abuse advocates and women’s services a shared framework for working with child welfare and other systems, one that keeps children safe and together with survivors and holds perpetrators, not mothers, responsible for their behaviour. It reflects values the sector already holds: women survivors should have agency and be kept safe and together with their children.
The Model’s tools and language help advocates move conversations away from the “failure to protect” approach, which places blame on the survivor rather than the perpetrator.
With a common language across agencies, advocates can strengthen collaboration with child welfare and other partners, build shared understanding of what is best for children and their mothers, and help change systems so more families can stay safe and together.
Family Court
The Safe & Together Model gives family court professionals, including judges, lawyers, custody evaluators, and guardians ad litem, a neutral, objective framework for custody and access cases involving domestic violence (also known as child arrangements and contact cases). It helps professionals examine the evidence, recognise perpetrator patterns, and understand how a perpetrator’s behaviour harms children, so they can make decisions that support the safety and wellbeing of children and survivors.
Domestic abuse is common in these cases worldwide. In England and Wales, studies have found allegations of domestic abuse in 49–62% of child arrangements cases. Australia’s Federal Circuit and Family Court reports family violence in 80% of parenting matters. In the US, an estimated two-thirds of contested custody cases likely involve domestic violence. Separation can be one of the most dangerous times for a family, and some perpetrators use children as a weapon of post-separation coercive control or target them directly.
Co-parenting and cooperation are the ideal outcome, but a perpetrator’s violence, manipulation, and coercive control can make safety and stability impossible. Becoming domestic abuse–informed builds a common language across courts and partner agencies for determining the best way forward.
Mental Health & Substance Use Services
The Safe & Together Model helps mental health and substance use professionals recognise when domestic abuse is part of a client’s situation and respond in ways that support treatment, recovery, and child safety. Using an intersections framework rather than a co-occurrence framework, the Model helps professionals understand how domestic abuse affects mental health, substance use, treatment setbacks, and recovery, for perpetrators and for adult and child survivors, and reflect that in treatment plans and documentation.
Domestic abuse is a factor in many of the cases these professionals handle, and they are often asked to assess parents in child welfare cases. Standard clinical assessments can show whether a client is a danger to themselves, but are not always designed to show how a perpetrator’s manipulation and coercion affect a survivor’s mental health, substance use, and access to safety and treatment.
Becoming domestic abuse–informed builds a common language with child welfare and domestic abuse partners, working together to keep children safe and together with the survivor parent.
Perpetrator Behaviour Change
The Safe & Together Model helps perpetrator intervention professionals, including those delivering men’s behaviour change programs, domestic abuse perpetrator programs, and batterer intervention programs, address the perpetrator as a parent. It gives practitioners a framework to hold perpetrators accountable as parents, partner with survivors and other professionals, and assess whether a perpetrator’s behaviour has changed and whether things have gotten better for the family.
Fatherhood can be a lever for change. Research on a UK perpetrator program found that men’s roles as fathers shaped their motivation to engage, with some becoming more aware of how their abuse affected their children and seeing the programme as a way to become a “better father.”
A common language and framework shared with child welfare and other partner agencies helps perpetrator intervention professionals support the safety and wellbeing of adult and child survivors.
Multidisciplinary Teams
The Safe & Together Model gives multidisciplinary and multi-agency teams a shared framework for domestic abuse cases, keeping the focus on perpetrator behaviour, its impact on children and family functioning, and survivors’ protective efforts. With the whole team domestic abuse–informed, professionals from child welfare, mental health and substance use services, family courts, and domestic abuse advocacy can work from the same understanding of what domestic abuse looks like and how it shows up.
That common language matters for reporting, referrals, shared assessments, and work with survivors and perpetrators alike. Without it, teams can end up working at cross-purposes: when one professional’s assessment doesn’t account for domestic abuse, the rest of the team builds on an incomplete picture.
A shared framework makes real collaboration possible, keeps each discipline’s work aligned with the survivor’s safety, and keeps the team focused on keeping children safe and together with survivors.
