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.
Women’s Sector
The Safe & Together Model holds the same values as those working with survivors of domestic abuse. Women survivors should have agency and be kept safe and together with their children.
To ensure that you are equipped to fight for the wellbeing of those you work with, both the survivors and your staff, the Safe & Together Institute provides tools and language necessary to shift the conversation away from the ineffective “failure to protect” paradigm, which focuses blame on the survivor and not the perpetrator.
By becoming more domestic abuse–informed through the Safe & Together Model, you will have a common language as you work with your partners in the domestic violence field, improving collaboration and understanding of what is best for the child and mother. More children and mothers will be kept safe and together, and you will be on the frontlines of changing the system for the better.
Child Welfare
The end result of the Safe & Together Model is the same goal as those working in the child welfare system—to keep the child safe. Most cases facing child protection professionals are tied to domestic violence, and many of those are further compounded by factors like mental health and substance use. Professionals are often not fully equipped with the tools necessary to navigate these complex issues, and are stifled by a system that blames mothers for failing to protect.
By following the Safe & Together Model, the child welfare field will become domestic abuse–informed. Through its tools and resources, children are kept safe and together with survivors without using the “failure to protect” approach. This reduces victim-blaming and creates a common language and framework to negotiate a way forward. Agencies will see a reduction of marginalised children in out-of-home care, cost savings on foster placement, a decrease in personnel burnout, and improved relationships with domestic violence partners.
By committing to domestic abuse–informed practice, you can transform your own system and influence policy and practice change for your community partners.
Family Court
Studies show that two-thirds of family court custody cases include a domestic violence accusation. Separation and the dissolution of a relationship can be one of the most violent times for a family. In some of these cases, children can be used as a weapon of post-separation coercive control or as the target.
Co-parenting and cooperation are the ideal end result, but a perpetrator’s violence, manipulation, and coercive control make safety and stability impossible. Family court professionals must be able to understand the issues surrounding domestic violence, interrogate the evidence, understand the perpetrator’s patterns, and more to make informed decisions for the wellbeing and safety of the child and survivor.
The Safe & Together Model offers a neutral, objective framework for addressing custody and access issues in divorce cases involving domestic violence, including how it harms children. Becoming domestic abuse–informed builds a common language for your agency and partners to determine the best way forward.
Mental Health & Substance Use Services
Domestic abuse is a factor in many of the cases mental health and substance use professionals handle. You’re often called into child welfare cases to assess the health and capabilities of both the perpetrator and the victim—yet many professionals are ill-prepared for the complexity and delicacy this requires. You can assess whether a client is a danger to themselves, but not always whether they’re a danger to others.
The Safe & Together Model helps mental health and substance use professionals build the behavioural expertise needed to determine the right treatment plan and documentation when domestic violence is a factor. They also help you understand how domestic abuse affects mental health, substance use, treatment setbacks, healing, and recovery—for the perpetrator and for adult and child survivors alike.
You’ll learn to identify how a perpetrator’s manipulation, coercion, and weaponised threats affect a victim’s mental health, substance use, recovery, and access to safety and treatment. Becoming domestic abuse–informed makes you a better partner to your peers in the child wellness ecosystem—working to keep children safe and together with their protective parent.
Perpetrator Behaviour Change
As the first line of service for those looking to address male violence, perpetrator behaviour change professionals play a critical role in the domestic abuse ecosystem. When the practice becomes domestic abuse–informed through the Safe & Together Model, you can create better outcomes and a more lasting impact on the lives of perpetrators and survivors.
The Safe & Together Model gives you a holistic view of domestic violence, allowing you to address the perpetrator as a parent. Research shows that speaking of the impact of violence on children is a greater motivator for change.
Through the Model, you will become a more efficient and effective practitioner able to partner with survivors and other professionals. You will gain a common language and framework to support the safety and wellbeing of the adult and child survivor. You will be empowered to hold perpetrators accountable as parents and assess the perpetrator’s behaviour change and whether things have gotten better for the family.
Multi-Disciplinary Teams
A multi-disciplinary team pulls together professionals from across a case—child welfare, mental health and substance use, family court, domestic violence advocacy—each looking at a different piece of the same picture. That’s why a common language matters: for reporting, referrals, shared assessments, and interactions with victims or perpetrators alike, everyone on the team needs to be working from the same understanding of what domestic abuse looks like and how it shows up.
That shared understanding happens only when the whole team is domestic abuse–informed. Being domestic abuse–informed is what makes real collaboration and communication possible—and what keeps the team from working at cross-purposes, where one professional’s assessment doesn’t account for domestic violence and the rest of the team is left building on an incomplete picture. It also makes you a better ally to the adult or child survivor.
The Safe & Together Model gives your team the tools and resources it needs to build that shared language across disciplines, so your focus can stay on keeping survivors and their children safe and together.
