Access to services

The ability of universal services to identify family violence is an essential component of ensuring victim survivors can be supported earlier. However, support services must be there to respond in a timely way. Victim survivors explained to us that once a victim survivor works up the courage to disclose their situation within a universal service, a lack of corresponding support can be a real disincentive to seek support in the future.

Across all workforces, there seemed to be a clear understanding of what should happen when someone presents in immediate crisis: contact is made with Victoria Police and Safe Steps and, where relevant, a mandatory report to child protection services is made. However, the response for non-crisis situations is less clearly defined, and services can be less readily available.

Many of the matters discussed in this section will be explored in further detail through another monitoring topic later this year when we explore the support available to assist victim survivors in their journey towards recovery.

Specialist family violence services and other therapeutic services

Safe Steps and The Orange Door, where available within a local area, are often listed as the places to call for specialist family violence support for a victim survivor. Safe Steps’ 2020–21 annual report revealed an increase in inbound monthly calls from 5,948 in July 2020 to 9,023 in June 2021, which includes calls from professionals seeking guidance on how to respond to a client. This increase in third-party calls affects the ability of victim survivors seeking immediate support to get through because there is only one line.

Family Safety Victoria has monitored data on referrals from universal services into The Orange Door, and advise that there have not been any manageable demand signals since the phase 2 MARAM commencement. Under The Orange Door service model, every person referred to The Orange Door receives an initial assessment from which they are assigned a priority rating based on risk and need. Those cases that receive a higher priority rating are assigned to a practitioner before those that are assessed as being at lower risk. Many stakeholders we met with, however, indicated that they did not understand the criteria for a case being ‘accepted’ by The Orange Door and felt that access seemed to vary according to demand and capability across sites. However, those we spoke to reflected experiences where victim survivors are referred to The Orange Door but ultimately do not meet the threshold for support, leaving them feeling discouraged and leaving the referring service feeling that the referral did not help.

We suggest there is a need for clearer communication about how prioritisation of cases at The Orange Door works, clearer criteria for referral to case management, and clearer pathways to other supports to ensure victim survivors and referring services have realistic expectations.

There are also known issues around wait times for therapeutic services more broadly. cohealth explained that there are long waitlists for family violence counselling and that they reluctantly closed their waitlist after it reached 12 months during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. They also indicated that other agencies were forced to stop accepting new clients or to limit eligibility criteria to manage high demand.

Our 2020 monitoring report described the lack of services for children experiencing family violence as a key issue. The Centre for Excellence in Child and Family Welfare and the Department of Education and Training agreed that in some cases there is a lack of referral options (for example, family violence services designed specifically for children and young people, or services for adolescents using violence against family members or intimate partners), and that wait times are a major access barrier for the therapeutic services that do exist. The Department of Education and Training also noted that schools require parental consent to arrange for a child to participate in a therapeutic service, so if the family is not engaged or the perpetrator won’t agree, the support that can be provided is limited.

Service model for universal services’ ongoing support for victim survivors

Where a patient or student does not wish to access family violence services, where waitlists are preventing timely access to services, or where there are other barriers to seeking support, universal services have an ongoing connection with the victim survivor, and therefore an ongoing opportunity to provide support. Family Safety Victoria indicated that the ongoing support of a trusted professional (such as a GP) is sometimes the most suitable response for the victim survivor.

Some hospitals are already doing early intervention work with victim survivors, including safety planning and support from a social worker.

Director of the Safer Families Centre, Kelsey Hegarty, explained to us that while there is some hesitancy from the family violence specialist sector about GPs doing ongoing safety work with victim survivors, many victim survivors do not take up referrals to specialist family violence services. So, it is extremely important for GPs to not just identify family violence and initiate referrals, but to also provide an appropriate trauma-informed response as part of the ongoing doctor–patient relationship, which may span months or even years.

In the maternal and child health sector, the MABELS program – a Health Justice Partnership in one region – was established to ‘provide an early intervention response to family violence within the Maternal and Child Health … context by improving the responses of [maternal and child health], legal, family violence and support services in a co-ordinated and integrated manner’. The program is both supporting victim survivors to access support earlier than they otherwise would have and supporting maternal and child health services to better identify and respond to family violence.

The Victorian Principals Association said that, ideally, student support services, such as social workers and psychologists, in each area would provide ongoing support to students in the school context, in partnership with any relevant external services. However, student support services are not consistently available across the state. For example, it is more difficult to fill these positions in regional and remote areas.

PROTECT guidance includes Four Critical Actions for Schools in responding to incidents, disclosures and suspicions of child abuse. Action 4 is to ‘provide ongoing support’ to students affected by abuse. This ongoing support must include developing and implementing a student support plan, regular communication between relevant parties and ongoing monitoring of the student’s wellbeing.

We suggest there is scope to be more specific about the types of support children and young people who are victim survivors may need in order to thrive in the school environment (see Table 5 and Box 3 for examples), and that this advice could be co-designed with young people with lived experience (this is also identified in our Reform Governance report).

Principals would likely welcome this advice: of 600 principals responding to the 2021 Term 3 Principals Survey, many requested further development of family violence resources relating to:

• help with planning support for affected students (372 responses)
• support for addressing safety issues for affected students (332 responses).

Similarly, all sectors should have guidance about what providing ongoing support for victim survivors within their services could look like, and high-level guidance could be provided within the MARAM suite of resources [relates to action 7].

Table 5: Examples of practical actions schools can take to support students who are victim survivors of family violence, as suggested by Berry Street’s team of Lived Experience Consultants

Source: Y-Change Lived Experience Consultants - Berry Street.

Creating a clearer service system for both victim survivors and services

We suggest many of the issues above could be addressed by a clearer service model that describes service pathways for people with different risk levels and in different circumstances, with clear access criteria for each. We understand there are some practical realities to this, such as heightened demand leading to services having to create stricter criteria. However, a documented map of how the service system should work would be a good starting point [relates to action 3].

One of the victim survivors we met with shared her experience where she had her family violence identified within universal services but then faced major barriers when trying to access support because the perpetrator lived overseas (see Anna’s experience below). She described trying to navigate the family violence and related service systems herself as overwhelming. Another victim survivor had a similar experience, and wished she’d been given a sheet of paper outlining contact details for the various support services available and a clear description of what each service does. This ‘low risk’ cohort, which may not meet the threshold for specialist services, would benefit from an overview of the services they may need to access to ensure they are not forced to blindly navigate the service system. These experiences also suggest that the support for victim survivors in navigating the service system envisioned in Victoria’s 10-year family violence plan has not yet been realised. The plan stated:

Victim survivors will not have to navigate the complex legal and community services systems by themselves. Service navigators will be highly skilled specialist workers that will have the flexibility and capacity to support people from crisis through to recovery, and ensure they are supported in a simple, timely and coordinated way that works for them.