Addressing high risk family violence; intimate partner homicide prevention

A forum on addressing high risk family violence through an integrated service response has been held in Victoria, Australia.

Both keynote speakers emphasised focusing on managing the response to the perpetrator and holding the perpetrator accountable.

The international keynote speaker was Mhairi McGowan from ASSIST and Domestic Abuse Services in Glasgow, Scotland. Mhairi is responsible for Scotland's first independent domestic abuse advocacy service which is co-located with police, and partners with police in their tasking and coordination processes to manage serious family violence offenders. Mhairi spoke about her agency's experiences working with the police; trust (between victims and agencies, and between agencies working together); information sharing; establishing quality logs; and the importance of treating domestic abuse as a a crime.

Professor Cathy Humphreys, Professor of Social Work at the University of Melbourne, presented an overview of high risk family violence interventions in Victoria. She spoke about the high risk model being rolled out: the Risk Assessment Management Panel (RAMP); the role of child protection; the importance of a strong Police and interagency response to post-separation violence; and the importance of continuing a strong response to family violence cases not designated as high risk. She also said,

"What we know from the MARACs  in England is that those that work well have a perpetrator focus; those that don’t work well can become ones which are really about mother blaming and woman blaming, and they are ones that we want to avoid. You avoid it by creating and continuing to focus in very strict ways on these forums for perpetrators to look at how we manage the accountability and the response to the perpetrator."

Video, audio and transcripts of the presentations are available on the Domestic Violence Resource Centre of Victoria website. Further information on Victoria's RAMP model is available in Multi-agency responses to improve safety (2014), DVRCV Advocate.

Nicky Stanley and Cathy Humphreys have also recently published an article, Multi-agency risk assessment and management for children and families experiencing domestic violence (2014). Contact your local library for full text access.

VAWnet, the US National Online Resource Centre on Violence Against Women, has updated their special collection on intimate partner homicide prevention. This is a collection of resources on the following topics:

• Safety Planning & Danger Assessment Tools
• Fatality Review
• Systems Response & Opportunities for Prevention
• Media & Community Response
• Grief & Trauma

The resource was developed by VAWnet and the National Resource Center on Domestic Violence.

Image: Working Together Teamwork Puzzle Concept by LumaxArt. Licence: Creative Commons CC-BY-SA-2.0, via Wikimedia Commons