Family Violence Reforms, have they been effective in practice?

The System Changed. Why Are We Still Working in Silos?

Victoria has spent years reforming its response to family violence.

We have new frameworks, information-sharing provisions, risk-assessment tools, multidisciplinary responses and service models designed, at least in theory, to prevent victim-survivors from having to navigate a bewildering maze of disconnected systems.

The language has changed.

We talk about integrated practice.

We talk about shared responsibility.

We talk about collaborative risk management.

We talk about looking at the whole person and recognising that family violence does not occur in isolation.

And yet, on the ground, one sentence continues to reveal just how stubbornly the old system survives:

"That's not our area."

I was recently told that my housing situation needed to be managed by a housing service because it was "not family violence related."

It is difficult to understand how those two things can be separated so neatly.

If family violence contributes to financial instability, if safety concerns affect where someone can live, if the cost of remaining housed diminishes their capacity to meet other safety needs, if they are trying to secure a home in which they can actually feel safe, then at what precise point does housing cease to be relevant to family violence?

Housing is not merely a roof.

Housing is safety.

Housing is the ability to close a door.

Housing is knowing where you and your children will sleep next month.

Housing is being able to leave an unsafe environment.

Housing is the difference between having choices and having none.

To describe housing instability as a separate "housing issue" may make administrative sense. Human lives, unfortunately, have never organised themselves according to funding streams.

We built an integrated system. At least on paper.

One of the most important principles arising from Victoria's family-violence reforms was that managing family-violence risk should be a shared responsibility across services and sectors.

That did not mean every worker suddenly became a family-violence specialist.

It meant recognising that no single service holds every piece of the picture.

A housing worker may see something a family-violence practitioner does not.

A school may notice changes in a child.

A hospital may identify escalating risk.

A homelessness service may understand that a woman is only days away from losing accommodation.

A financial counsellor may see that debt is eliminating her ability to leave.

A family-violence practitioner may understand how all of those things intersect with coercion, safety and ongoing risk.

The point of an integrated system is not that everybody does everybody else's job.

The point is that everybody understands that their job forms part of a larger response.

There is an enormous difference between saying:

"We are not a housing service, but housing is clearly affecting your safety. Let's work with the housing service and make sure this forms part of the plan."

and:

"Housing isn't family violence related. You need to speak to housing."

One is collaboration.

The other is a referral dressed up as a response.

Referral is not integration

We have become extraordinarily good at referring people.

We refer them to housing.

We refer them to financial counselling.

We refer them to mental-health services.

We refer them to therapeutic services.

We refer them to food relief.

We refer them to legal services.

We refer them to parenting programs.

We refer them somewhere else when their needs exceed the boundaries of our program.

Sometimes referral is absolutely appropriate.

But sending someone another telephone number is not the same thing as working collaboratively. It puts pressure on a victim survivor to tell the story again, to tell someone else what has happened.

A genuinely integrated response asks different questions.

Was the referral accepted?

Can the person actually access it?

How long is the wait?

What happens to their safety in the meantime?

Does the other service understand the family-violence context?

Who is coordinating the overall response?

Has anyone asked the person what they believe would actually make them safer?

Without those questions, "referral pathways" can simply become more sophisticated language for passing people around.

The problem with categories

People rarely present with one problem.

A person experiencing family violence may simultaneously be dealing with trauma, debt, disrupted employment, children struggling at school, housing insecurity, legal proceedings, transport problems, isolation and food insecurity.

These are not seven unrelated problems requiring seven separate humans to solve them.

They are frequently different consequences of the same destabilisation.

Trauma affects functioning.

Housing instability increases stress.

Financial pressure reduces options.

Lack of transport limits access to work, school and services.

Food insecurity compounds distress.

Children respond to instability.

Every part interacts with every other part.

Yet our systems continue to divide the person into pieces.

Housing takes the housing piece.

Mental health takes the mental-health piece.

Family violence takes the family-violence piece.

Child and family services take another piece.

And somehow the person experiencing all of it is expected to hold the entire case together.

We call this service navigation.

Sometimes I think we should call it what it actually is:

outsourcing system coordination to the person in crisis.

Safety is bigger than immediate physical danger

One of the lingering problems in family-violence responses is an overly narrow understanding of safety.

Safety is obviously freedom from immediate physical violence.

But safety is also economic.

It is psychological.

It is relational.

It is environmental.

It is having secure accommodation.

It is having a functioning car when children need to get to school and appointments.

It is having enough food.

It is having somewhere safe to sleep.

It is not being forced back toward an unsafe person because every alternative has become financially impossible.

It is having enough stability for a traumatised nervous system to stop behaving as though catastrophe is permanently five minutes away.

None of these things sits neatly inside one service specification.

That is precisely why collaboration matters.

"Not our responsibility" cannot be the end of the conversation

There is an important distinction here.

I am not suggesting that family-violence services should become housing organisations, mechanics, financial counsellors, psychologists, food banks and employment agencies.

Specialist services exist for good reason.

Expertise matters.

Boundaries matter.

Funding limitations are real.

But service boundaries and human needs are different things.

A worker may legitimately say:

"I cannot personally provide that service."

The system should be far more cautious about saying:

"That issue has nothing to do with us."

If an issue is affecting a victim-survivor's safety, recovery, choices or capacity to remain independent of violence, then it belongs somewhere in the risk-management conversation.

Perhaps another organisation delivers the actual intervention.

Fine.

But somebody still needs to see the whole picture.

A professional needs to integrate the response.

Human-centred, not problem-centred

This is increasingly where I believe our systems lose their way.

We become problem-centred.

We identify the presenting issue and locate the program designed to respond to it.

Housing problem: housing service.

Trauma problem: counsellor.

Food problem: food relief.

Money problem: financial counsellor.

Family violence problem: specialist family-violence service.

But people are not collections of presenting problems.

Often the person is functioning remarkably well considering the systems around them.

The more useful question is not:

"Which service owns this problem?"

It is:

"What is happening in this person's life, what is making them less safe, and what combination of responses might genuinely change that?"

That is human-centred practice.

It requires us to see possibility as well as pathology.

It requires curiosity.

It requires services to speak to each other.

And occasionally it requires organisations to resist the gravitational pull of their own funding boundaries.

We should expect more from reform

Victoria's family-violence reforms were not supposed to produce a more sophisticated collection of silos.

The promise was something more ambitious: a system capable of sharing information, understanding risk collectively and coordinating responses around the safety of victim-survivors and children.

There has undoubtedly been progress.

But a framework is only as integrated as the experience of the person trying to use it.

If someone experiencing family violence is still required to separately coordinate housing, safety, trauma, children, financial hardship and practical assistance while each organisation explains why another part of her life belongs somewhere else, then the system is not yet integrated.

It is simply interconnected on paper.

Perhaps one of the most important questions we can ask of any service system is therefore remarkably simple:

Who is holding the whole person?

Not just the housing problem.

Not just the risk assessment.

Not just the referral.

The person.

Because if nobody is responsible for seeing the whole picture, the spaces between our services become places where people fall.

And after everything we have learned about family violence, trauma and safety, we should no longer be surprised when they do.