Safe at Home is a new approach to supporting people experiencing family violence. It is an early intervention model that aims to keep women and children safe in their own homes and prevent homelessness. It does this by providing rapid, flexible and coordinated support for the whole household, including women, children and the person using violence.
Safe at Home is different to how things have been done in the past. Women often have to make the difficult decision to leave their home to escape violence. Leaving their home can cause women and children to become disconnected from their community, work and education. It can also lead to homelessness. According to Homelessness Australia, “domestic and family violence is the leading cause of homelessness for women”.
We believe it’s time to change the system. Women and children should be able to remain in their own homes.
Holistic support for the whole household
Safe at Home aims to provide holistic support through:
- Earlier intervention and faster response times
- Flexible, longer-term support periods, responsive to changing needs
- A whole-of-household approach through personalised coordinated responses
- A range of tailored supports from case management, legal and financial support, and counselling to practical assistance like access to home security upgrades
- Support for children and young people as separate clients
- Support and accountability for the person using violence
- Help to build the household’s economic capacity and prevent homelessness
Safe at Home has been developed through years of research, advocacy, cross-sector collaboration and input from people with lived experience of family violence and people who have used violence.
It aims to create system-level changes so that people experiencing family violence can get the support they need to stay safely in their own home and maintain their connections with work, school and community. This will reduce the number of people forced into homelessness, and the number who return to live with people using violence because they have nowhere else to live.