Month: February 2025

The Knowledge Translation Report and Practice Guidance provides an overview of key findings and considerations for practice from the Safe at Home: Experiences, Barriers and Access (SHEBA) Project. This project explored Personal Safety Initiatives (PSIs) and Safe at Home responses to family violence more broadly in Victoria, Australia.

Across phases of access, implementation and longer term use of PSIs and Safe at Home responses, practice considerations that can be implemented in different organisational and practice contexts within the current Victorian service system are provided.

Full details of the SHEBA Project can be found in the Research Report.

Read the Document

Citation:
Isobe, J., Diemer, K., & Humphreys, C. (2024). Safe at Home: Experiences, Barriers, and Access (The SHEBA Project) – Knowledge Translation Report and Practice Guidance. The University of Melbourne. DOI: 10.26188/27950151

This Policy Brief provides an overview of the 12 key components for effective Safe at Home responses identified in the Safe at Home: Experiences, Barriers and Access (SHEBA) Project. This project explored Personal Safety Initiatives (PSIs) and Safe at Home responses to family violence more broadly in Victoria, Australia.

The 12 key components identified were:

1. Support towards affordable, secure and stable housing as part of homelessness prevention.
2. A range of accessible specialist family violence services offered over time as part of the response.
3. Local partnerships and collaboration providing strong service coordination to address safety risks, stability needs and sustained wellbeing.
4. Program responsiveness through streamlined processes and flexibility to adapt service provision.
5. Receive specific funding for components of the response, indexed to economic and contextual changes over time.
6. Clients have a voice in decision-making to ensure that responses are accessible to, informed by, and empowering of diverse victim/survivors.
7. Include children and young people as victim/survivors in their own right, with components to support their safety, wellbeing and recovery.
8. Focus on reducing risk and increasing victim/survivor safety through a suite of integrated responses.
9. Attend to safety concerns arising from multiple, changing forms of violence used within different family contexts.
10. Work alongside perpetrator interventions with people using violence as part of a holistic response connecting safety and accountability.
11. Provide cultural safety and cultural authority through intersectional service provision supporting diverse needs.
12. Informed and improved by iterative data and evidence generation, capacity building and collaborative working.

Across the 12 key components, 62 recommendations were made to strengthen and support an enhanced future state of Safe at Home responses in Victoria.

Full details of the SHEBA Project can be found in the Research Report.

Read the Document

Citation:
Isobe, J., Diemer, K., & Humphreys, C. (2024). Safe at Home: Experiences, Barriers, and Access (The SHEBA Project) Policy Brief, November 2024. The University of Melbourne: Melbourne, Australia. DOI: 10.26188/27957123

The Research Report details the background, methodology, findings and recommendations from the Safe at Home: Experiences, Barriers and Access (SHEBA) Project.

This project explored Personal Safety Initiatives (PSIs) and Safe at Home responses to family violence more broadly in Victoria, Australia. The project aimed to hear from victim/survivors of family violence who had accessed PSIs, and from sector practitioners delivering PSIs and Safe at Home responses to understand:

1. Key components of an effective Safe at Home response.
2. Facilitators and barriers to implementing an effective Safe at Home response.
3. Evidence of how Safe at Home responses can be adapted to ensure the safety of victim/survivors to accommodate: a) emergency or disaster settings; and b) diverse population groups.
4. Gaps in the current Safe at Home service provision for victim/survivors in Victoria.

Findings highlighted key strengths and facilitators, limitations and barriers for effective implementation of PSIs and Safe at Home responses in Victoria across phases of access, implementation and longer-term use. The project highlighted practice considerations across these phases that can be implemented in different organisational and practice contexts within the current Victorian service system. Combining findings with those from evidence in the literature, the SHEBA Project highlighted 12 key components for effective Safe at Home responses and their delivery, contributing to international literature concerning Safe at Home responses. The project made 62 recommendations to strengthen these 12 key components and support an enhanced future state of Safe at Home responses in Victoria.

The Executive Summary extracted from the report can be accessed here.

Read the Research Report

Citation:
Isobe, J., Diemer, K., Humphreys, C., & De Silva, H. (2024). Safe at Home: Experiences, Barriers, and Access (The SHEBA Project): Research Report. The University of Melbourne. DOI: 10.26188/27889083