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.

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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