The Children’s Voices for Change project is seeking children and young people aged 10 to 25, who have lived experience of family violence, to take part in an online activity.
This project is being led by Southern Cross University, in partnership with Safe and Equal and the Centre for Excellence in Child & Family Welfare.
It is funded as part of the Victorian Government’s Family Violence Research Agenda 2021-2024.
The research project seeks to understand what constitutes effective supports for children and young people as victim-survivors of family violence in their own right.
This stage of the project involves research with children and young people with lived experience of family violence, through an anonymous, interactive online activity. This phase has been approved by Southern Cross University’s Human Research Ethics Committee (approval no. 2023/115).
The project is recruiting children and young people who:
- are 10 to 25 years old; and
- have experience accessing family violence support services in Victoria when they were up to 13 years old; and
- have an established relationship with a service or network; and
- are not currently in distress or crisis.
If you can help with identifying potential participants who meet these criteria, please share this opportunity. The online activity will be open until Friday 18 August.
Click here for more information about the project
Shaping how organisations can best keep children and young people safe.
This is a crucial moment in history, as we acknowledge the past failures of institutions and adults in protecting the safety of children and young individuals.
Between 2021 and 2022, the Centre for Social Impact at the University of Western Australia conducted an impact evaluation of the Australian Childhood Foundation’s Safeguarding Services.
This research project was grounded in qualitative methods and involved collaborating with organisations that have partnered with the Foundation to enhance their capacity and foster a supportive environment for the well-being and safety of children and young people who engage in their services.
One of the biggest challenges for people who most need social services is navigating a fragmented service system. Here we explore one potential solution, integrated child and family centres which ensure that children and families get what they need, where they need it.
Fragmented service delivery is a common problem across the social service sector. People’s lives are complex and the issues they face don’t necessarily fit into neat boxes. Government services, on the other hand, are delivered in siloes through individual contracts, resulting in multiple individual services with little connection between them.
Services such as child and family services, early child education, domestic violence, homelessness/ housing, health and mental health are all hampered when delivered in a fragmented way. Understanding the impacts of this and how to overcome them is important not only for those working in these systems, but the people designing and funding them as well.
“The tendency of family courts to dismiss the history of domestic violence and abuse in custody cases, especially where mothers and/or children have brought forward credible allegations of domestic abuse, including coercive control, physical or sexual abuse is unacceptable,” said Reem Alsalem, UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women, in a report to the Human Rights Council in Geneva on Thursday.
A history of intimate partner violence against women was often neglected in family courts and shared custody or parental authority, treated as the default ruling, regardless of the child’s perspective.
“When custody decisions are made in favour of the parent who claims to be alienated without sufficiently considering the views of the child, the resilience of the concerned child may be undermined.
“The child may also continue to be exposed to lasting harm,” Ms. Alsalem said. She also called out the failure of child custody processes to use child sensitive approaches that focus on the best interest of children.
Click here to read full article
Drawing on a large sample of female carers living in Australia (n=3,775), this study aims to document and explore children and young people’s experiences of abuse in the past 12 months. We focus on children’s exposure to intimate partner violence (IPV) perpetrated against their female carers, as well as children being the target of direct physical and emotional abuse themselves.
Overall, a significant proportion of respondents who had a child in their care during the past 12 months said that a child was exposed to IPV perpetrated against them (14.1%). One in nine said a child in their care had been the target of direct abuse perpetrated by their current or most recent former partner (11.5%). Critically, one-third of respondents who experienced IPV said a child was exposed to the violence at least once in the past 12 months (34.8%).
A number of factors were associated with an increased likelihood of children being subjected to direct abuse. These included the characteristics of respondents and their relationships, children and households. We also present evidence linking economic factors, including changes in employment, with the direct abuse of children.
WESNET have recently had enquires from concerned parents about how to keep children safer on their devices and online when using tech at school, but also using school-assigned devices at home to complete their school work.
Whilst there are more general concerns for keeping children safer online, there are also more specific and unique concerns about children using their technology within the context of post-separation co-parenting arrangements where there is or has been domestic abuse.
WESNET’s Tech Safety Team not only flesh out the issue but also share some practical and useful strategies and resources you can put into place if you or your clients have children and are currently in this situation.
The Children’s Voices for Change project, funded by Family Safety Victoria, is seeking practitioners in Victoria who provide services to children aged 0-13 years who have experienced family violence, to complete a short anonymous online survey.
This research project uses a children’s rights-based approach to understand how children aged up to 13 years, who are victim-survivors of family violence, engage with Victoria’s family violence service system.
Please click here to learn more and to access the survey
Responses will close on Monday 24 April 2023.
Monash University this month released a report examining young Victorians’ experiences of identity abuse in the context of family violence, finding that it often occurs alongside other forms of abuse. The study is one of two pieces of work on which Family Safety Victoria engaged Monash University, as part of the Victorian Government’s Child and Young Person-focused MARAM practice guidance project.
The report reveals young people’s self-reported experiences of gender-identity and LGBTIQ+ identity abuse in family violence settings, including the significant social, emotional, educational, physical and cultural impacts of family violence.
The fatal impact of family violence and how it contributes to young Australians’ deaths by suicide is downplayed and poorly recorded, hidden by other presenting issues such as harmful substance use, and missing from Australia’s response systems, advocate Tash Anderson and authors of this report reveal.
Family violence is the leading cause of youth homelessness and death by suicide is the leading cause of death (accounting for 38 per cent of deaths) among 15–24-year-olds in Australia. Research estimates between one and two in four children and young people grow up experiencing adult family violence.
Despite this, young people’s deaths by suicide currently sit outside the family violence narrative. In Australia there are no national or state-wide specialist responses for young victim-survivors of family violence seeking help alone; who the paper highlights are more likely to be at greater risk of suicidal ideation and death by suicide if unsupported in early childhood development.
This resource is for policy makers and practitioners working with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children who have experienced domestic and family violence and have come into contact with child protection systems.
This framework is designed to be implemented in local contexts, to meet local needs. It has been built from knowledge generated through participatory action research methods led by First Nations community researchers in regional and remote Queensland locations. Importantly, it recognises the strength of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families and embeds evidence-based healing responses.
Children are placed at the centre of this trauma informed, strengths based a framework that upholds self-determination and will support Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children to experience increased physical, social, emotional, cultural and spiritual safety in their homes and communities. A set of principles, drawn from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander values shapes key actions, ideas and questions that can be embedded within practice. The framework provides critical insights for government, to support policy and systemic change that will enable the framework to be implemented successfully. Links to additional resources are also included.