At the two launch sites for the new model, a victim’s safety will be assessed by the use of a Domestic Violence Safety Assessment Tool (DVSAT) and those victims assessed to be at ‘serious threat’ will be referred to a Safety Action Meeting (SAM). Information regarding the victim will be shared by the agencies attending the SAM and an action plan developed for agencies and services to implement. These action plans will be specific and targeted at the victim’s safety, and victims themselves will not be directed to take any action as a result of the meeting.
The new service delivery model is based on a model already operating in South Australia, where recent findings by the South Australian Coroner’s Office have highlighted the need for risk assessment when policing domestic violence and the need for information sharing between agencies.
In the most recent findings, the South Australian State Coroner, Mark Johns, criticised the South Australian police force and said their slogan of ‘keeping South Australia safe’ was a hollow promise to domestic violence homicide victim Zahra Abrahimzadeh and her family.
Forty-four year old Ms Abrahimzadeh was repeatedly stabbed by her estranged husband in front of hundreds of people (including their daughter) at a Persian community function in Adelaide in March 2010. Ms Abrahimzadeh had reported her husband’s violence to police in 2009 when she and the children fled the family home and a restraining order was put in place for her protection. Over the next twelve months, Ms Abrahimzadeh made many more reports to police regarding continuing threats of violence, however police failed to investigate. The Coroner found:
The power of arrest and charging is the most powerful influence that police can bring to bear... if that power is not exercised expeditiously, or worse, not exercised at all, the domestic violence offender will think he has ‘gotten away with it’... he will be encouraged to think that she is not being taken seriously... (in this case the offender) even taunted the children with the pointlessness of their having gone to the police in the first place, and was never arrested despite the numerous court sessions he attended relating to restraining order...Risk assessment must be applied and not just recited as a mantra.
An earlier South Australian coronial inquest into the death of two-year-old Jakob Wyatt and his father David Wyatt found that Mr Wyatt had stabbed Jakob to death, then inflicted stabbing injuries on his infant daughter, fifteen-day-old Chloe, and the children’s mother, Naomi Thompson, before killing himself. The Coroner found that Wyatt’s mental health had degenerated over a period of time, and this was known to the ‘plethora of organisations’ the family had been in contact with, but a lack of information sharing between the various agencies meant that no action plan had been put in place to attempt to secure the safety of Ms Thompson, Jakob and Chloe. The Coroner said:
A number of organisations had reason to be concerned. It is plain that there was a lack of communication and coordination between the various agencies... if the Family Safety Framework had been in place in this area, the Family Safety Meeting would have been an opportunity for the high risk factors at play to be shared and a management plan evolved. This would hopefully have led to a much more effective understanding of the case by all agencies as a result of a sharing of information that was not, in the event, passed on. In that way the agencies, all of which were focusing primarily on their own particular mandate, would have appreciated the need to protect vulnerable third parties – in other words, Ms Thompson, Jakob and Chloe.
Both the Abrahimzadeh and Wyatt deaths occurred before the implementation of the police risk assessment tool and Family Safety Meetings in South Australia.
RLC’s Sydney Women’s Domestic Violence Court Advocacy Service (Sydney WDVCAS) and Central West Women’s Domestic Violence Court Advocacy Service (Central West WDVCAS) will be responsible for implementing Safety Action Meetings and other elements of the Reforms for the Orange and Waverley Local Court launch sites.
Read about the NSW Domestic and Family Violence Reforms.
Read the South Australian Coroner’s reports.
