In this Advance Your Advocacy Practice session on Understanding gender-based violence and disability through an intersectional lens with Women with Disabilities Victoria and Safe Steps.
Disability Advocates are highly likely to identify gender-based violence or receive disclosures of experiences of violence in their work. Rates of violence against people with disabilities are around twice as high as across the general population. Yet more needs to be done to upskill the disability and family violence sectors on how to work together to support clients experiencing family violence.
Women with Disabilities Victoria and Safe Steps present this Advance Your Advocacy Practice session where they focus on understanding disability, intersectionality and gender-based violence and how to best support someone in a holistic and best practice manner when they have disclosed experiences of violence to you.
You can contact Women with Disabilities Victoria on Contact [email protected] or Safe Steps disability Disability Family Violence Crisis Response Initiative (DFVCRI) team on [email protected]
Support Numbers
1800RESPECT – CALL 1800 737 732 OR Live chat
Safe Steps 24/7 365 days a year 1800 015 188
Additional resources
Intouch – Specialist Family Violence Services for culturally and ethnically diverse victim survivors
Queerspace-Specialist Family Violence Services for working with LBGTIQA+ clients
Rainbow Door-specialist service providing free information, support, and referral to all LGBTIQA+
Thorne Harbour Health-LGBTIQ+ community-controlled organisation
Safe + Equal Disability practice leads – Operating in 9 DFFH regions across VIC out of local FV services and tailored supports
Pride in Prevention Program Guide for working with LBGTIQA+ people
Women with Disabilities Victoria Support Service Referral Options
Women with Disabilities Victoria and Our Watch, Changing the Landscape
Women with Disabilities Victoria Facts on Violence
Women with Disabilities Victoria Preventing Violence Against LGBTIQA+ People with Disabilities
Women with Disabilities Victoria Taking Action Guide
WATCH Session Livestream
Listen to audio
Transcript
JAX
Hello, everybody. Welcome
Good morning, everyone. My name is Jax Brown, and my pronouns are he and they. And I’m the resource development lead. So I organise sessions like this one and I’m always open to hearing from you about what you’d love us to run sessions on, so please do get in contact.
Welcome to this Advance Your Advocacy practice session. It’s so wonderful to have you with us today
But before we kick off this morning session, I’d like to acknowledge that we’re meeting on the lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation
And pay my deep respects to their elders past and present. And I’d also like to pay my respects to any Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander people who are joining us today. We really encourage your active engagement with the session, so please ensure that you put your questions in the Q&A box And our team will be monitoring this behind the scenes as we move through today and we’ll be facilitating a Q&A at the end of the presentations. So if you click up on the tab at the top of your screen, you should see a tab that says Amy’s screen share, and that way you can see me and the other presenters as they come on and the Auslan interpreters who are joining us today as well as the PowerPoint slides at the same time.
You can also enable captions by clicking on more, which are the three little dots at the bottom of the bar on your screen, and then clicking show captions.
So this session today is for disability advocacy workers and builds on a previous session we ran back in 2022. Our focus today is on understanding gender-based violence and disability through an intersectional lens.
We know that disability advocates are highly likely to identify gender-based violence in their work and receive disclosures.
Sadly, rates of violence against people with disabilities are around twice as high as across the general population. Yet more needs to be done to upskill disability and family violence sectors in how to work together to support clients experiencing violence. So now please extend a very warm welcome to Amy from Women with Disabilities Victoria, followed by Natash and Alicja from SafeSteps over to you, Amy.
AMY:
Thanks, Jax.
Did my slide just change for everybody? Okay.
Morning, everyone. My name is Amy. My pronouns are they, them, and I’m the gender and Disability Program Coordinator at Women with Disabilities Victoria, and I bring lived experience of psychosocial disability and gender-based violence to my work at WDV and to our presentation this morning. I’d like to acknowledge that I’m joining from beautiful Wurundjeri country on this cold, sunny morning in Warring or wombat season. I also pay my respects to Wurundjeri elders past and present, and extend that respect to traditional owners of the lands throughout so-called Victoria, where women with disabilities work extends. I also look to the leadership of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women and gender diverse people with disabilities in their work responding to gender-based violence and promoting disability justice, and I particularly want to acknowledge the legacy of Aunty Gail Rankin, one of the founding elders of the First Peoples Disability Network.
I also want to acknowledge the lived experience that many of us bring to our work, It strengthens and sustains our advocacy, but it can also be a lot to hold so today, yeah, we’ll be talking about violence and discrimination against women and gender diverse people with disabilities and I encourage you to take care of yourself and take breaks as needed. And also note that if you want to speak to someone about perhaps your own experiences of violence or the impacts that gender-based violence may have had on you through your work You can contact RESPECT on 1800 737 732 The phone counselling service is also available for third party debrief for if you’re a worker experiencing vicarious trauma. I’ve used it myself and I would encourage you to consider it. And I’ve also shared with Jax, who I will share with you Women with Disabilities Victoria’s full list of referral options.
So we’re here to speak about gender-based violence today, and I’ll start with a bit of a definition. Gender-based violence is any act of violence directed at someone because of their gender and due to gender inequality, it disproportionately affects women, girls and gender diverse people. Gender-based violence can cause physical, sexual, financial, and psychological harm and it also includes threats of violence, coercion, and manipulation. it can occur in public or in private.
Some of the most commonly spoken about forms of gender-based violence include domestic violence, so violence that’s usually perpetrated by someone’s current or previous partner and family violence, you might have heard these interchangeably, but family violence is a broader term and includes violence between family members or within family-like relationships. So that can include domestic violence, but it can also be harm perpetrated within other relationships, like between parents and children between housemates, siblings, extended family, or, like, really importantly, in the case of people with disabilities, by carers, either formal or paid carers or informal or unpaid carers. At Women with Disabilities Victoria, we take this broad view of gender-based violence, because we acknowledge that women and gender diverse people with disabilities experience violence more frequently over a longer period of time and across a wider range of settings perpetrated by a greater range of people than women and gender diverse people without disabilities.
At Women with Disabilities Victoria and in the program that I coordinate, the Gender and Disability Workforce Development Program we focus on the primary prevention of gender-based violence. It’s the bottom section of the bottom and largest section of the pyramid on the slide here.
Primary prevention takes action to address the underlying attitudes
systems and structures that lead to gender-based violence. It aims to create a world free from violence. So that’s a world that’s gender equal, and that is free from ableism and other forms of discrimination. It’s a long-term social change project. We’re not there yet. Sowe persevere. But that’s why primary prevention is just one level of the four levels of activity that respond, reduce and ultimately end gender-based violence.
We can also apply the principles of primary prevention to other levels of this prevention pyramid. So the next level is early intervention, and it aims to change the trajectory for individuals at higher risk than average of perpetrating or experiencing violence. It takes action when the early signs of violence start to appear. We can use primary prevention principles here as well. So, in your work as advocates are working to empower women and gender diverse people with disabilities and to support our self-determination. That’s a primary… that’s primary prevention. But this can also apply at that early intervention level, where you identify that somebody might be you might identify early signs of violence. By somebody who has been supported to understand their rights and to speak up for their rights is more likely then to so to identify those early signs of violence and to speak up and seek support, or maybe more likely to. So it applies there as well. The next level is the response where we’re supporting people who are currently experiencing violence, holding perpetrators to account and aiming to prevent the recurrence of violence. And that’s where my colleagues Alexia and Natasha from Safe Steps are going to be speaking today. That’s where their presentation and their work is focused.
We can also think about how applying primary prevention principles to people currently experiencing violence by supporting them to understand support options and referral pathways and supporting them to make their own decisions about what will keep them safe can also ensure that response efforts are really effective and sustainable and Alicia and Natasha will speak more about that. The final level on that prevention pyramid is the recovery where it’s the ongoing process to enable victim survivors to find safety, ongoing health, wellbeing and resilience But
just to say that all those levels of the pyramid are really important, really needed, and all work together and support each other. They’re connected. But our focus at WDV and the focus of my presentation today is going to be a bottom level of primary prevention the ongoing long-term social change.
I’ve been invited to speak about intersectionality. WDV is an intersectional organisation. It was founded to address intersecting impact of ableism and gender inequality on the lives of women with disabilities, and is now being expanded to include impacts on all gender diverse people with disabilities. And in particular, looking at the high rates and specific forms of violence that we experience due to ableism and gender inequality. But the term was originally coined by Kimberly Crenshaw in to explain how the combined impacts of racism and sexism create unique experiences of discrimination for African American women, it’s important to note that intersectionality isn’t just about acknowledging that people have multiple overlapping identities, it actually is a tool to analyze structural and systemic oppression. So, I can say for myself that I’m a neurodivergent, non-binary queer person, and it is true to say that those experiences shape my experience of the world. However, intersectionality goes a step further and seeks to understand how I’m impacted by neuronormativity, ableism homophobia and cis normativity and also to understand how I benefit from things like white privilege, for example so applying an intersectional understanding of disability recognises that amongst people with disabilities, other social hierarchies are reflected and we might experience advantage or disadvantage based on race, class, nationality, sexuality, gender, religion, age, body shape, or health status and many others, as well as disability.
Why is this important? Because it’s these overlapping forms of discrimination that drive higher rates of violence against women and gender diverse people with disabilities on the screen we see a Venn diagram that represents the conceptual model from changing the landscape, a national resource to prevent violence against women and girls with disabilities that was published by Our Watch and WDV in if I’m looking over here, it’s because my slides are over here.
So, WDV and OurWatch released Changing the Story the national framework to prevent violence against women and girls, and that framework introduced the gendered drivers of violence that are in the green bubble on the left here and in our watch partnered with Women with Disabilities Victoria to release Changing the Landscape that added the four ableist drivers of violence and demonstrated how they intersect to drive higher rates of violence against women and girls with disabilities. We can also see particularly like particularly when we look at those gendered drivers, how those gender drivers drive violence, not only against women, but also against all trans and gender diverse people with disabilities and Rainbow Health Australia’s Pride in Prevention Guide does a really good job of demonstrating this. Those gender drivers, though they’re condoning of violence against women. We see this when media reporting focuses on the risks taken by victim survivor, for example, rather than focusing on perpetrator accountability. We see this in men’s control of decision making and limits to women’s independence and public and private life.
We see rigid gender stereotyping and dominant forms of masculinity. We say that this drives violence against women, but particularly drives violence against people that are particularly seen to diverge from those rigid gender stereotypes. We see Zoe Bell Gender Collective, in their Trans Femme project does an excellent job of demonstrating how this, in particular drives by its very high rates of violence against trans women and trans femmes. And also drives violence against non-binary and other gender-diverse people. We also see male peer relations and cultures of masculinity that emphasise aggression, dominance and control, we then overlay these ableist drivers which include negative stereotypes about people with disabilities. This can include stereotypes that, like, that we are violent, this is particularly applied, I think, to people with psychosocial disability and that can lead to people with disabilities being misidentified as perpetrators when they’re attempting to report violence. This also then can flow onto the accepting and normalizing of violence, disrespect and discrimination against people with disabilities
An example of just one example of this is, and I’ve unfortunately been in a position to overhear support providers identifying particular service users as so-called difficult clients, and and suggesting that you might need to be a bit rough with these clients. Rough handling by support workers is another example of violence against people with disabilities that’s unfortunately perpetrated at very high rates. Accepting and normalizing violence, disrespect and discrimination against people with disabilities. Oh, I just spoke about that one. Apologies. This also includes controlling people with disabilities, decision-making and limiting independence.
And also the social segregation and exclusion of people with disabilities. That can include in specialist schools, in segregated workplaces, or in shared residential services, or so-called group homes.
This can serve to other people with disabilities. It can make certain people with disabilities invisible. So that means that some of us are not seen as a part of broader society with equal rights to safety and respect. These are also examples of the kind of closed environments where unfortunately violence often occurs.
For some women and gender diverse people with disabilities, there are also other intersecting drivers of violence, including ageism, classism, heteronormativity, homophobia and biphobia, racism, colonialism, transphobia and cis normativity.
And I’m going to speak a little bit more about some of these specific experiences. So, yes, as I said, some women and gender diverse people with disabilities experience even higher rates and also specific forms of violence and discrimination. Taking an intersectional approach acknowledges that gender inequality and ableism may be compounded by other forms of disadvantage that a person may experience. For example, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women experience higher rates of disability than non-Indigenous women and report disproportionate rates of violence. Women with disabilities in rural settings experience higher risks of social isolation and have less access to support services which increases the likelihood that they will experience violence and creates barriers to seeking support if they do, and also women make up % of all elder abuse victims, many of whom also have disabilities.
Women with Disabilities Victoria has done some kind of some specific work in partnership with other intersectional organizations to go a bit deeper into some of these intersectional drivers of violence. In , we partnered with the Multicultural center for Women’s Health to develop a series of resources on preventing violence against women and gender diverse people with disabilities from multicultural, migrant and refugee communities.
The outcomes of this partnership emphasize the barriers that migrant and refugee women and gender diverse people with disabilities experience to accessing disability and other supports. This includes social isolation. So limited networks dependence on caregivers and community stigma around disability can contribute to isolation, people experience financial hardship as a barrier. The non recognition of overseas skills and qualifications can lead to precarious work with little career progression, and some categories of some basic categories limit access to social support systems like the disability support pension and the NDIS.
Services are often under-resourced and they can often lack budget for accessible and culturally appropriate support, including the recruitment of bilingual staff and access challenges to accessing services can include limited access to safe, affordable, culturally appropriate healthcare, housing, employment, and sexual and reproductive health, information, workplace, there are also barriers inherent in our immigration system VISAs and residency rights can restrict access to essential services and create dependence or fear of reporting violence or discrimination due to potential visa rejection. And people also experience workplace challenges, such as the fear of losing sponsorship from their workplace via sponsorship from their workplace, or facing deportation, and often keeps individuals from disclosing disability to their employers or reporting workplace discrimination and harassment, and I’m also going to share a link to the full range of resources that we developed in partnership with the Multicultural Center for Women’s Health which includes an animation and animation guide and a short webinar exploring some of these barriers and measures to address these barriers in more detail, we are currently co-designing a series of resources on violence prevention looking at LGBTQIA plus people with disabilities experiences and so far we’ve published an animation and a fact sheet and new resources on supporting LGBTIQA plus people with disabilities will be launched in June. But some of the things that we discovered so far through the research project and the publishing of the fact sheet is the LGBTIQA plus people with disabilities report significantly higher rates of verbal, physical, and sexual violence compared to people with disabilities that don’t identify as LGBTIQA+ and among LGBTIQA plus people with disabilities, it’s trans people with disabilities that are more likely to experience physical violence, intimate partner violence, and sexual assault, LGBTIQA+ people with disabilities also experience higher rates of or report higher rates of poor treatment by health professionals compared to people with disabilities who don’t identify as LGBTIQA+ and LGBTIQA plus people with disabilities experience the highest rates of workplace sexual harassment. So we can see that heteronormativity and cisnormativity, ableism, stigma, and social marginalisation lead to LGBTIQA plus young people with disabilities experiencing higher rates of violence higher levels of stress and reduced sense of safety compared to LGBTIQA+ young people without disabilities. This is partially because often people find or report that disability services are often not inclusive of LGBTIQA plus people and LGBTIQA plus organizations often don’t provide services that are accessible and appropriate for people with disabilities.
But I can say that we have also produced a wonderful guide co-designed by LGBTIQA+ people with disabilities with, like, loads of, tips for supporting, supporting us through service provision, workplace inclusion.
Yeah, and so, I’ll absolutely be sharing the invite to the launch of that full suite of resources with Daru to share with you if you’re subscribed to their newsletter so how can understanding these drivers of violence and understanding intersectionality guide responses to client disclosures and inform disability advocacy work. Well, thankfully, changing the landscape also identifies six essential actions to address these underlying drivers of violence and prevent violence against women and gender diverse people with disabilities. And WDV also has our Taking Action Guide
that also offers more guidance on how these can be applied in practice. So the first one is addressing the underlying social context that gives rise to violence against women and gender diverse people with disabilities in your work, this can look like promoting the human rights model and social models of disability when you’re advocating in systems where the medical and charity models often still really entrenched. It includes challenging the acceptance of violence against women and gender diverse people with disabilities, an example of this that we can all practice every day is using a strength strength-based approach when we’re discussing disability, using factual language that doesn’t reinforce stereotypes or imply weakness, or suggest that disability is a reason for violence. An example that’s really shifted the way I think and speak about this that WDV really reinforces is that as women and gender diverse people with disabilities, we aren’t vulnerable to violence. We are actually targeted for violence based on our perceived vulnerability. So continuing to reinforce this vulnerability and using the language of vulnerability actually increases the risk that we experience violence. Sometimes I feel like but like particularly as an autistic person, when people find out that I am autistic, I think that there is a perception that I am vulnerable or impressionable. That can mean then sometimes I feel like then I’m walking around with a target on my back. But it can also mean that I’m targeted for violence because it is assumed that I won’t speak up about it. But sometimes this violence can be perpetrated in the name of protecting the so-called vulnerable person, thinking about how when we’re perceived as vulnerable, perpetrators can use this as an excuse to control who we engage with where we go, how we spend our money. And these forms of financial control and coercive control are also forms of violence. We can also improve attitudes towards women and girls with disabilities by challenging ableist and sexist stereotypes. We can promote the inclusion of women and girls with disabilities in all aspects of life promote women and girls with disabilities, independence, agency, and participation in leadership and decision making. I think the work that you do as advocates supporting us to understand and make decisions about our own lives, to take considered risks and set our own boundaries and continually advocating for supported decision-making as an alternative to guardianship and other forms of deferred decision-making is really critical and really important here, and it really does make a difference. And finally, there’s this piece around engaging men and boys to challenge controlling, dominant and aggressive forms of masculinity. So we don’t just practice primary prevention in the way we engage with women and gender diverse people and girls with disabilities. We also practice it in the way we engage with men. I’ve kind of tried to rush through and give a really brief overview of this content, but I want to share lots of resources that you can use to follow up and dive deeper into some of this content. Please visit our website, and check out all of our free resources and I’ll also share specific links you can consult our gender and disability experts by experience advocacy team. They are available to consult if you’re developing new projects, new programs, new processes, new practices they’re a group of people with really extraordinarily diverse lived experiences of disability, and also really vast professional expertise to contribute. You can also book an introductory session on preventing gender and disability based violence that goes further into some of the topics I spoke about today, and you can also book tailored training for your organization that goes much deeper into a lot of this work, and especially the practical application, but finally, I just want to thank you for your… for your work, I really want to affirm that the work you do as advocates, especially when you apply a gendered lens and consider how gender inequality or other forms of discrimination might be impacting the person, the people that you’re advocating with and for and addressing those through your disability advocacy. That is violence prevention and disability justice is violence prevention, but that’s all from me for now. I’d love to hand over to Natasha and Alicia to speak more about supporting people with disabilities who are experiencing violence. Thanks
ALICJA
Thank you so much for that, Amy. I’m just going to see if we can share our screen as well. Thank you so much. Okay, can everyone see the screen? Sorry? Wonderful. So, yes, as Amy said, Natasha and I are part of Safe Steps, which is a family violence service. It’s the / crisis response family violence service for Victoria. And we’re going to talk a little bit about disability and the intersection with family violence and the program that we run here at Safe Steps as well and Natasha will kick us off.
NATASHA
Alright, just want to make sure that everyone can see me. Okay, great. Thank you for that, Alicja
So I’d like to start first by also paying my respects to the of elders of the the Wurundjeri country of the Kulin Natio and if you could go for a bit, Alicja, yes and now, I’m going to start off by talking about the family violence Prevention Act of in Victoria, so this was a very important act for us here in Victoria, because it recognized Family violence in a very broad way so, as Amy was talking about we recognize that family violence was physical, sexual, emotional social and economic abuse and it also focused on the impact on children and this was very important because prior to the Act the focus when describing family violence was on physical assaults only the act is also very important in that it centers victim safety and rights and acknowledges that family violence is a human rights violation and as it is a human rights violation, that it requires respectful survivor focused responses. The Act also helped to strengthen the illegal protections so it expands on what was previously given around intervention orders that talks about how conditions can be tailored, it can exclude perpetrators from the home importantly, it also limits victim cross-examination, it also expands police powers, so it enabled immediate after-hours protections and stronger police action to improve safety and accountability and perhaps most important for the sector and our day-to-day work.
It brought in something called the multi-agency risk assessment and management framework otherwise, shortened and this is a framework and assessment phase was created to allow easy information sharing and prevent the client from having to break house. The story as well as to coordinate services. Now I want to talk a bit about. Well, it might look like if someone’s in the experiencing family violence, so they might seem more withdrawn than usual, they might not seem like their usual self, they might also be quieter, particularly for people with disabilities, we do see the appointments are canceled more often or with explanations that don’t seem to make sense or like the reasons that are being given are forced and that’s a really important one because we often see that the PUVs, so PUV stands for person using once is withholding or controlling when support, or even if support occurs as part of disability-based family violence, which we’re going to talk a bit about why now another thing that we will see if appointments do occur is that PUVs might be consistently present as a way to intimidate someone or to ensure the ideal narrative or APV approved narrative is the only narrative that’s being provided and also to make sure that they don’t disclose then there’s things like clients experiencing or disclosing feelings of fog, so fear, obligation and guilt and unexplained injuries. So again this is explanations that seem to be inconsistent before happened and then for people that are on the DSP, we see things like limited money from the DSP them having limited money even though they may have just got paid they might not be able to afford food or they might be going for other medications. So if someone discloses to how can you respond?
I think one of the most important things is to be trauma-informed. So to prioritize safety, truth empowerment. S ensure that the person is kept safe, that they can make their own decisions about things that being empowered and I think something else that’s really important is avoid re-traumatizing someone sometimes someone might not share their story at one specific pace, so it’s also important to give time and space for people telling their story, everyone tells their story in a different way at a different time, and some disabilities, there is also so, processing speeds. So the way people process information is a bit slower and so it’s really important to make sure that someone never feels rushed or that you’re being impatient with them. It’s really important to affirm that violence is never okay. And that’s the case for everyone. And also to affirm their experiences to show you that you believe them when somebody chooses to disclose or if someone chooses to disclose use open-ended questions to try and get as much information about the situation as possible. So use active listening skills. If someone once a referral to a service, or you want to offer them a referral to service
Getting consent to make that referral is very important. SafeSteps is a voluntary service which means we can only provide support if clients consent and many local family violence services are also the same. So if you’re going to make referrals ensure that you have consent to do so, it’s also very important to establish a safe person for someone this may or may not be someone in the emergency contacts, it’s very important to note that someone that is in the emergency contacts might be the person using Vance, so very important to have detailed discussions around that and to work out together or explore together who is a safe person something to think about is how can you create a safety play with them, what can they do to stay safe? How do they know how to keep safe? A person that is going through a family violence situation is experiencing and has experienced family violence for quite often a long time like with what Amy said, they, people with disabilities do tend to experience it for longer periods of time with multiple people, they are often the best place people to know what’s kept them up safe to now. If you are safety planning of someone, it’s important to know how to take into account the Disability needs. So, for example, if they’ve got a physical disability some wheelchairs can be quite bulky, and they can take a while to transport. So can you put something in the safety plan about you know a easy number for wheelchair taxi. We do have a safety Plan resource in easy English but at the moment it is undergoing some restructuring so when that restructuring is finished, we will let you know. In the meantime, 1800RESPECT This is a great service and they have created extensive easy read resources on family violence and, of course, an emergency, you can call for police fire ambulance or safe steps /, days a year on -000
ALICJA
Thank you, Natasha. Sorry, it’s just finding the unmute button for myself. Thank you for all that great information. As Natasha mentioned. Some people don’t want to leave their home if they’re experiencing family violence, or they’re not ready to, or they’re in that process, there’s things that need to happen before they can safely leave. They might feel that that escalation in their risk. There’s a lot of reasons why people choose to stay In their homes as well, so it’s important to take that into consideration when you’re having these discussions, with individuals as well, of if they do want to stay home. What does that look like? How can they stay as safe as possible in the home, and what do they need to do in case things escalate? What does an escalation look like? Victim survivors or people experiencing family violence are experts in their own safety. Like Natasha said, they’ve likely experienced family violence for some time and have strategies on how to keep themselves safe as well. An important note is I think many professionals when they hear someone talking about violence in the home, things that have been happening to them is they they want to go to the police and get an intervention order. If the client is wanting that, then you should definitely support them. However, this can also be something that increases the risk for individuals as well. It can escalate the situation. IVOs, unfortunately, essentially a piece of paper. So they’re not necessarily going to be the full story of how to keep someone safe as well. Other safety interventions, keeping safe could be getting something like a camera doorbell, knowing who’s coming to the door making sure that that person has a relationship with their neighbors maybe lets them know, maybe they already have someone in their life who they have an intervention order against just so the neighbors know to look out for a certain car or a certain individual if they are coming to their home locks, changing locks, things like that, and part of that safety planning, as Natasha was saying, was establishing safe words, having a safe person, and sharing that as well with other people that are in their life, so that in case things do escalate, they have sort of multiple options of people to reach out to instead of just counting on one person in that emergency situation. As Natasha said, our… we do have a suite of Easy English resources around family violence that are currently under review, and the website’s being adjusted. Hopefully it won’t be long, and there’ll be back up and ready to go especially our safety planning booklet, it’s something that you can actually work through with someone step by step, on how to create a safety plan with them Safe Steps is the / crisis response for family violence. However, there are many amazing specialist services in Victoria as well that work in that intersectional framework. Organization called InTouch. They work with individuals from culturally and ethically diverse backgrounds. They work with people using violence as well in a culturally informed way and have some amazing programs there. There’s also Drummond Street and Thorn Harbour Health who specialize in supporting queer clients they do have also community programs and crisis programs, unfortunately, they are limited in what they can do a lot of services are struggling to keep these programs. Going just because of the funding government funding situation, the budget, etcetera, but they do absolutely amazing work and we work really closely with them as well to try and support that informed response. There are family advance services across Victoria, so in every single region of Victoria, including regional and remote areas in Victoria. They, I guess they do have a different approach in the type of response that they will do as well compared to how we respond in Metro Melbourne. As I’m sure you all know, REAC works in those regions as well. They do wonderful work and work really closely with their local family violence partners Jira is the family violence service that’s run through Vacca to support families, First Nations families who are experiencing family violence and safe and equal has a wonderful program as well in terms of they have regions where they’re running a pilot, having disability practice leads sit in nine different family services across Victoria and really hone in on the intersectionality of supporting people that are living with a disability experiencing family violence. They’re all wonderful, please have a look if you’ve got one in your region and reach out to them to set up a time to talk if you’re working in a specific region as well. They are just a wealth of resources.
Safe and Equal is the family violence peak body in Victoria, so they have a lot of other great resources as well. Yes, as I said, here’s some more links for you all to look at. I’m sure the slides will be sent around afterwards as well which brings us to our program that we run here at Safe Steps. It’s the Disability Family Violence Crisis Response Initiative. Natasha and I are the disability liaison officers that work in this team supporting whole state of Victoria. Any working professionals, including all of you here today, can reach out to us anytime for a consult. If you feel like you do have someone who is experiencing family violence, it might be a bit of a complicated situation and not sure where to refer them to. Please contact us. We work to , Monday to Friday. Be happy to chat with you about what their options are, support with some case planning as well, and those referral pathways. We do have some funding in our program as well to support people that are experiencing serious risk family violence, a family violence crisis, and that will typically be working with either safe steps without intake team or something like the Orange Door or local family violence service as well. So if you do have people that are in that side of their journey, you can reach out to us as well and of course we do as much capacity building as we can trying to raise the profile of these important topics across the sector.
Thank you. Thank you so much, everyone. Sorry, I feel like I had to try and rush through to get in before
JAX
Thank you, we’re almost at time. So we’ll probably only have time for a couple of little questions, but we’d love to hear from disability advocates. If you’ve got a question, please pop it in the Q&A tab, and we will try and get to it. I guess I’m interested in what you spoke about there with the the disability emergency fund Is that… how is that triaged? Like, how do you make a decision? Because I’m sure funds are limited. Who gets access to that fund and how that works
ALICJA
Yeah, so the funding does have pretty strict criteria around it, so again, it someone needs to be assessed as being at a very high risk of family violence, so at serious risk under the framework and the funding really is there to overcome barriers for people in accessing family violence services. We’ve had so many cases. We’ve had their mobility aids damaged and that’s why they can’t leave. So that’s where we can step in and fund something like that. It is tricky some days, but we have a really solid page framework that we work within and I’d say, Natasha, we’re pretty lucky in that we can usually say yes usually, as a manager, Mel usually says we’re in the business of saying yes so we can, another thing that I don’t think we touched on was the yes, we often see mobility aids broken or damaged, we often see that the person usin is the main support person, or caregiver, so, if the person has had to leave the violent situation and no longer is, able to get that support, then we can fund support workers in the short term to bridge that gap, really important.
JAX
Thank you. I loved how you said, Amy, in your presentation, that disability justice work is violence prevention work and really thinking about how having an intersectional response and framework with how you approach clients is, you know, really best practice and really doing this work well I wondered if you had any additional thoughts you wanted to add around that
AMY
Yeah, I think that Natasha and Alicia’s presentation demonstrated this as well I think that Disability justice is primary prevention, but applying those prevention principles and a disability justice lens in terms of supporting our independence and agency at all levels of preventing violence, the early intervention where you start to see those early signs of violence in response and in recovery as well, shows that applying that lens, empowering us as the experts in our own lives and our own safety really is evidence shows that that’s the most effective and the kind of best best practice across all of those levels of the prevention and response pyramid.
JAX
Yeah, yeah, totally agree. Alrighty, well, we’ve just come to and to the end of our session today. But thank you so much for such a wonderful and engaging and useful session for our disability advocates. Thanks always as well to our Auslan interpreters. As I said in the chat, we’ll be sending around the video presentation of today, also the slides, and also all the additional links that we’ve shared as well. Thank you so much, and we’d love to see you at some of our upcoming sessions.
AMY
Thank you all. Thanks, Jax. Thanks, Daru.Thanks, everybody, for coming.
NATASHA
Thank you, Jax. Bye-bye.
JAX
Bye, everyone.
