- Published:
- Thursday 8 July 2021 at 4:30 pm
The Victorian Government is delivering world-leading reform across the service system to upskill professionals to identify, assess and manage family violence risk.
Family Safety Victoria has been working in collaboration with Curtin University and No to Violence to develop Multi-Agency Risk Assessment and Management (MARAM) Practice Guides and assessment tools for professionals working with adults who use family violence.
The guides have been developed through consultation and user testing involving more than 1,000 professionals over 18 months. This included academics and expert stakeholders with specialist practice knowledge in working with people using violence, including towards:
- Aboriginal people and communities
- LGBTIQ communities
- people with disabilities
- diverse multicultural, language and faith communities
- older people.
These resources build on the MARAM Framework (released 2018) and victim survivor focused Practice Guides (released 2019). The MARAM reform continues to respond to the Royal Commission into Family Violence recommendations, the Expert Advisory Committee on Perpetrator Interventions Report and findings from a range of inquests.
The new perpetrator-focused resources support professionals to understand their responsibility for risk identification, assessment and management. They create new approaches to individual, service and system-level perpetrator accountability through better coordination of interventions across services. The new resources also maintain a focus on victim survivors by recognising their experiences and the impacts of violence and coercive control while supporting interventions with perpetrators that reinforce victim survivors’ safety.
The first set of perpetrator-focused MARAM Practice Guides and tools were released online from 12 July 2021, targeted at services outside those who specialise in working with people using family violence. This will include:
- an updated MARAM Foundation Knowledge Guide, incorporating new practice concepts for working with adults using family violence
- practice guides for professionals to safely engage, identify, assess and manage risk with people using violence, including safety planning for their risks and needs
- new identification and risk assessment tools (to support assessment with and of the person using violence)
- new risk management and safety planning templates to support practitioners
- guidance on
- identifying patterns of coercive control
- misidentification of predominant aggressors
- working with perpetrators with cognitive disability and complex needs
- working with perpetrators who are parents
- responses to perpetrator suicide risk
- secondary consultation
- referral
- information sharing
- coordinated, ongoing monitoring of risk.
A second set of Comprehensive MARAM Practice Guides and tools, targeting services who specialise in working with people using violence, will be released in late 2021, after a period of user testing.
Supplementary MARAM Practice Guides to support professionals to work with adolescents using family violence are also in development and further updates will be provided later in 2021.
Training for services in the new perpetrator-focused MARAM Practice Guides will commence in 2022.
Training and implementation support for these resources will be funded through the 2021-22 State Budget, which allocated $97 million over 4 years for continued implementation of the MARAM, Family Violence Information Sharing Scheme (FVISS) and Child Information Sharing Scheme (CISS) reforms.
This builds on the 2020-21 State Budget MARAM and FVISS allocation of $2.7 million, and the initial development and implementation funding in 2017-18 State Budget of $30 million over 2 years for MARAM and $11.6 million over 4 years for FVISS.
You can find out more about MARAM practice guidelines and resources on the MARAM webpage.
Updated