Appendix 4: MARAM Pillars

Pillar 1

Shared understanding of family violence

It is important that all professionals, regardless of their role, have a shared understanding of family violence and perpetrator behaviour, including its drivers, presentation, prevalence and impacts. This enables a more consistent approach to risk assessment and management across the service system and helps keep perpetrators in view and accountable and victim survivors safe. To that end, Pillar 1 aims to build a shared understanding about:

• what constitutes family violence, including common perpetrator actions and behaviours, and patterns of coercion and control
• the causes of family violence, particularly community attitudes about gender, and other forms of inequality and discrimination
• established evidence-based risk factors, particularly those that relate to increased likelihood and severity of family violence.

Pillar 2

Consistent and collaborative practice

Pillar 2 builds on the shared understanding of family violence created in Pillar 1, by developing consistent and collaborative practice for family violence risk assessment and management across different professional roles and sectors.

Each professional should use the Structured Professional Judgement approach, appropriate to their role in the system, to assess the level or ‘seriousness’ of risk, informed by:

• the victim survivor’s self-assessed level of risk
• evidence-based risk factors (using the relevant assessment tool)
• information sharing with other professionals as appropriate to help inform professional judgement and decision making
• using an intersectional analysis when applying professional judgement to determine the level of risk.

Pillar 3:

Responsibilities for risk assessment and management

Pillar 3 builds on Pillars 1 and 2 and describes responsibilities for facilitating family violence risk assessment and management. It provides advice on how professionals and organisations define their responsibilities to support consistency of practice across the service system, and to clarify the expectations of different organisations, professionals and service users.

Pillar 4

Systems, outcomes and continuous improvement

Pillar 4 outlines how organisational leaders and governance bodies contribute to, and engage with, system-wide data collection, monitoring and evaluation of 12 tools, processes and implementation of the Framework. This pillar also describes how aggregated data will support better understanding of service-user outcomes and systemic practice issues and, in turn, continuous practice improvement. This information will also inform the five-year evaluation to ensure it continues to reflect evidence-based best practice.