Safe Families
What is the Safe Families Program?
The Act for Kids Safe Families Program is a service model involving a multigenerational ecological approach to holistically address the complex issue of domestic and family violence.
Bespoke packages are delivered on a fee-for-service basis according to each family’s specific dynamics and needs. Safe Families works with adult perpetrated domestic and family violence, as well as adolescent/youth/child to parent violence through a Key Worker model.
Safe Families adopts an agile model of co-design around each individual member of the family aimed at identifying and resolving the core underlying issues contributing to their experiences. This can include (but is not limited) to addressing motivation to change, perpetrator accountability, protective parent vulnerability, repairing attachment, increasing empathy, and communication with high conflict individuals.
Safe Families is delivered by a dedicated unit within Act for Kids with our pioneering work starting in the Moreton Bay area.
Safe Families specifically aims to work with:
- Families impacted be domestic and family violence where the person using violence remains a part of the family unit.
- Families where the person using violence is required to coparent.
- Adolescent to parent violence as a result of their experiences of domestic and family violence
What we do:
- Therapeutic In-Home Support – Working intensively with children and their families to address domestic and family violence, improve safety, help children and parents heal from trauma and lead happy lives.
- Therapeutic Family Restoration/Preservation – Working intensively with parents to improve their parenting, address domestic and family violence, and work towards the children being safe in the care of their parents. Providing direct therapeutic intervention to both parents and children.
- Therapeutic Outreach – Work therapeutically with Protective Parents, Parents Using Violence, and Adolescents/Children who use violence to increase safety, improve emotional regulation, and help heal from trauma.
- Therapeutic Coordination – Our teams coordinate internally to a high degree, ensuring that no individual in the family is being overlooked and the complex and often risky dynamics inherent within domestic violence matters are being considered. We take safety concerns seriously and work hard to empower families towards strengths-based solutions.
What we deliver:
- Stability – Increased stability and improved outcomes for children.
- Individualised tailored approach – Dedicated specialist team implementing therapeutic interventions informed by assessments and evidence-based practice.
- Experienced professionals – Highly experienced multi-disciplinary trained staff.
- Diverse and inclusive – Culturally-responsive packages to address domestic and family violence and improve outcomes for families.
- Return on investment – Achievement of outcomes offsets the ongoing and increased costs of child protection and domestic violence.
- Flexible delivery – Intervention for any family who needs intensive therapeutic intervention around domestic and family violence; regardless of their journey through the child protection continuum.
- Comprehensive and professional reporting – Reports are produced periodically with frequent tracking of changes being reported against an Outcomes Framework.
- Group and individual work – Our highly trained staff are facilitators of group programs such as Caring Dads, Shark Cage, Love Bites, and Rhythm 2 Recovery. We can deliver these programs both in group settings or can individualise these programs to meet the needs of the individuals we work with.
- Integrated Service Response approach – Development and facilitation of the integrated service response group to foster service cohesion and quality outcomes for families. Safe Families manages relationships and communications with all stakeholders.
Changing the lives of kids in Australia
Five-year-old Maddie was physically, emotionally and verbally abused by her parents from birth, witnessing severe domestic violence and substance abuse, including Ice.
For the first six years of his little life, eight-year-old Aiden was beaten, burned, threatened, and degraded.