DVRCV What Does It Take?

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Cathy Humphreys

DVRCV – What does it take?

Keynote presentation: ‘High Risks for Family Violence Interventions’

Professor Cathy Humphreys, School of Social Work, University of Melbourne

Thank you very much and thank you Virginia for the lovely welcome to country. I, too, would like to acknowledge the Wurundjeripeople and the Kulin nation, and pay my respects to elders past and present, and to any elders here today.

I always say that being part of this sector, and being allowed to contribute to this sector a great privilege. I enjoy enormously arriving at events like this and finding whole groups of new faces as well as people who’ve been working tirelessly in this area for many, many years.

As Deb was saying when I arrived… she said it’s just like a wedding, isn’t it? Meeting all the old friends and family from different parts. It is the coming together for events like this that we do create the networks that potentially make a difference to the sector.

My understanding for today is that my role is just to provide an overview of the issues that are galvanising us in Victoria at the moment. And I guess a bit of a picture of how we got to where we are. So a little bit of history and a little bit of context. And we’re really looking forward enormously to hearing from Mhairi McGowan about the well-developed work in Scotland. We look forward to hearing from Mhairi because a lot of people have heard from me before – not that there’s any pressure.

I’ve taken the title of this presentation to be High Risks for Family Violence Interventions as a small play on words. I want to focus on the issues which constitute high family violence risks interventions, but I also didn’t want to shy away from just mentioning some of the potential unintended consequences of developing a more substantial infrastructure for responding to high risk cases.

Just to give you a little overview of what I plan to do: a bit on the Victorian context, some of which has already been discussed; then just talking about some of the risky issues which have had to be addressed in developing the high risk model – the RAMP for Victoria.

So there have been a group of people who’ve been meeting in a very collaborative process for some time and I think that it’s good to have the department being so collaborative in this process, where many people from both academia and sector organisations have worked with government to think through some of the issues about the model.

I’m just going to raise a few of the issues that have been thought about and discussed as part of that. And I’m going to finish with some cautionary notes about the high risk focus.

As we’ve been hearing, and everyone has sought to mention this so far, and I’m continuing to do that – we have been having in Victoria some very prominent and tragic child deaths. Darcy Freeman, aged four; Jai Bailey and Tyler Farquharson in 2005; Luke Batty, Savannah and Indiana in 2014. As well as a number of children also who have died in the last year – eight children from the last data given to us from Victoria Police; eight children in Victoria killed in the past year in the context of family violence. And, as was mentioned, we had another five deaths in Victoria yesterday.

I know that we keep on mentioning these issues, but it does seem to me that we’re seeing in this context also some very serious issues around these children; many of these children were part of revenge killings aimed not at the child, but taking from the woman the most precious people in her life. The intent is the woman’s life-long sadness and pain and the children are almost collateral damage in this particular war zone, the particularly horrific form of violence against women and their children.

We’ve also just been hearing, too, about the way in which domestic homicide is being recalculated in Victoria. I remember being at Mornington Peninsula where I was giving a talk and they just had the newspaper article which said that in 2011-2012 there were 13 arrests for domestic violence, and in 2012-2013, there were 45 arrests for domestic violence related deaths.

That was just quite extraordinary. This is really why we’re here, I guess. But in fact if we’re looking at this number of murders, we’re looking at something that’s extremely… you know, when we need to be doing something different, we need to be taking action in a different way, in a much more crisis-driven way and a much more focused way.

Many of those 45 deaths from the article were around manslaughter, culpable driving and incitement to murder, and that 25 were clear domestic murders. There was also 579 rapes in the context of family violence last year.

So in a population with less than six million people in Victoria, women were being killed at a very disturbing rate, which seems as high as anywhere in the world. Some of this could be to do with some very good forensics that were done by Victorian police, where instead of just taking the data as reported they went into the case notes and could see that there was a lot more murder that was happening in domestic violence related than had previously been thought.

So some of this is about very good work, I think, from Victorian police looking at case notes rather than looking at the reported data. Nevertheless, it remains a highly disturbing figure. I do wonder whether there’s not contagion effect – this is just a hypothetical idea, and I haven’t seen it put around much. But what you see is patterns that occur where you get contagion effect, where one suicide actually leads to more. I wonder whether the group of very disaffected men who are being emboldened by the notion that this is now a possibility; this is what you do when you’re unhappy, disaffected and angry. And that they are creating their own discourse about a sense of entitlement and a sense of wiping out their own families as a response to their own unhappiness and disaffection.

I think it’s an extraordinarily worrying trend and it’s extremely difficult to know what the best response is in terms of prevention of these fatalities and deaths.

I also think that we’ve all mentioned the increasing rates – so not only do we have the fatalities, but we also have a very high rate of reporting now on domestic violence. Again, this may be very strongly representative of a much greater confidence in the system, and it may also be that we’ve widened the definition of family violence. But we’re also looking at very high numbers of crisis calls to both the police and the women’s violence crisis service.

At the same time we’re also seeing very worrying rates of men breaching intervention orders: 820 men breaching more than three times; 200 men more than five times. And that’s the formal reporting, it doesn’t talk about the numbers of women that are putting up with enormous levels of harassment and stalking.

Just moving on to a little bit of history, because that is part of the history of why we’ve got to where we are. But for the last eight years or so, ever since I’ve been back in Victoria (in 2006), there have been many visits from UK police members discussing homicide and also crimes of dishonour. We’ve had state-wide forums addressing high risks since about 2008. We’ve also had the influence, I think, of UK practitioners bringing news about their experience about their experience of MARAC – people like Deb Nicholson and Erin Davis who came from elsewhere having worked and seen how useful and important the high risk response can be.

I think we’ve been galvanised in our own way to take this forward. We’ve also had, I think, a greater awareness of how important it is to share the issues around information sharing, because one organisation doesn’t hold all the information about the levels of risk that women are experiencing.

If you look at 2008 when KPMG did some benchmarking data about the numbers of domestic violence incidents that were being reported, they showed when looking at police data that 2 per cent of 886 incidents police identified six or more risk factors present when they had a domestic violence incident, when they did their risk assessment.

During the same time period, the NCARS data from the north and also the data from the women’s family violence specialist services, found that around 34 per cent of women had nine or more risk factors.

Some of that is to be expected, that you are going to see the level of risk until you actually have trusted conversations with the woman not at the point of crisis. It also might be that given the level of training that’s occurred with the police since 2008, that you might also get police picking up and identifying a lot more risk at family violence incident. But it’s very clear that the women’s services are picking up a huge amount more understanding and identification of the risks than the police attendance at an incident.

Hence the huge importance of sharing information, because actually we’ve got very different sources of that information and very different amounts of knowledge about the level of risk that could be occurring.

So we’ve also had the demonstration models that were already mentioned by Sylvia, and where one was in Geelong and one was in Heidelberg, they were given a very positive evaluation by Thompson and Goodall.

I think one of the things that the evaluation raised was how difficult it is to establish a very effective high risk response; it didn’t just happen with an announcement. There was an enormous amount of process that occurred behind trying to get agencies to work well together, to share information and to act to bring down the risk.

We’ve had the announcement of $30 million for family violence intervention by this government, of which some of that will go to supporting 17 Risk Assessment Management Panels (RAMPs) being rolled out across Victoria. This is a huge program. It’s extraordinarily exciting to think that we are going to be moving forward in this way. And I guess it’s been on the cards for the last six or seven years, so to actually be bringing it forward feels like an enormous opportunity.

In terms of some issues that have been discussed – I know that many of you in this room haven’t been part of these detailed discussions that have been happening, and many of you would have some queries and questions about the process. Because it’s not obvious the way what becomes in and what becomes out when you look at the high risk model.

So the CommonRisk AssessmentFramework (CRAF) is the foundation for family violence risk assessment in Victoria and will remain so. The foundation has been established there and it’s the foundation for getting a shared understanding and shared language for thinking about family violence together.

At the same time, there are a wide range of actuarial tools which would weight some of those risk factors. They’ve been validated with some validated tools. There is quite a lot of evidence to suggest that the use of actuarial tools in conjunction with professional and clinical judgement, does create more consistency and greater accuracy.

There’s been no appetite in Victoria for the use of actuarial tools and we’re not going forward with those actuarial tools at this point. I know that the HRRC does use an actuarial tool, but it’s not necessarily a validated one, but based around the L17. But my understanding is that it isn’t the prime decision making tool in relation to what goes to the high risk forum, but he could say more about that.

I simply raise this issue, not because I’m unhappy about the fact that we’re not using actuarial tools – it’s been totally agreed and that’s really important, I feel very clear about that. But I think it’s something we should keep on the agenda. In the two demonstration sites it took a long time for them to agree what actually was high risk and what was going to go to the panel. And with 17 new RAMP sites, where we know across Victoria we’ve got some excellent interagency working, and we’ve also got some very difficult interagency working. Maybe it’s an issue we should remain and consider and keep under review, because it’s not easy to decide what should come to the high risk panel and it’s not always easily agreed.

There’s certainly, under the model that’s been developed, there will be quite a lot of guidance and quite detailed guidance. So maybe that will make all the difference. I think that will be helpful to see how that plays out.

A central discussion for the group was also thinking about women’s representation, because there is a lot of ambivalence about talking about women without them being present. I think that our baseline has always been that when you’re doing risk assessment, risk planning and risk management, you should always do that with the women involved.

However, when you’re looking at the most high risk, there are very high risks for them to be involved in this process. It may put them at greater danger, particularly if she’s living at home with the offender, and some of these women are, it can be extremely difficult for them to attend something like the high risk panel without putting them at increased danger.

I think, though, that the lack of women’s presence at the forum does raise a whole lot of issues about the way in which we look to good practice in this area. Which means that the briefings from the women are really important; how we represent her at the forum is incredibly important; that the perpetrator focus becomes more important rather than less important.

What we know from the MARACs in England is that those that work well have a perpetrator focus; those that don’t work well can become ones which are really about mother blaming and woman blaming, and they are ones that we want to avoid. You avoid it by creating and continuing to focus in very strict ways on these forums for perpetrators to look at how we manage the accountability and the response to the perpetrator. And I guess the issues of confidentiality are also incredibly important in these forums.

Some other issues that arise are around the child protection issues. Because clearly there will be many children that come in as part of a family intervents forums, and we do know that as the severity of risk to women increases so does it to their children.

There are no formal actuarial tools around family violence for children, and that’s because the issues of risk assessment in this area for children are too complex at this point to be really managed very well within an actuarial tool. But we do know that severity for women also increases severity for children.

I think that one of the issues about the RAMPs is that this is a major opportunity for child protection, because one of the areas where child protection is consistently weak – not just here in Victoria but everywhere – has been on having a focus on men and particularly men who are violent.

It’s not their core business; they’re not well-trained in this area; certainly there’s been a rollout of training over the last six months, which has been very important. But when you’re looking at high-risk offenders, you’re actually looking at policing responses; you’re looking at how child protection works with the police not how child protection works alone.

These high risks forums are going to be really important for capacity building the family violence practice within the child protection area. I think they’re an opportunity. I also think that in the area of post-separation violence child protection has actually only a limited role.

You’ve got the protective parent – taking protective parents through standard child protection investigations is actually not necessarily what’s required, unless they have a perpetrator focus.

Actually, a lot of post-separation violence is much better dealt with through a RAMP, where you’re really trying to take on the issues around the offender’s violence, stalking and harassment. That that’s a much more appropriate venue than actually the child protection processes, unless child protection creates a different form of intervention in the post-separation arena.

Again, that’s wide open for them to be doing some different forms of practice in this area. But really what we have with post-separation violence is a protective parent and one who needs greater support and help in that protection, and that’s the role of the interagency in this area.

Following on the post-separation violence, it’s a bit unclear how many police family violence incidents involve post-separation violence. What we know from some of the work in the UK is that 40 per cent of police referrals to child protection in the UK involve post-separation violence.