The Safe and Together Model is an internationally recognised suite of tools and interventions designed to help child welfare professionals become domestic violence informed. The Safe and Together Model was developed by the Safe and Together Institute.
The Safe and Together ModelTM provides methods and interventions designed to help child protection professionals become domestic violence informed. This child centred approach is based on the tenets that children are best served, when we can work together toward keeping them safe and with the non-offending parent. The approach provides a framework to support practitioners from statutory and non-statutory backgrounds to work collaboratively with domestic violence survivors and intervening with domestic violence perpetrators to enhance the safety and wellbeing of children living with Domestic Family Violence.

The Safe and Together (S&T) Institute’s approach is to address domestic and family violence, specifically intimate partner violence in a child protection context which has been influencing practice across Australia since approximately 2013. The model was developed by an experienced men’s behaviour change practitioner from the USA and has been incorporated into service models in other jurisdictions such as Queensland, Western Australia and South Australia, as well as some specialist DFV services in the NT. The S&T approach promotes ‘domestic violence-informed practice’, along with trauma-informed practice. The model aims to achieve better outcomes for children and families through developing a domestic violence informed child welfare system which includes improved staff competencies and cross system collaboration. The three key principles for the S&T model are:

• Keeping a child safe and together with the non-offending parent
• Partnering with the non-offending parent
• Intervening with the perpetrator to reduce risk and harm for children

PAThways and Research In Collaborative Inter-Agency practice (the PATRICIA Project) is an action research project focused on the collaborative relationship between specialist community-based domestic and family violence (DFV) support services for women and their children, and statutory child protection (CP) organisations.

Drawing together a diverse range of participants from five states of Australia, it comprised five components of research, each with its own methodology, set within an action research framework that facilitated a process of changing things while simultaneously studying the “problems” of developing collaborative work and strengthening perpetrator accountability. The intended outcome was to use evidence to foster greater collaboration to support the safety and wellbeing of women and their children, and strengthen accountability for perpetrators of DFV.

For more information, read the report from the Australia's National Research Organisation for Women's Safety