Children’s voices for change

Children’s voices for change: A rights-based approach to understanding and implementing effective supports for children and pre-adolescents as victim-survivors of family violence

The Children’s Voices for Change project engaged children and young people as family violence experts by experience – as research participants, ​co-researchers and Youth Advisory Group members – to enhance our collective understanding of the ​diversity and distinctiveness of children’s experiences of family violence, and the effectiveness of services in meeting their needs. The project reviewed the existing Victorian family violence service landscape and analysed aggregated client data from The Orange Door, to understand children’s system pathways; it surveyed 320 practitioners who provide support services to children who have experienced family violence; conducted participatory research with 23 children and young people who have accessed family violence support services in Victoria; and co-created a Children’s Feedback Tool through collaborative workshops with children and young people and practitioners.

Project reports

CHANGE Children’s Feedback Tool

The project’s six key findings:

1. There is no ‘one size fits all’ for supporting children and young people who have experienced family violence.

Children who experience intersecting forms of structural oppression and marginalisation face greater barriers to accessing family violence supports and having their needs met.

 2. Children need connection, trust and loving relationships with family, friends and pets, to enable them to heal from family violence.

They also want to ensure that they and their family members are safe, healthy and well, and that they have financial security and housing stability.

3. Building and maintaining trust with the child is very important.

Children and young people described services breaching their trust by disclosing information to others, by not understanding their experiences of family violence, and by Victoria Police actions, including where police had seemingly ‘sided’ with the person using violence; children and young people were perceived to be lying about their experiences of family violence; police had failed to respond adequately to their situation; and police actions undermined their safety.

 4. Asking children for feedback about their service experience about their service experience is not common practice in Victoria.

Less than half of practitioners (144/315 = 46%) said their service seeks feedback from children. Where children do give feedback, it is usually through an adult.

5. There are still many barriers to supporting children as victim-survivors of family violence in their own right:

• The specialist family violence service system is insufficiently resourced: practitioners and children alike emphasised their concerns about long wait times to access services, staff shortages and high staff turnover, a lack of specialised programs and therapeutic interventions, insufficient case management periods, and a lack of practitioner expertise and confidence.
• Family law parenting orders often make it hard for services to help children or put children at risk of harm.
• The need for parental consent to engage with services can be used by the person using violence to prevent children’s access to support, as a form of control and ongoing abuse;
• Financial support and housing stability are key unmet needs for children who have experienced family violence.
• Services do not always collaborate and communicate effectively to ensure that important risk information about children is appropriately shared and acted upon.

6. Services and systems must listen to, hear and understand children.

We need to seek children’s direct, unfiltered voices about their family violence response and recovery needs to be able to meet those needs effectively.

Project reports are available here.

CHANGE Children’s Feedback Tool.