Page 4554 - Week 12 - Thursday, 26 October 2017
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
Current
Perpetrator programs
The Third Action Plan 2016-19 of the National Plan to Reduce Violence Against Women and their Children 2010-2022 has a focus on perpetrator interventions. It is the first plan to focus on holding perpetrators accountable and encouraging behaviour change.
The ACT’s approach to working with men who use violence is guided by this framework. The ACT’s Family Violence Act 2016 and other reforms to police and justice system responses to perpetrators, discussed in more detail in the next section, provide a strong framework for increasing perpetrator accountability in the ACT.
Under the Third Action Plan, the ACT has committed to implementing key performance indicators against the National Outcome Standards for Perpetrator Interventions (NOSPI) and participating in national work to develop an approach to report against these indicators annually to drive further improvements. The ACT is currently preparing to provide data for the development of the NOSPI Benchmark Report. This report will be available in 2018.
Legislative changes
The Family Violence Act 2016 (the Act) commenced on 1 May 2017. The Act implements 22 recommendations made by the Australian and New South Wales Law Reform Commissions in their report Family Violence – a National Legal Response (the National Legal Response).
The Act expanded the definition of family violence to include economic abuse, sexual abuse and emotional or psychological abuse and behaviours that are threatening, coercive or controlling. The Act includes a number of specific examples of emotional or psychological abuse including:
• stopping the family member from visiting or having contact with family and friends; and
• stopping a family member from engaging in cultural or spiritual practices.
The Act made a number of important changes to the process for obtaining a family violence order. For example, the Act contains an express provision conferring on courts a power to make a protection order on their own initiative at any stage of a criminal proceeding.
The Act contains the provisions that relate to the National Domestic Violence Order scheme (the NDVO scheme), which was agreed to by the Council of Australian Governments (COAG). The NDVO scheme will help domestic violence orders to be recognised across all states and territories and improve information sharing on a national level with the aim of improving safety for women and children escaping domestic violence. The proposed national commencement date for the NDVO scheme is 25 November 2017.
To support the changes made to legislation and to offer more streamlined services for people in crisis needing legal responses, the National Legal Response implementation included the introduction of new registry procedures, major modifications to the Integrated Courts Management System, development of new template orders and other court documents and updating of information products.
Major reforms that improve access to financial assistance for victims of family violence were also enacted. The Victims of Crime (Financial Assistance) Act 2016 replaced the Victims of Crime Financial Assistance Act 1983. The Victims of Crime Commissioner is the decision maker for the new scheme, which is delivered alongside the Victims Services Scheme. Victims of family violence are now eligible to access immediate needs payments up to
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video