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Legislative Council - Fifty-Fourth Parliament, Second Session (54-2)
2021-08-25 Daily Xml
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Domestic and Family Violence

The Hon. N.J. CENTOFANTI (14:49): My question is to the Minister for Human Services regarding domestic violence. Can the minister please update the council on the Marshall Liberal government's services for perpetrators of domestic and family violence?

The Hon. J.M.A. LENSINK (Minister for Human Services) (14:49): I thank the honourable member for her question. It does give me great pleasure to provide some further information in relation to this matter.

As I think I have spoken about before, in relation to domestic and family violence one of our many commitments was to host a statewide round table, I think it was, in the early days. That was one of our first 30-day commitments, which we were able to do. From that, we took the view that going out to regional South Australia and speaking to communities directly about what services they would like to see going forward was one of the areas in which we particularly identified that perpetrator services needed to be boosted.

Prior to that, services for perpetrators have been quite limited in South Australia. My understanding is that there are programs that operate in the correctional services space, but unfortunately the efficacy of those is only about 50 per cent. That probably speaks to the fact that they are tertiary services, and once someone has been incarcerated their behaviours are often entrenched. There are also some programs mandated by the domestic and family violence court for people who have to appear before that service.

We wanted to make sure there were services available in the community. As frontline workers have said to us, they often have perpetrators themselves coming to them and saying, 'I think I need help. What can I do?' From 1 July, we have implemented a new program, which was put to tender and awarded to No to Violence, a national service that operates in other jurisdictions. They will be employing local staff here as well.

It will do a number of things to assist in this space, as well as connecting people to services and providing support interventions. It is also looking at increasing the capacity of frontline workers to identify perpetrators through their work, acting as a central referral point for perpetrators of domestic and family violence, as well as for their friends, family and concerned community members. It will facilitate a number of referrals to specialist support, as well as tracking and mapping perpetrator movement throughout the South Australian system, which will be important for our body of work to understand how this impacts on people across the system.

We are looking forward to the outcomes of that to understand these issues better and to ensure that people are receiving support when they need it.

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