Safe at Home
Safe at Home is a new approach to supporting people experiencing family violence. In February 2025 McAuley launched a three-year trial of the Safe at Home response in Geelong, in partnership with local service provider Meli. The Victorian State Government is funding the Safe at Home trial.
You can visit the Safe at Home website for detailed information about this innovative new approach and the trial taking place in Geelong.
What is Safe at Home?
Safe at Home is an early intervention model that aims to keep women and children safe in their own homes and prevent homelessness. It does this by providing rapid, flexible and coordinated support for the whole household, including women, children and the person using violence.
Safe at Home is different to how things have been done in the past. Women often have to make the difficult decision to leave their home to escape violence. Leaving their home can cause women and children to become disconnected from their community, work and education. It can also lead to homelessness. According to Homelessness Australia, “domestic and family violence is the leading cause of homelessness for women”.
We believe it’s time to change the system. Women and children should be able to remain in their own homes.
Holistic support for the whole household
Safe at Home aims to provide holistic support through:
- Earlier intervention and faster response times
- Flexible, longer-term support periods, responsive to changing needs
- A whole-of-household approach through personalised coordinated responses
- A range of tailored supports from case management, legal and financial support, and counselling to practical assistance like access to home security upgrades
- Support for children and young people as separate clients
- Support and accountability for the person using violence
- Help to build the household’s economic capacity and prevent homelessness
Safe at Home has been developed through years of research, advocacy, cross-sector collaboration and input from people with lived experience of family violence and people who have used violence.
It aims to create system-level changes so that people experiencing family violence can get the support they need to stay safely in their own home and maintain their connections with work, school and community. This will reduce the number of people forced into homelessness, and the number who return to live with people using violence because they have nowhere else to live.
The current system
Family violence is the single largest driver of homelessness for women in Victoria. In 2022-23, over 23,000 women and 13,000 children who had experienced family violence were assisted by homelessness services (AIHW, 2023). Each year in Australia, 7960 women are returning to live with people who use violence because they have nowhere affordable to live (Equity Economics, 2021)
There is little hope for accessing affordable housing, with the wait time for family violence victim-survivors averaging close to two years (DFFH, 2024).
Safe at Home research
McAuley consulted with women who have used our services, who have become homeless because of family violence. This gave us valuable information about what really happens on the ground and where things are not working well – as well as whether being able to stay home safely could have been an option. Read more about: Listening to those with lived experience.
Together with Melbourne University we also interviewed frontline workers in family violence and homelessness services, gathering a wealth of insights into how the system was operating. Read what this research found.
Parity – April 2023
A special edition of Parity, the journal of the Council to Homeless Persons, explored the issue and canvassed solutions. McAuley was a sponsor of the edition and contributed several articles:
Listening to those with lived experience
‘It’s in McAuley’s DNA’: opinion piece by Jocelyn Bignold OAM
‘The time if right’: re-imagining ‘Safe at Home’
For further information on the ‘Safe at Home’ project, contact: felicityp@mcauley.org.au