Better practice in responding to family violence

The principle that businesses should lead from the top and demonstrate accountability addresses the need for a whole-of-organisation commitment to responding to family violence.

Organisations seeking to achieve this principle:

• develop a family violence strategy for the whole organisation
• consider all relevant functions of the business
• develop policies for staff as well as customers
• consider appropriate responses to perpetrators
• embed cultural and systems changes
• establish ongoing monitoring and evaluation.

Building an organisation’s response to family violence may require cultural change. Businesses can drive this through clear and consistent messages from their leaders and an ongoing awareness of how the business is tracking in their response to family violence.

In our 2019 research to measure whether family violence policies are improving outcomes for victims-survivors, a consumer advocate gave the following feedback:

“There’s an organisation wide cultural response that will have an impact on the way that customers who are affected by family violence are responded to, because it’s a whole mindset, it’s a whole culture that’s modelled inside and outside the organisation.”