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Round Table Consultation Event – Understanding domestic violence and religion: Exploring how faith-based organisations can be part of the solution. Held Friday 28th October, in-person at

St Athanasius College, Melbourne and online via livestream.

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PURPOSE ... THE OPPORTUNITY

Presented by the Social Work Innovation Research Living Space (SWIRLS) at Flinders University, University of Divinity, Lutheran Church Australia, and Christian Research Association This event was a national gathering to share information about initiatives and research demonstrating how churches and faith communities in Australia are working to prevent and respond to domestic and family violence. This purpose and opportunity of this gathering was to promote inter-faith awareness of how religious organisations and communities are raising awareness about domestic and family violence, and how they understand their role in responding and providing support to congregations and affected individuals – victim/survivors and perpetrators of violence.

The gathering also invited government and service provider representatives to share information about their work with faith communities on this issue. The event supported sharing ideas about how domestic and family violence policies, services, and other relevant resources, can further work with faith communities.

In this space there are difficult conversations and reflections in the call for renewed knowledges, practices and initiatives that will promote safety and reduce the risk of spiritual abuse and domestic and family violence. As religious institutions commit to addressing domestic and family violence, this gathering sought to acknowledge the work being done to transform church and faith-community responses, and ensure churches and faith settings are safe spaces, and support accountability and healing.

RATIONALE

It is timely to bring together church and faith communities to share information about their initiatives because:

Churches and faith-communities are investing in research to understand and address domestic and family violence.
Churches and faith communities are seeking to understand practices and instruction that have detrimentally impacted on and risked victim/survivor safety.
The Royal Commission into Family Violence has recommendations for faith-communities (adopted by the Victorian Government) – the role of faith-communities is recognised as significant in supporting (or constraining) individuals and faith community members to understand, recognise and respond to DFV, and support safety.
Churches and faith communities can support victim/survivor and perpetrator accountability and healing.

PRESENTERS

Professor Wendy Mayer, Dean of Research Strategy, University of Divinity
Professor Sarah Wendt, Director, Social Work Innovation Research Living Space (SWIRLS)
Dr Josephine Clarke, Research Associate, Social Work Innovation Research Living Space (SWIRLS)
Dr Ruth Powell, Director at NCLS Research

PANNELISTS

Lieutenant Star Conliffe, Salvation Army Officer
Associate Professor Cathy Vaughan, Melbourne School of Population and Global Health
Tania Farha, CEO, Safe and Equal
Janette Phelan, Joint Churches Domestic Violence Prevention Project (Queensland)

Resources, including recordings of the research presentations, panel discussion and presentation slide decks are available below.

Responses from the consultation will be collated and a report will be produced and distributed as an outcome of this event.

Professor Wendy Mayer - Welcome and Acknowledgment of Country

Professor Sarah Wendt and Josephine Clarke - Research Presentation

Presentation slide deck - Professor Sarah Wendt and Dr Josephine Clarke

Dr Ruth Powell - Research Presentation

Presentation slide deck - Dr Ruth Powell

Please note, due to technical difficulties the slide deck did not present in full during the live presentation. The slide deck provided here is the full presentation and, as such, may not exactly match the order delivered in the live presentation.

National Anglican Family Violence Project - Research Outputs: Main report plus 3 detailed study reports

Research Presentations - Question Time

Panel Discussion (Facilitated by Professor Sarah Wendt) - Janette Phelan, Associate Professor Cathy Vaughan , Lieutenant Star Conliffe, and Tania Farha

The Teaching/Research Nexus

While many of us espouse the value of the teaching-research nexus in university education and in social work, research has shown it is often unclear what the nexus is and how it expresses itself in an academic’s work. The nexus can be explicit or subtle and can be achieved in many ways. For this SWIRLS PhD and Honours Research Seminar Professor Sarah Wendt poses questions and leads a discussion about:

What is the teaching/research nexus?,
Why does the teaching/research nexus matter in social work?
How to strategically plan for the teaching/research nexus to be more visible in the discipline?

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SWIRLS Research Seminar - Child Protection

SWIRLS researchers and PhD students have the drive to make a difference in the lives of children and young people. This ‘in conversation’ panel, facilitated by Professor Sarah Wendt, provided an opportunity to hear about current research exploring child protection lived experiences, practices, and systems. Furthermore, the panellists provided their reflections on how their research contributes to continue improvement for children, young people and their families.

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Panellists:

Dr Carmela Bastian – who has 20 years experience practicing in child protection and now researches child-centred practices and collaboration across systems

Dr Ben Lohmeyer – who has ten years’ experience in the non-government youth services sector and now researches young people’s experiences of structural and systemic violence

Luke Cantley – Research Fellow who has gained extensive experience working as an Aboriginal Health Worker and seeks to understand the role Aboriginal culture plays as a protective factor within the child protection system

Amy Bromley – PhD student who has ten years of experience in the child protection sector and is researching how child protection systems reform through empowering practitioners

Isabelle Hermes – PhD student who is researching the service engagement of parents who are at risk of, or who have experienced, child removal by statutory child protection agencies

Making and breaking social policy podcast

Featuring a range of guests who are involved in the making and breaking of social policy, this podcast is about how we all live together and if we can make that work.

This podcast was created as a key piece of content for two social policy topics in Social Work at Flinders University. It is hosted by Dr Ben Lohmeyer, Lecturer in Social Work at Flinders Uni and SWIRLS Member.

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Other forums, webinars and podcasts

Emerging Minds podcast - Child-focused approaches to complex problems

Emerging Minds podcast series - Child-focused practice approaches to complex problems
Emerging Minds and SWIRLS, January 2023

The compounding effects of disadvantage can mean that children and families present to services with multiple intersecting issues. Trauma, intergenerational disadvantage, alcohol and drug use, mental illness and family and domestic violence (FDV) can all impact one another, making them more challenging for children and families to overcome. Child-focused practice approaches are key to supporting children and families facing complex, coexisting problems.

So, how can practitioners provide the support that is required when working with children and families affected by complex issues? What are the specialist skills that all practitioners need to work effectively with children and families, and how can these be developed in busy professional roles?

In this two-part podcast series, Professor Sarah Wendt and the SWIRLS team share structural approaches to conversations with parents who are facing intersectional disadvantage. They describe the important competencies in non-blaming conversations with parents, creating opportunities to make change in the lives of children.

Throughout these episodes, Sarah and the team examine three key practice questions:

What is happening for the child and how can their safety and wellbeing be maintained or improved?
How can an understanding of parenting capacity uncover many of the strategies that parents use to support their children, despite multiple disadvantages?
How can a focus on the parent-child relationship help practitioners to have supportive and non-threatening conversations with parents?

Child-focused approaches to complex problems – part one is available now. Part two will be released on Tuesday 7 February 2023.

Listen to the podcast series - Child-focused approaches to complex problems

Emerging Minds has partnered with SWIRLS to develop a suite of resources, including these podcasts and practice papers. These resources provide practical examples of structural approaches to holding child-focused conversations with children and parents who are experiencing adversity, using a structural approach to consider the needs of children and understand the context of parent and family adversity. They support a focus on the environments that affect family life, a curiosity in the parent’s story, and non-shaming conversations that support child safety and wellbeing.

Access all resources

Centre for Excellence in Child and Family Welfare - Emerging Themes : Collaborations

Emerging Themes Video Series : Collaboration

In the second instalment of the Centre for Excellence in Child and Family Welfare 'Emerging Themes' video series, Professor Sarah Wendt (Matthew Flinders Fellow and Professor in Social Work, College of Education, Psychology and Social Work, Flinders University) & Dr Carmela Bastian (Senior Lecturer, College of Education, Psychology and Social Work, Flinders University), speak on the importance of how effective system collaboration and coordination can keep children and families safe.

Uncertainty in Social Work

Hear from Flinders University's Social Work Innovation Research Living Space (SWIRLS) PhD candidate and Associate Lecturer in Social Work, Chris Reynolds, as he discusses the topic of 'uncertainty in social work' in a cross Centre conversation as a special guest for the Centre for Social Work Innovation and Research's (CSWIR) 2022 podcast series.

Fearless Minds interview series - The unseen impacts of youth violence

Focusing on the invisible - The unseen impacts of youth violence

When we think of youth violence, we might think of school bullying or youth ‘gangs’. But SWIRLS researcher Dr Ben Lohmeyer steps back from these eye-catching behaviours to uncover where violence is an invisible and accepted part of Australian society.

Hear from Dr Ben Lohmeyer who explores the concept of invisible violence and its impact on the lives of our young people. Are violent movies and video games really corrupting young people's minds? What are other less visible ways that young people are being exposed to power inequalities and violence? Is being a young person harder today than it was 20 years ago?

Diversity considerations for older Australians receiving aged care and palliative care

Dr Georgia Rowley, RePaDD Member and Research Fellow, Social Work Innovation Research Living Space (SWIRLS), discusses the needs for diversity considerations in Australia’s aged care and end-of-life care workforce, and the creation and use of informational web pages attaining to diverse population groups for the RePaDD seminar series where members and guest speakers present their research and its implications for palliative care, death and dying across the community, and health and social systems.

Read the article - Steps towards equitable care: creating web pages to highlight diversity for Australia’s aged care and end of life care workforce

Watch the seminar video

Decolonising Social Work

Aboriginal social work academics Sue Green and Bindi Bennett posed the challenge: ‘Decolonising requires the individual and in turn the profession to undergo a journey of self-discovery and a personal process of decolonising themselves’ in their article for Australian Social Work journal. In this forum, SWIRLS Members respond to this challenge and also talk about what decolonisation means to them. These resources formed part of the Nordic Circles Study Group conference - decolonising social work, held on Monday 9th May, 2022.

Read the article - Wayanha: A Decolonised Social Work

Decolonising - what does it mean?

Decolonising - responding to the challenge

Nordic Circles Study Group Conference - Welcome to Country and decolonising social work forum

For the Nordic Circles Study Group Conference 2022, a live Welcome to Country by Kaurna Elder, Uncle Mickey O’Brien was broadcast from Australia, followed by SWIRLS members engaging in a group conversation, about the importance of an Acknowledgement of Country and Australia’s historical context, colonial legacies and continuing impacts. The circle creates a space for regular collaboration over an extended period of time, durable networks in the Nordic-Baltic region and beyond and provides a cross-disciplinary forum for debating topics that are not already established in universities, thereby contributing to the initiation of new research agendas and alternative perspectives.

Welcome to Country by Kaurna Elder, Uncle Mickey Kumatpi Marrutya O'Brien

Acknowledgement of Country and discussion by Luke Cantley & SWIRLS

Learn more about Nordic Circles Study Group

Social work routes - health inequities and decolonisation

Social work routes podcast - health inequities and decolonisation

Luke Cantley has family connections to the Gunditjmara nation of Victoria (Australia) and is a Research Associate located within the Social Work Innovation Research Living Space (SWIRLS) at Flinders University. Through his research Luke seeks to understand the role Indigenous culture plays as a protective factor within the child protection system, whilst also exploring the nuances between child safety and cultural safety. Luke has gained extensive experience working as an Aboriginal Health Worker using a strengths-based approach across diverse sectors including Prison Health, Primary Health Care, Public Housing and Mental Health Services.

This podcast is part of the The Social Work Routes podcast, dedicated to exploring the pathways to social justice work. The podcast is hosted by Kris Clarke, an Associate Professor at the University of Helsinki.

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Emerging minds podcasts – Family violence and child-aware practice

Emerging minds podcasts – Family violence and child-aware practice

Listen to podcast - part 1

This episode is the first in a two-part series on family and domestic violence and child-aware practice. Tune in to hear experienced family violence practitioners and other leaders in the field discuss the impact of family and domestic violence on children and the mother-child relationship, and some of the practice dilemmas that accompany conversations with mothers about their children’s wellbeing in a context of family violence, and some ways of having conversations with mothers that respond to these dilemmas.

Listen to podcast - part 2

Tune in to hear experienced family violence practitioners and other leaders in the field discuss some of the possible entry points into conversations about children’s wellbeing with mothers experiencing family violence and fathers who are using violence. They’ll also address themes of safety, complexity, and organisational support. This episode is the second in a two-part series on family and domestic violence and child-aware practice.

ANROWS insights podcast - How do we engage men who use violence?

Engaging men who use violence in conversations about change is a critical first step to sustainable attitudinal and behaviour change.

Engaging men who use violence: Invitational narrative approaches, a research report from ANROWS, explores how invitational narrative approaches use stories to challenge minimisation, denial or apathy towards the use of violence against women and children. Invitational narrative practice engages perpetrators in an emotional journey, supporting them to take responsibility for their behaviours by discovering their core values and relationship ideals.

In this episode, members of the research team Professor Sarah Wendt (Flinders University), Dr Kate Seymour (Flinders University), and Chris Dolman (Emerging Minds and Uniting Communities) sit down with Michele Robinson, Director, Evidence to Action (ANROWS) to discuss what invitational narrative practice is, how shame and “ethical preferences” play an important role in this technique and discuss how to evaluate the effectiveness of this work.

As an outcome of this project, ANROWS, in partnership with Flinders University and Uniting Communities, hosted a symposium for policy-makers and practitioners, led by Professor Sarah Wendt, on invitational narrative approaches to engaging men who use violence. The symposium explores the key findings of the research project.

View the symposium in our public lecture resources here.

Read the research reports in our reports publications resources here.

For additional information, please consult ANROWS website.

Listen to the podcast