Family and domestic violence and child-aware practice

This course is the second in a suite of family and domestic violence courses. The foundation course, The Impact of Family and Domestic Violence on the Child, should be completed first.

Download course summary here

This course examines opportunities for practitioners to engage in a prevention and early intervention approach to promote children’s mental health and wellbeing in the context of family and domestic violence (FDV).

It will provide you with a conversation guide to assist your engagement with parents who are living with FDV to enquire about their children’s social and emotional wellbeing.

Whilst this area of work presents challenges for practitioners, it is important that they work in a way that actively considers the safety and social and emotional wellbeing of children in families where FDV is present.

This course is based on the following understandings:

• FDV is prevalent in the lives of many Australian women and children.
• Women experiencing FDV will typically not present at specialist FDV services.
• There is a role for workers in non-FDV services to gain skills in crisis response, risk assessment and safety planning to recognise and respond to FDV.
• It is important that this response has a focus on the children in these families to minimise the effects of FDV on children’s mental health and wellbeing.

This course will not equip you in the skills of crisis response, risk assessment and safety planning to recognise and respond to FDV. It assumes you have a basic understanding of these. It will explore an approach that will help you to focus on the children in families where FDV is a presenting issue.

As you work through this course, you will engage with examples of situations where:

• a father presents to a service and it becomes evident that he is using violence and abuse in the family, affecting his female partner and children
• a mother presents to a service and it becomes evident that she and her children are living with her male partner who is using violence and abuse in the family.

Although family and domestic violence can occur in many different kinds of intimate or family relationships, it is most frequently perpetrated by men towards their female partners and children¹. It is within this context that this course looks at the ways in which children are impacted by violence.

This course is designed for practitioners in adult-focused services who engage with adult and family adversity. It recognises the significant number of parents affected by family and domestic violence who present to services, and the interrelated nature of FDV and mental health, substance use, homelessness, poverty, and child protection issues.

This should be undertaken after completing the Impact of Family and Domestic Violence on the Child: An Introduction course.

It is estimated that the course will take you 2-4 hours to complete, including watching the videos, completing reflection activities and assessments. You can undertake the course across multiple sessions at your own pace. The last screen you visit before logging off will be bookmarked and you will have the option of returning to that screen when you next log in.

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