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Safety and Accountability Audit

The Safety Audit is an interdisciplinary self-assessment tool, so the work is conducted by a community team of violence against women experts and key workers who represent the systems that are being examined. Team members collect data and meet as a group to discuss the Audit findings; recommend changes in policy, procedure, and training; strategize how to implement the recommended changes; and help implement, monitor, and evaluate the changes over time.

Internal and inter-agency analysis examining how work routines and case processing protocols strengthen or impede the safety of domestic abuse victims and accountability of perpetrators.

Research Study:

  • Detailed mapping of justice system’s case processing systems
  • Internal report and analysis of how staff at all levels in justice systems agencies are institutionally organised to respond to domestic abuse crimes.
  • Analysis of systems, forms, case files, policies, practices, staff interviews, observations and organisational philosophy
  • Focus on victim safety and perpetrator accountability at all stages of case processing
  • Uncovering and making recommendations on the gaps in the systems’ response
  • Making visible any contradictions between an agency’s assumed response and the actual response, and disparities in intervention

Tools:

Interviews, observations, analyses of case files, policies, focus group feedback.

Practitioners work side-by-side to analyse how systems organise the day-to-day routines of individual practitioners to either centralise or marginalise attention to victim safety and well-being and offender accountability.

Case and Agency Auditing:

A source book, audit processes, methodologies, tools and templates for intra and interagency auditing and monitoring formalise effective cooperation and liaison between CJS practitioners and victim advocacy services as part of the Blueprint for Safety, covered by a Memorandum of Understanding between all agencies.

Audit, process and monitoring tools include:

  • Policy and Practice assessment guide
  • Case and text mapping tools
  • Case review system
  • Tracking sheets
  • Checklists
  • Interview and observation processes and tools
  • Agency specific monitoring tools
  • Best practice template
  • Source book
  • Progress tracking system
  • Policy Development worksheets
  • Data templates
  • Victim focus group templates / direct feedback to CJS agencies

Institutional Analysis can be used to discover information about:

(1) people’s actual lived experience with the ways in which intervention is meeting or not meeting their needs

(2) organisation and function of current practice

(3) contrasts between the stated official process and the actual process

(4) problems that require a shift in policy and practice

(5) whether recommended policies and protocols have been implemented as intended

(6) where harmful unintended consequences and disparity of impact might exist in a system or institution’s response

(7) impact of changes in policy and practice.

Outputs

  • Audit report and recommendations
  • Services mapping
  • Justice system domestic abuse baseline data

Impact

Over 100 safety and accountability systems audits have been carried out in the US, producing a range of new safety and accountability insights, recommendations and changes to policy and practice, which when implemented have reduced re-victimisation, attrition and domestic abuse homicides.

Spearheads institutional cultural change in civil and criminal justice systems and provides a basis for the Implementation of the Blueprint for Safety.