Development of a General Stopping Violence Programme – DVA approval

HMA is taking the initiative to develop a National Domestic Violence Programme to meet the criteria for programme accreditation under the Domestic Violence Act 1995. I am aware over time programmes become stale, integrity drifts, methodologies change, and research points us in new directions. Maintaining practice currency and ensuring we are delivering the best quality programmes is vitally important if we are to truly protect the safety of women and children who are living with family violence.

With that in mind I have invited ten key thinkers and practitioners from the field to a two-day working session in Christchurch, the week before Christmas. We have a wonderful mix of people with significant experience in cultural approaches, gender awareness, programme supervision experience, support for those with victimisation experiences, theoretical knowledge, and child protection experience. I am anticipating a rich conversation.

From this we will scope out the philosophical ideas, delivery approach and content. We will then develop this into three programme variations:

• Open 50 hour general group programme – with whanau and individual sessions as is appropriate
• Closed 50 hour general group programme – with whanau and individual sessions as is appropriate
• 12 hour individual programme – with whanau as is appropriate
• Theory book to support the programme
• Training programme which we have online ready to go – this also fits into a Certificate in Violence and Abuse Intervention – we will hopefully have this NZQA registered early in 2011.

I am framing the conversation around the notion of interventions to create safety for family/whanau, rather than the language of programmes. My thinking is that this opens the space for consideration of what is the best mix in terms of approaches to intervene with family violence and create safety for the individual family/whanau. This might be a combination of individual, group and family/whanau accountability/restorative work. This has the potential to create challenges for agencies but it is my view that unless we demonstrate flexibility and responsiveness then effectiveness is impacted.

We have a timeline to have the development work completed by March 2011. We will keep you appraised through the newsletter as we progress.

Comments are closed.