INTRODUCING THE SAFE AND TOGETHER™ MODEL

Phoenix is pleased to have partnered with the Safe & Together™ Institute USA to deliver the globally recognised evidence-based CORE model training. The Safe & Together™ model is focused on child protection by supporting the non-offending parent, while ensuring an emphasis on the perpetrator’s patterns of abuse and holding them to account for their violence rather than expecting the survivor to protect, manage, and be responsible for changing the violent behaviour.

The first principle of the Safe and Together (S&T) model is to:

• Keep the children safe and together with the non-offending parent, and maintaining this relationship as a means to keep the children and family safe.

How do we do this?

The Safe and Together CORE training model focuses on assessment, interviewing, documentation and case planning skills. This becomes the foundation for Domestic Violence-informed practice, to keep the families affected by family and domestic violence ‘safe and together’.

Dawson Ruhl, our expert Safe and Together trainer, brings more than 35 years’ experience to Phoenix in a range of areas including clinical practice and supervision, program development, senior management, and social justice reform and advocacy.

“There’s a commonly held idea that children are not affected by domestic violence if they are not in the room when it happened. However, that is a misconception; we now know the evidence is clear that children are impacted and can be severely traumatised.”

“Children experience the yelling, the hitting, the screaming, the crashing, in a myriad of ways, whether they are present or not,” Dawson Ruhl said as he delivered day one of the Safe & Together (S&T) CORE training in Perth recently.

Dawson said a central aim of the S&T model was to assist organisations and the service sector to become more broadly DV-informed in terms of the practice culture, and how family and domestic violence (FDV) is documented.

“The Safe and Together Core training approaches FDV as a pattern of coercive behaviours, rather than incident-based which gives us a better, more holistic understanding of the abuse,” he said.

How are we different?

Recently, a Lotterywest grant application submitted by Phoenix Support and Advocacy Service Inc. was approved by the Premier of Western Australia, the Hon. Mark McGowan MLA.

The grant provided seed funding to assist Phoenix to expand and diversify our services through the establishment of Phoenix Professional Development and Prevention (PDP) Services as a new fee-for-service program and business. Phoenix PDP will include workforce training, sector professional development, clinical supervision and mentoring for professional staff who wish to work with, or currently work with individuals and families impacted by interpersonal violence and abuse. We are thrilled to have a range of industry experts join our team to also provide this training. Read more about the grant here.

In addition to our training, the heart of Phoenix rising is through the community and individuals we work with through our adult child sexual abuse survivors’ counselling programs, which we now offer online. Learn more about our counselling services here including making a referral or self-referring.

The Phoenix Story tells the clients’ story their way as we reach out to those affected by historical child sexual abuse and advocate for those survivors. We are different in how we deliver our training and through the lens of child protection and safety, we focus on prevention and intervention above all else. Get in touch today to discuss how Phoenix can work with your organisation.

Target Audience for Phoenix Training?  Please click here for a full list

Phoenix will be delivering this training virtually across Australia this year with limited places available. Don’t miss out on this exciting training opportunity that you can do in the comfort of your own home or workplace and become more DV-informed. Contact training@phoenix.asn.au to have a conversation about training with us.

Together we will rise, with Phoenix.