When Sophie* attended a domestic violence disclosure meeting with South Australian police and a domestic violence support worker, she was curled in on herself and could barely speak.
Her friend, who accompanied her as a support person, had been the one to apply on Sophie’s behalf to the disclosure scheme, which allows victims of family violence to be told of their partner’s history of violent crimes, so that Sophie could find out information about her partner.
After a screening process, with Sophie’s consent, and under strict confidentiality arrangements, police were able to meet with Sophie, and tell her that her partner did in fact have a history of reported violent behaviour toward a former partner.
After hearing this news, Sophie’s transformation was remarkable.
“She began to weep,” the caseworker wrote in their notes of the meeting.
“It was evident that [she] realised, in that moment, that she was not responsible for his use of violence towards her … This information had a profound impact on [her] as her entire physicality changed.”
After the disclosure, Sophie revealed more about the abuse she and her children had endured for years and the ways they sought to protect themselves. She engaged in domestic violence counselling and was able to participate in safety planning and started to think about ways she might leave the relationship safely.
Sophie is one of 2,581 people who have applied to access the South Australian domestic disclosure scheme (DVDS) since its inception in 2018. In the six years it has been running it has seen a 200% increase in the number of applicants to the scheme, with 96% of these applicants being women.
An independent review of the SA scheme, shared exclusively with the Guardian, has praised it as a model initiative, finding it had helped hundreds of women make better informed decisions about their safety, with the report author calling it the “best scheme that exists globally”.
“I think it’s hands down the best scheme. Not only hands down, but by a long margin,” said Katerina Hadjimatheou, director of the centre for criminology at the University of Essex, who led the review and who spent the last year researching every domestic violence disclosure program in the world. “I really think it’s got it right.”
Despite this, there has been reluctance in most Australian jurisdictions to consider implementing disclosure programs.
“I think it’s the best thing we’ve come up with,” said Mergho Ray, manager integrated programs at Women’s Social Services SA, which runs the scheme jointly with South Australia police. “People are underwhelmed by it nationally and I don’t get it … I don’t understand that not everyone is yahooing about this across Australia. But, we are.”
How it works
The disclosure scheme allows South Australian police to access and disclose the criminal history of the applicant’s partner (or former partner with whom they have ongoing contact), as well as any reports that have been made to police about them of certain crimes, any intervention orders they may have had against them and breaches of intervention orders.
Experts said that the fact that police could disclose reports of criminal behaviour and not just crimes where charges had been laid or convictions recorded, as is the case in some DV disclosure schemes globally, made a huge difference in the efficacy of the South Australian scheme.
There are strict rules about sharing this information with the subject who has asked for it. Firstly, subjects must havea screening call with someone from Women’s Safety Services SA to lay out the reasons for their fear and the ongoing nature of their relationship with the partner.
“[You can’t just] go out with someone once and you go, ‘Oh, I’m going to check them out before I make my second date,’” said Ray.
The applicant must also sign a confidentiality agreement promising not to share the information with anyone. The report found that there had been no legal challenges or privacy complaints made about the program, which is often cited as a criticism of disclosure schemes.
Ray’s team are the main point of contact for any applicants to the DVDS and are present with the applicant at the disclosure meeting.
The report into the DVDS found that the dual model – of police and specialist DV support – was key to its success. 86% of people engaging with the DVDS had no contact with any domestic or family violence support service before applying for information through the scheme.
The report found that 99% of clients using the DVDS who responded to a survey after using it (269 people or 25% of the 1064 people who attended a disclosure meeting), were satisfied with the service they received, compared to just 64% in England and Wales.
“The data speaks for itself,” said Hadjimatheou.
Among the design features of the SA scheme that made it so effective, she said, were the fact that service users were allowed a support person with them, that meetings did not take place at police stations, that police who attended were usually in plaineclothes , and the way disclosures were phrased by police, including telling clients that just because no information was available to share about their partner did not mean the client was not at risk.
The report found that First Nations people and people who met their partners through dating apps were overrepresented as applicants, relative to their respective populations in the general South Australian community, with the report suggesting this could reflect the overrepresentation of both groups among those experiencing family violence.
How it helps
According to the report, clients reported a largely positive impact of having information disclosed to them, including making visible previously hidden patterns of abuse by serial perpetrators, correcting victim-blaming narratives, and helping clients make informed decisions about their relationship.
Ray shared accounts of some people who her team had supported through the DVDS.
Multiple women, who had children from prior relationships, discovered through the DVDS that their partners had a history of sexual offending against children, which led them to leave the relationship.
One woman learned that her partner had a history of violent assaults against his former partners after they broke up with him, allowing her to take steps to try to protect her safety as she prepared to leave him.
Multiple women, after learning information about their partners through the DVDS, decided to make police reports for the first time, so that there would be a record for other women who might enter into a relationship with their partners in the future.
“I walked out of the disclosure with a sense of relief, it took a huge weight off my shoulders that it wasn’t me, it was the same pattern of abuse to his prior girlfriends,” said one woman, quoted in the report. “It gave me a feeling of being shame and guilt free. I cannot articulate the freedom I feel now.”
‘I don’t understand that not everyone is yahooing about this’
Hadjimatheou says the South Australian scheme “should be considered a model for other jurisdictions” and she has presented on it to the UK Home Office and National Police Chiefs’ Council.
She expressed bewilderment that the scheme was not more widely known in Australia and that other states had not implemented similar programs.
“In Australia, more than any other jurisdiction, the public debate has been very dominated by this idea that if [a disclosure scheme] doesn’t [assist people] at the very start of the relationship, and it’s not that early intervention prevention, then it’s useless,” she said.
Hadjimatheou said this criticism was part of the reason that a NSW scheme, which ran from 2016-2018, was not continued.
A Monash University review of the South Australia DVDS, the NSW scheme, and the New Zealand disclosure scheme, published last year, raised significant concerns about the disclosure schemes, including that they may contribute to victim-blaming narratives, ran the risk of giving users a false sense of security if there was nothing to disclose, and that users – including in SA – reported being left with inadequate support after the disclosure meeting.
Kate Fitz-Gibbon, professor at Monash University, said it was “great to see additional research on the efficacy of domestic violence disclosure schemes” but that she remained concerned about the efficacy of disclosure schemes and said they carried significant resourcing implications.
“Our research suggests such resources may be better allocated towards other evidence-based policies and practices,” she told the Guardian.
Representatives from the NSW and Victorian governments did not answer questions about whether disclosure schemes were being considered for their states, but a Victorian government spokesperson said: “We have led the nation in the work on preventing family violence, but when women are still dying at the hands of men – we must do more.”
