How to get help with family violence

If you or anyone else is in immediate danger, call 000 and ask for police. If it is not safe to speak, stay connected — Australian emergency call takers follow a specific process for silent and interrupted calls.

If you are deaf, hard of hearing or have a speech impairment, contact 000 through the National Relay Service. If you need an interpreter, call the Translating and Interpreting Service on 131 450 and ask to be connected — police, hospitals and services can also arrange interpreters directly, and using a family member as an interpreter is not appropriate in these situations.

For support that is not an emergency, call 1800RESPECT on 1800 737 732. It operates 24 hours a day, is free and confidential, and provides counselling as well as referral into the specialist services in your state. It also runs online chat and text options, which are safer where a phone call could be overheard.

You do not have to have decided anything before you call. Counsellors will talk through what is happening, what your options are, and what the risks of each are, without pushing you toward a decision. Many people call several times over months before anything changes, and that is a normal use of the service rather than a waste of it.

If you are supporting someone else, 1800RESPECT will help you work out how to respond and what not to say. The most common mistake made by friends and family is issuing an ultimatum about leaving, which usually results in the person withdrawing rather than acting.

Men who are using violence, or worried they might, can call Men's Referral Service on 1300 766 491. It is a separate service and calling it is not an admission of anything legally.

Every state and territory also runs its own 24-hour domestic violence line and its own network of refuges and specialist services. 1800RESPECT will connect you to the right one for your area, which is faster than searching for it yourself.

A safety plan is a set of decisions made in advance so that you are not making them under pressure. It covers where you would go, who you would tell, what you would take, how you would get there, and what you would do about children, pets, money and identity documents.

Documents are the bottleneck that most people underestimate. Birth certificates, passports, visa grant notices, Medicare cards, driver licences, bank cards, immunisation records, prescriptions, court documents and proof of ownership for a car are all hard to replace quickly and all needed to establish an independent life. Where it is safe to do so, photograph them and store the images in an account the other person does not know about, or leave copies with someone you trust.

Money is the second bottleneck. Open an account at a different bank in your own name only, with statements sent electronically to a new email address. Know where your income arrives and whether the other person can see or move it. Financial abuse — controlling access to money, running up debt in your name, preventing you from working — is one of the most common forms of family violence and the one that most reliably makes leaving feel impossible.

Technology safety is now central rather than optional. Location sharing on phones, shared cloud accounts, a car with a connected app, a smart doorbell, an old tablet still signed into your accounts, and family plans with a shared mobile bill all leak information. Change passwords from a device the other person cannot access, check which devices are signed into each account, turn off location sharing, and check what accounts are linked to a shared subscription.

Be careful about acting on all of it at once. Sudden changes — passwords changed, location sharing off, a new account discovered — can escalate risk. Safety planning services help you sequence these changes rather than doing them in a single afternoon.

An escape bag kept somewhere accessible but not obvious — at work, at a friend's house, in a car — covers the situation where you leave with no notice. Documents, medication, spare keys, chargers, some cash, and something comforting for children in it.

Tell someone. A single person who knows the situation, has a copy of your documents, and knows what to do if you do not answer the phone changes the practical options available to you enormously.

Every state and territory has a civil protection order that restricts what one person may do in relation to another. The names differ — apprehended domestic violence order in New South Wales, intervention order in Victoria and South Australia, domestic violence order in Queensland, family violence restraining order in Western Australia — but the structure is broadly similar.

An order is civil, not criminal. Making one does not give the other person a criminal record. Breaching one is a criminal offence, and that is the mechanism by which the order does its work: it converts behaviour that police could not otherwise act on, such as turning up at your workplace, into an offence they can.

Police can apply for an order on your behalf, and in many jurisdictions must do so where they believe an offence has been committed or is likely. This matters because it removes the burden of initiating court proceedings against someone you may still live with. You can also apply privately, and legal aid and community legal centres assist with private applications.

Interim or provisional orders can be made quickly, sometimes on the spot by a senior police officer, to protect you until a court can hear the matter properly. A final order is made after the other person has had the chance to respond, and can be made by consent without admissions, which is the most common outcome.

Orders can include conditions beyond staying away: no contact by phone or online, no approaching your workplace or a child's school, no damaging property, exclusion from a shared home, and conditions about firearms. Ask for the conditions you actually need, including conditions about social media and about third parties passing on messages.

Orders made in one state are recognised nationally, so moving interstate does not leave you unprotected. Registering the order in your new state is not required for it to be enforceable, though telling local police it exists is sensible.

An order is not a substitute for a safety plan. It is a legal instrument that improves the police response, and the period immediately after separation and after an order is made is statistically among the most dangerous. Treat the order as one layer, not as the answer.

Family law matters — parenting arrangements and property — run in a separate court system, the Federal Circuit and Family Court of Australia, and family violence is directly relevant to what that court decides about children's arrangements. Getting a protection order does not resolve parenting arrangements, and parenting orders do not protect you; the two need to be handled together.

Services Australia has a dedicated family and domestic violence pathway, including social workers who can be spoken to confidentially, arrange urgent payments, change how and where your payments are made, and refer you to local services. Ask for a social worker specifically rather than explaining the situation to a general service officer.

Crisis Payment for extreme circumstances family and domestic violence is a one-off payment for people who have left home because of violence, or who remain in the home after the violent person has left. It is available to people who are already receiving or eligible for an income support payment, and there is a short window in which to claim it, so it is worth asking about immediately rather than after you have settled somewhere.

The Leaving Violence Program is a federal program providing financial support and safety planning assistance to people leaving an intimate partner relationship involving violence. It is delivered through a service provider rather than through Centrelink, and includes both a cash component and support in kind.

Beyond crisis payments, leaving usually changes your entitlements: a person who was assessed as part of a couple is assessed individually, family payments may change, and rent assistance may become available. Tell Services Australia that your relationship status has changed as soon as it is safe to do so, because entitlements are generally not backdated to the point at which circumstances actually changed.

Check who controls your money. If the other person is a nominee on your Centrelink record, or receives your payments into an account they control, that can be changed. If they have run up debt in your name, that is financial abuse, and both your bank and the Australian Financial Complaints Authority have processes for economic abuse in joint accounts and joint loans.

Free financial counselling is available nationally and specialist family violence financial counsellors exist in most states. They negotiate with banks, utilities and telcos on debts incurred through coercion, and they do this routinely.

Do not overlook superannuation. If your relationship ends, super is property for family law purposes, and there are also early release grounds on limited hardship and compassionate bases. Get advice before withdrawing super, because it is often the worst-value money to spend first.

Every employee in the national system — including casuals and part-time employees — is entitled to paid family and domestic violence leave each year. It is available in full from the start of employment rather than accruing over time, and it does not have to be taken in a single block. The entitlement is set by the Fair Work Act and the Fair Work Ombudsman publishes the current number of days and the rules about payslips, which must not identify the leave in a way that creates risk.

The leave can be used for anything reasonable arising from the violence: attending court, seeing police, arranging housing, going to a bank, attending counselling, or organising school changes for children. Employers may ask for evidence, and a statutory declaration or a document from a service or police is generally enough.

You can also request flexible working arrangements — changed hours, a different location, a different phone extension — on the basis of family violence, and an employer can only refuse on reasonable business grounds.

If you are in Australia on a temporary partner visa and the relationship breaks down because of family violence, the family violence provisions may allow your permanent visa application to continue. This is one of the most important protections in the system and one of the least known, and fear of losing a visa is routinely used as a means of control. The Department of Home Affairs publishes what evidence is accepted and how to raise it, and free immigration legal advice is available through community legal centres.

Children who are exposed to family violence are recognised as victims in their own right in Australian law, not merely as witnesses. That affects protection order conditions, family law parenting decisions and child protection responses.

Parenting arrangements after separation are decided by reference to the safety of the child. Family violence is directly relevant, and there are exemptions from the usual requirement to attempt family dispute resolution before applying to court where family violence is present.

Schools, childcare centres and doctors can be told about a protection order and asked not to release a child to a named person. This has to be done actively — nobody does it for you — and providing the order to the school is the practical step.

If you are being contacted or monitored online, the eSafety Commissioner can require the removal of certain seriously harmful content, including intimate images shared without consent, and publishes practical guidance on securing devices and accounts.

Believe them. The most common reason people do not disclose again after a first disclosure is that the response questioned the account or minimised it.

Do not issue ultimatums about leaving. Leaving is the point of highest risk, it takes most people multiple attempts, and there are usually concrete reasons — money, children, visa status, pets, housing — that an outsider cannot see. Pushing usually results in less contact, which removes the one safety net the person had.

Ask what would help, and be specific about what you can offer: a spare room, storage for documents, an address for mail, someone to mind a pet, a lift, childcare during appointments. Concrete offers are far more useful than general availability.

Keep a record of what you observe, with dates, in a place the other person cannot access. It may become useful evidence, and memory alone rarely holds up.

Look after your own limits. Supporting someone through this is sustained rather than brief, and 1800RESPECT provides support to friends and family as well as to people experiencing violence.

Know the emergency threshold. If you believe there is immediate danger, call 000 regardless of what you have been asked to do. Everything else is negotiable; that is not.