Building Access for Women with Disability, delivered by People with Disability Australia

Directorate: Justice Strategy and Policy

Division: Strategy, Policy and Commissioning

Project summary

A four year project supported by the NSW Government Domestic and Family Violence Innovation Fund to provide greater access to domestic and family violence (DFV) services to women with disability and their children.

Focus Area:

• Improving access to mainstream services through better systems and processes.

Project objective

Building Access for Women with Disability is a four year project supported by the NSW Government Domestic and Family Violence Innovation Fund and delivered by People with Disability Australia. The key objective of this project is that women with disability and their children will have greater access to domestic and family violence (DFV) services. This will in turn increase their safety, and may reduce their likelihood of returning to violent situations or being at risk of homelessness.

The Innovation Fund is delivering $20m for 20 innovative projects across two rounds. The Fund supports innovative projects addressing prevention, early intervention and crisis response to DFV. Projects target a variety of priority communities, including people with disability.

The Building Access for Women with Disability project is receiving funding ($516,418) over four years, from 1 July 2017 to 30 June 2021. The project provides DFV services with information, support and resources to increase the accessibility of services for women with disability. Each year, five services across the state are selected and supported to audit their own physical environment, informational resources, policies, procedures and attitudinal accessibility, with support from women with disability who are recruited to assist in the process.

The project supports services to provide appropriate and necessary assistance to women with disability experiencing violence through the collaborative development of disability inclusion action plans, and the creation of a disability inclusion Community of Practice.

The challenge

Women with disability experience DFV at much higher rates than their peers, yet they are frequently denied access to the very services that should be supporting them and contributing to their safety. This is often because this cohort of women have typically not been considered nor represented in the planning and delivery of DFV services, resulting in barriers including:

• inaccessible information (e.g. websites that cannot be screen-read, lack of Easy English information, or procedures with text-heavy information sheets),
• staff who may not feel confident supporting people with disability (e.g. may believe the disability sector addresses DFV against people with disability, or lack knowledge about different ways that people with disability experience DFV etc.),
• policies and procedures which discriminate (often implicitly) against women with disability (e.g. services at a physically inaccessible locale, or services not providing support to a person to access funding or services etc.).
• inaccessible premises (e.g. stairs, narrow corridors, poor lighting etc.)

The Building Access for Women with Disability project addresses these challenges by supporting DFV services to improve their provision of support and services to women and girls with disability.

Why is this important?

The Building Access for Women with Disability project is important as successful implementation of the project will increase accessibility and inclusivity of participating DFV services, leading to improved responses for women with disability experiencing violence, and ultimately increasing the safety of this cohort.

Disability inclusive approaches are often beneficial to other populations including women who are not yet diagnosed with disability (including women who acquire a brain injury as a result of violence), women from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women, and women with low literacy.

In addition, Communities of practice and cross-sector collaboration between disability and DFV services will enable each sector to learn from the other, addressing gaps in knowledge and increasing the support offered to women with disability and their children experiencing violence.

This project also directly contributes to a number of NSW Domestic and Family Violence Blueprint for Reform 2016-2021 actions, including actions 1 (preventing DFV), 3 (supporting victims), 5 (delivering quality services), and 6 (improving the system).

What will success look like?

A successful project will deliver improved responses for women with disability experiencing violence and their children, and ultimately increase the safety of this cohort. Improved responses mean greater access to DFV services and may reduce their likelihood of returning to violent situations or being at risk of homelessness.

People with Disability Australia expect to see changes in knowledge, attitudes, skills practices and actions for services and staff involved with the Building Access for Women with Disability project.

Cross-sector collaboration between disability and DFV services also provides an opportunity to address gaps in knowledge between sectors and increase the support offered to women with disability and their children experiencing violence.

How will you measure success?

People with Disability Australia reports to Women NSW on service delivery six monthly, per the reporting timetable in the Service Delivery Schedule, and will complete a project evaluation. The reports compare the outputs and activities listed in the Project Timeline of People with Disability Australia’s proposal with actual delivery of these activities and outputs during the period.

The Building Access project will be evaluated to measure two key outcomes of the project (and supplementary outcomes related to these two): 1) Increased accessibility and inclusion of DFV services, and the long-term outcomes of 2) Increased safety for women with disability.

To evaluate the first and second outcomes, People with Disability Australia will use the following measures:

• Two audits of accessibility at services performed by a disability access consultant using a pre-tested audit tool to provide data to compare at the start and end of the project, as well as within each service in each year of the project.
• Questionnaires for DFV service staff, one administered after the first audit, and subsequent questionnaires following training, DIAP development, Community of Practice involvement and the second audit. This will track initial knowledge, attitudes, practices and actions of DFV staff, and changes/improvements.
• Questionnaires for disability service staff, including one administered prior to their involvement with DFV services and the Community of Practice, and a follow up questionnaire at the end of the project. This will track the initial knowledge of disability services regarding violence against women with disability and DFV service responses available to this cohort, and improvements.
• Interviews with women with disability who have experienced violence and have engaged with the DFV services after the completion of the project. This provides another way to measure whether improvements to accessibility have been made and sustained.
• Another measure of the accessibility of DFV services and the increased safety of women with disability will be the number of women with disability identified as accessing the service prior to the changes in accessibility, and those accessing the service afterwards.

Status report

Current Status: Progressing

Date: 1/9/2023

Status Notes:

September 2023

The ‘Building Access Project’ aims to improve access to DFV specialist services for victim-survivors with disabilities. The Building Access Project is underway with funding committed to enable service delivery for a further 12 months (FY 2023-24). Since its commencement on 1 July 2017, the project has supported over a dozen DFV specialist services to audit their service for accessibility, develop their Disability Inclusion Action Plan and provided training to build the capability of staff and board members. The project also developed resources to be used by the DFV sector and provided training on supporting DFV victim-survivors effectively by running several forums, communities of practice sessions and presentations at conferences. Services which have been supported through this project reported an increase in understanding of the impact of disability on DFV victim-survivors and higher success rate in applying for grants to work with people with disability as a result of their improved knowledge in the area.

June 2022

A KPMG evaluation of this project published in December 2021 set certain milestones for service improvement that PWDA are meeting.  These milestones are as follows:   

• Pandemic related issues – adapted services and training to be delivered online
• Physical inaccessibility of Sexual Domestic and Family Violence (SDFV) services - increased SDFV sector focus on information, procedural and attitudinal accessibility.
• Under-resourcing of SDFV services to address barriers in SDFV services - creating materials and tools that could be used across the sector, for example our easy-read resources about abuse, assault and how to report to police. This approach has proven to have a high impact across the sector.
• Difficulty seeking input from women with disability who had used SDFV services to hear about their experiences - developing a framework and protocol for services to offer women with disability who access their services the opportunity to provide feedback on their accessibility and inclusiveness.
• Barriers across systems for women with disability - building partnerships across sectors, such as in justice and health, and promote our online and training resources across those sectors to help address barriers that exist across systems for women with disability.  The tools developed for this are scalable. 
• Services having difficulty implementing recommendations around accessible information and policies - continuing to create resources, template policies and guidelines to assist services in improving access and inclusion on information, procedural and practice fronts

May 2021

Access Consultants - A key feature of the project is the involvement of women with disability (WWD) as Access Consultants who perform audits and consultations in the DFV organisations. Employing WWD as Access Consultants ensures changes to DFV organisations are informed by WWD. 

DFV organisations - The audit process PWDA facilitate alongside the Access Consultants will play a driving force in affecting change within DFV organisations. Having PWDA, backed with advice from the CoP and the Expert Advisory Group (EAG), provide recommendations to the DFV organisations will be a key factor in persuading change in these organisations and operationalising their Disability and Inclusion Action Plan (DIAP).

Funding bodies and PWDA and its sector networks - By communicating the effectiveness of PWDA’s work in this space and by facilitating Expert Advisory Groups (EAG) and a Community of Practice (CoP), the project will influence change in the broader enabling environment, including funding bodies (actual and potential), PWDA, and its sector networks. In the first instance, the Funding Bodies are influenced by the evidence base created in the reporting submitted by PWDA which in turn increases their understanding and convinces them of the need for projects relating to WWD and DFV. 

Each year, five services across the state will be selected and supported to audit their own physical environment, informational resources, policies, procedures and attitudinal accessibility, with support from women with disability who will be recruited to assist in the process. 

As mentioned above, the participating services will be provided with two disability-related training packages, in addition to support for auditing processes and the administration of a number of questionnaires. 

It is important that the participating services will not solely be DFV refuges. In addition to DFV refuges, participating services will also include other services that provide counselling, case management, court support and other supports to women experiencing violence in NSW. The involvement of a wide range of DFV oriented services in this project will help ensure that women with disability experiencing violence are aware of, and able to access a variety of mainstream supports. 

Another significant element of the project is that the five services per year, over 4 years, will ultimately produce a Community of Practice that will ensure there is no loss of knowledge from the findings and outcomes of this project. This Community of Practice is vital to maintaining the learnings from this project, disseminating these to other DFV services as well as mainstream organisations, adding to the project’s sustainability and scalability. 

The project will be headed up by a project officer (.5xFTE) who will deliver the project throughout the 5 year period. The project officer will provide ongoing project support, liaise with services, and will engage with the expert advisory group, broader project group and the Community of Practice, ensuring clear and open lines of communication between each of these groups throughout the project.