This report presents the findings of the baseline and formative evaluation of the Family Safety Teams (FSTs) pilot programme. It is based on an analysis of family violence statistics, and interviews with FST staff, community stakeholders, and victims and perpetrators of family violence in three of the four FST initial pilot areas of Auckland, Hutt Valley and Wairarapa. The FST pilot is a collaborative initiative between NZ Police, the Ministry of Justice, the Department of Child Youth and Family, and a number of community-based violence prevention non-government organisations (NGOs) established in these areas (and Hamilton) in 2005. It aims to reduce family violence by applying a coordinated and collaborative justice and social services sector approach whereby police investigators and adult and child advocates address the full range of needs and issues for families experiencing family violence. Key objectives are to provide formal systems and structures to support more effective interagency coordination, communication and collaboration, to provide comprehensive and integrated service and/or support interventions, and to contribute to the development of best practice across the sector. Changes and development in systems and practice, information gathering, assessment, monitoring, and proactive intervention and advocacy are seen as key to achieving these objectives. The role of advocacy in this approach is to ensure that women's and children's voices were integral in the application of 24-hour wrap-around services across all sectors and to ensure that service gaps were addressed. The objective of the baseline evaluation is to provide information about existing systems and agency responses to family violence, to document key stakeholder and service user experiences and perceptions, to document the extent of interagency coordination, collaboration and consistency of practice within and between the pilot areas, and to identify potential indicators to monitor trends in family violence. The objectives of the formative evaluation phase are to clarify FST objectives in practice, to develop a programme logic model, develop success indicators and outcome measures, monitor the three FSTs, identify issues in information sharing, and feed information back to FSTs. Detailed findings are provided, both generally and by area, in relation to stakeholder and adult and child victim feedback on safety perceptions and barriers to, and gaps in services, as well as perpetrator feedback on services. In-depth FST member feedback is provided by location and intermediate progress with logic model development is reported. Outstanding issues are summarised by location and suggested ways forward are discussed overall.

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