Domestic, family and sexual violence (DFSV) is widely recognised as a serious and pervasive issue in Australia, with children and young people heavily impacted.
At Youth Off The Streets, the scale of this impact is clear. Ninety per cent of young people accessing our crisis accommodation identified DFSV as a major reason for needing support. Last year, 70 per cent of students attending our alternative high schools had been directly impacted by DFSV.
These realities mean that responding to DFSV is core business for organisations working with young people. However, across the youth and community services sector, responses remain inconsistent, with many professionals who work closely with young people expected to respond to DFSV disclosures without adequate training or system-level support.
Our program, Taking Action Creating Change Together (TACCT), was developed to address this gap. TACCT is a two-day workshop designed to build sector-wide capacity to recognise, respond, refer and empower children and young people impacted by DFSV. Every youth worker, caseworker and senior manager at Youth Off The Streets completes the program, but the majority of participants have come from other organisations across the sector.
“Originally we designed TACCT to support youth workers in the youth homelessness space,” says Natalie Robitnytskyj, Youth Support Services Capability and Practice Specialist at Youth Off The Streets, who was part of the program’s development and is now involved in its delivery. “But then we found there was huge interest from the whole of the youth sector, so we ended up opening it up to psychologists, teachers, caseworkers, senior managers of youth homelessness services – anyone who works with young people.”
The interest reflects a shared need across community services for clearer guidance and stronger skills when young people disclose experiences of DFSV.
Responding safely starts with training
According to Natalie, the most common issue TACCT participants raise is a lack of confidence.
“A lot of youth workers don’t know what to do when they receive a disclosure,” says Natalie. “They feel like if they see the signs, they might make it worse – or they don’t even know how to have that conversation in the first place, so they avoid it altogether.”
This is where TACCT plays a critical role. The program builds practical skills and knowledge around DFSV, helping workers understand what it can look like for children and young people and how to recognise, respond, refer and empower safely.
Formal qualifications often don’t fill this gap. Natalie notes that core training pathways – such as Certificate III or IV in Youth Work or a Diploma of Community Services – don’t prepare workers for supporting young people experiencing DFSV. Some participants come to TACCT equipped to work with the mother of a family experiencing DFSV, but not the children or young people.
As a Registered Training Organisation, Youth Off The Streets offers Units of Competency in addition to the aforementioned formal qualifications, so that workers are able to better address this gap.
“For many participants, TACCT is the first time they’ve had any kind of domestic and family violence training,” says Natalie. “I think children and young people really feel that lack of confidence.”
Another significant gap in learning is what it actually means to be trauma informed.
“A lot of organisations say that they’re trauma informed, but when I put the question of what being trauma informed means to every single participant in TACCT, not many could answer,” says Natalie.
Ensuring responses are grounded in an understanding of the impacts of trauma on a young person’s physical, mental, social and emotional wellbeing is crucial to providing effective support.
“That’s the gap TACCT fills.”
From knowledge to practice
Over the two days, TACCT covers the impacts of DFSV on young people, including grooming and how intimate partner violence can show up in young people’s own relationships. The program explores power and control, sexual violence and risk factors, alongside core frameworks such as attachment theory and adverse childhood experiences (ACEs).
“We talk about how we can respond in a trauma-informed way to any kind of disclosures we might receive, as well as the physical, behavioural and emotional signs of a young person experiencing DFSV,” says Natalie. “We talk through how to have that conversation and open it up to talk about it.”
“In the training, we really highlight believing a young person when they tell you something. We explore how you validate their experiences, how you show empathy and compassion in those moments, how to uphold your own professional boundaries and how to build rapport so that young people do feel comfortable to disclose.”
TACCT also covers mandatory reporting, risk assessments, safety planning and how to centre the needs of the young person when making referrals.
The course content was shaped by gaps identified by young people with lived experience of DFSV in their own experiences with youth workers and was co-designed with young people in Youth Off The Streets’ Youth Advisory Group.
“Having the voice of young people in the creation of the program was essential,” says Natalie. “During the process of codesigning the workshop, the young people we worked with said that a lot of the time when they would make a disclosure, it was dismissed or not acted upon.”
The cost of getting it wrong
Not having your disclosure treated seriously and sensitively can have devastating consequences. It can mean delayed recovery and healing for young people and entrench distrust in adults and institutions. Not being believed often compounds the trauma young people already have.
The most serious consequence of not training sector workers in how to recognise and respond to DFSV is that children and young people continue to experience harm.
In one session, Natalie trained a worker who shared that a young person had disclosed domestic and family violence to another staff member. That worker told them, ‘If you tell me anything else, you’ll be separated from your family and your parents will go to jail.’
“As a result, that young person stayed silent and was abused for another five years,” says Natalie. “That’s the consequence of not training the sector properly: young people are left in harm’s way for longer, carrying significant trauma – and in many cases the risk can even be death.”
A stronger sector
In a sector where confidence and consistency are critical, investment in capacity-building programs like TACCT is making a tangible difference. Last year, TACCT was delivered to almost 600 community professionals across NSW, with participants reporting an average satisfaction score of 4.75 out of 5. The training led to a measurable shift in confidence. After completing TACCT, 97 per cent of participants reported feeling confident responding appropriately when a young person discloses DFSV, up from 56 per cent before the training.
Importantly, the impact of TACCT extends beyond crisis response. As DFV Prevention Month highlights the importance of early intervention, the training supports workers to engage young people before a disclosure, too.
“Being able to sit down with young people and respond to disclosures is hugely important, but so is the preventative work,” says Natalie. “Talking about what healthy relationships look like, what’s okay or not okay at home and giving young people the language and tools early help prevent harm escalating.”
“We’re trying to uplift capability in every sense.”
