In recent years, children and young people’s exposure to family violence has become a prominent policy issue within Australia. There has been a growing need to understand in more detail the service system responses to these children and young people, specifically the response they receive within the statutory child protection system.

To understand these service system responses in more detail, the Australian Government Department of Social Services (DSS) commissioned the ACU Institute of Child Protection Studies (ICPS) to undertake a project to develop and pilot a methodology to investigate service system responses for families where child protection concerns exist within the context of family violence. The aim was to understand the nature of services (and particularly whether they were child-centred), and the case-management approach and service system pathways for children and young people exposed to family violence and who have had substantiated child protection concerns.

The Queensland statutory child protection service (Department of Child Safety, Youth and Women) agreed to participate and provide data for the pilot.

The project comprised four stages: a literature review, quantitative data analysis, semi-structured qualitative interviews and data synthesis.