Building Safe Communities for Women and their Children
Building Safe Communities for Women and their Children (BSCW) is an Australian Government initiative under the COAG: National Plan to Reduce Violence against Women and their Children 2010 (the National Plan). This initiative builds on the partnership between Australian governments and communities to reduce violence against women and their children. Forty projects are funded through the Department of Social Services (DSS) Building Safe Communities for Women and their Children (BSCW) grants across Australia with the aim to develop and implement solutions to reduce violence against women and their children in local communities.
The ANROWS Action Research Support (ARS) project is funded by DSS, until February 2018, to support the 40 BSCW projects to design, implement and share their project findings through the use of action research.
Action research is research undertaken in the course of everyday work. It requires ongoing reflection on project directions and outcomes and provides the opportunity to adapt and change the project activities if required by changed circumstances or indicated for better outcomes.
Action research encourages an open exploration of what is, and what is not working and supports innovation without fear of failure. Action research is being used to capture and document the lessons learned in the work to build safer communities and reduce violence against women and their children. The BSCW projects are based in urban, regional and remote settings. Further information, including tools and resources for action research and “Stories from the Field” presentations by the projects are available on the ANROWS Action Research Support webpage.
Aiming to address the underlying causes of violence, some of the BSCW projects use the national primary prevention framework to reduce violence against woman and their children, Change the Story as a guide for their work. Primary prevention involves taking action to prevent the problem of violence before it occurs. It means working to change the underlying causes of the problem, in the different environments where people live and work.
The project links below provide brief summaries of the diverse and innovative work of each of the 40 BSCW projects according to their location across Australia.