ANROWS and Stopping Family Violence Inc. convened a workshop to discuss the upcoming ANROWS research Evaluation readiness, program quality and outcomes in Men’s Behaviour Change Programs, led by Professor Andrew Day.

The workshop was conducted on Thursday 18 October 2018 in Perth WA, and provided an opportunity for participants to explore a range of preliminary findings from the project. Of particular importance, participants were also encouraged to discuss and reflect upon the implications of findings for their local practice and policy contexts.

A wide range of stakeholders engaged in the workshop including domestic and family violence practitioners, MBCP providers and program managers, researchers, government professionals, policymakers, corrections staff and researchers from predominantly Western Australia as well as across Victoria, South Australia and New South Wales.

The interactive four part workshop led by Rodney Vlais, provided an opportunity for rich discussions amongst participants, across a range of topics. Following the presentation and discussions, a panel facilitated by Mark O’Hare (Stopping Family Violence) was convened with the research team, including Professor Andrew Day (James Cook University), Professor Donna Chung (Curtin University), Rodney Vlais, Damian Green (Stopping Family Violence) and Kate Jeffries (WA sector representative).

Key themes emerging from the presentation and panel discussion, included:

• The dilemmas and complexities when setting minimum standards for MBCP provision;
• Encouraging and ‘enforcing’ minimum standards of practice through best-practice accreditation and compliance systems;
• Capacity-building, practice development and support systems for the MBCP and borderer perpetrator interventions sector;
• Approaches to program evaluation, including what might be required for a program to be evaluation-ready;
• Outcome measures, including debates on what counts as success in this work;
• The use of program logic models and monitoring and evaluation frameworks;
• Measuring and strengthening program integrity;
• Tailoring group-based interventions to individual perpetrators, in ways that are conceptually consistent with the highly gendered nature of domestic and family violence; and
• Safety and accountability planning as a promising strategy to embed throughout a MBCP

The Research Report and Research to Policy and Practice paper will be made available later in the year. More information about this project is available here.

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