Praxis International

Description

Since 2003, Praxis has been providing training and technical assistance (TA) to communities funded to do Safety and Accountability Audits by the U.S.Department of Justice, Office on Violence Against Women. Who conducts the Safety Audit? What happens during a Safety Audit? How is the focus of a Safety Audit decided upon? Who serves on the Safety Audit Team? What about confidentiality? How long does it take to do a Safety Audit? What are the outcomes of a Safety Audit? Who can I contact for more information about the Safety Audit? Praxis International has developed and pioneered the use of the Safety Audit process as a problem-solving tool for communities that are interested in more effective intervention in domestic violence cases. The Safety Audit is a tool used by interdisciplinary groups and domestic violence advocacy organizations to further their common goals of enhancing safety and ensuring accountability when intervening in cases involving intimate partner violence. Its premise is that workers are institutionally organized to do their jobs in particular ways—they are guided to do jobs by the forms, policies, philosophy, and routine work practices of the institution in which they work. When these work practices routinely fail to adequately address the needs of people it is rarely because of the failure of individual practitioners. It is a problem with how their work is organized and coordinated. The Audit is designed to allow an interagency team to discover how problems are produced in the structure of case processing and management. Who conducts the Safety Audit? The Safety Audit is an interdisciplinary self-assessment tool, so the work is conducted by a community team of domestic violence experts and key workers who represent the systems that are being examined. Team members collect data and meet as a group to discuss the Audit findings; recommend changes in policy, procedure, and training; strategize how to implement the recommended changes; and help implement, monitor, and evaluate the changes over time. In September 2002, the U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Violence Against Women (OVW) selected Praxis to provide technical assistance on the use of Safety and Accountability Audits to any OVW grantees wanting to expand their knowledge of Safety Audit methods and to develop their capacity to conduct successful Audits. Under this technical assistance grant, Praxis provides a wide variety of resources and training opportunities to grantees conducting Audit projects. Some communities subsequently contract with Praxis or our partner, the Battered Women’s Justice Project, as a consultant to their Audit project when the support they require exceeds the capacity of our technical assistance grant. See the Consultation and Training section of this website for more information on technical assistance and consulting activities. What happens during a Safety Audit? The process involves examining whether institutional policies and practice enhance the safety of battered women and their children, as well as enforce perpetrator accountability. The Safety Audit does not assess individual effectiveness or actions.

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