Domestic & Family Violence Support

This guide was developed in consultation with Trans, Gender Diverse and Non-Binary (TGDNB) community and draws on current evidence and literature in order to improve knowledge, skills and service responses from the violence prevention sector when working alongside TGDNB people experiencing domestic, family and intimate partner violence.

There is a growing evidence base indicating that TGDNB folks experience elevated rates of domestic and family violence, intimate partner violence and sexual violence, and where services in the violence-prevention sector are seeking to be inclusive and responsive, there remains a range of barriers to TGDNB people accessing and receiving support from violence prevention services. We would further recommend Rainbow Health Victoria’s Pride in Prevention Evidence Guide (2020) and Messaging Guide (2021) as relevant and supporting documents to this resource, keeping in mind the specific sector and resourcing contexts in our state of Queensland.

Currently, efforts to respond to TGDNB community needs may be presumed to fall within the policy domains of anti-discrimination or community and mental health, and while these areas are of fundamental importance, they do not fully account for gender-marginalising TGDNB experiences just as these policies do not sufficiently account for the gender-marginalising experiences of Queensland women, Issues of workforce participation, housing and homelessness, and domestic and family, intimate partner and sexual violence remain hugely impactful on our communities, and this is clearly indicated in the statistics shared later in this document. It is therefore critical that policies aimed at eliminating gendered inequality and violence meaningfully include and respond to Trans, Gender Diverse and Non-Binary communities and experiences rather than nominally including TGDNB women and Non-Binary people in a cursory manner that does not meet community needs.

We encourage that the violence prevention sector in Queensland works towards a goal, identified in Rainbow Health Victoria’s recent Pride in Prevention messaging guide, of “…a shared national primary prevention framework that is inclusive of LGBTIQ+ experiences of family and intimate partner violence” (Fairchild et al., p. 6, 2021). The messaging guide goes on to highlight the shortcomings of current efforts to address gender inequality in ways that meaningfully includes LGBTIQ+ and TGDNB communities:

“Continuing to address men’s violence against women can be done in ways that simultaneously challenge, rather than reinforce, the silencing and exclusion of LGBTIQ+ communities and their experiences. This needs to be done carefully as messaging intended to prevent men’s violence against women can sometimes inadvertently reinforce binary understandings of gender, and reinforce assumptions that ‘women’ and ‘men’ are both cisgender and heterosexual.

Similarly, primary prevention messaging specific to LGBTIQ+ communities could inadvertently detract from the importance of men’s violence against women as a social problem. For instance, well-meaning but simplistic attempts to ‘de-gender’ discussions of family violence can inadvertently feed denial of the impact of sexism, gender inequality and gender-based violence.”