Safety Planning

It can be hard to know what to do when someone who is an intimate partner, family member or informal carer is abusive.

It is understandable if you feel frightened, overwhelmed or without hope.

You are not alone. There are people and services that can help you and information and resources to help you work out your options.

There are three parts to safety planning:

• Working out what is being done to you – identifying the pattern of abuse that is being used against you and assessing your risks. When you first meet with our team we will carry out a Risk Assessment with you so that you (and we) are clear about what we need to do to increase your safety.
  
  
• Looking at all of the options that might help –When we know what types of abuse are being used against you and what the impact of the abuse is, we can start to think about the specific safety interventions that will be useful. Some of these will be things you already do, but we may be able to help you with additional ideas and resources. For example, if it seems like the person using violence is able to track your movements we might support you to work out how this is happening and to look at your google, facebook and messenger accounts and change your passwords.
  
  
• Understand the goal of the Safety Plan and then choose the options that you think will be helpful. For example, if you want to stay in the relationship with the person using violence but would like to try and prevent some of the violence (a word of caution here because only the person choosing to use violence can stop the abuse) then your safety plan will be really different than if you are working towards leaving the relationship.

Safety Planning is really individual. One size does not fit all!