The purpose of this project was to update existing ‘Good Practice Guidelines’, building upon the findings of the initial project conducted in 2009. The development of ‘Good Practice Guidelines’ aims to support good practice across the country to a range of population groups and provide the opportunity for transparency and accountability with service partners, NZ Police and DSAC trained medical staff, with service funders and our community.
This project seeks to:
1. Review the principles of good practice for provision of crisis support services to survivors of sexual violence and the Vision for services
2. Update the evidence base for the principles
3. Extend the guidelines to working with survivors from diverse communities.
In order to review and update the 2009 guidelines, our initial focus was on obtaining feedback and consultation with services, service partners and key stakeholders during the TOAH-NNEST annual hui 2015 (held in Whangarei). For this purpose, given the expertise of the sector, and the importance of capturing feedback, we presented a workshop at the hui to access a range of suggestions (via questionnaire and informal interviews) for the ongoing development of the guidelines.
Literature review was used to update the evidence base.
To extend the guidelines to working with survivors from diverse communities, we formed research partnerships with people from a variety of communities, foremost among these being Māori/ tāngata whenua. Other communities or groups we partnered with to establish good practice when working with their members following sexual assault include: Pacific communities, Muslim women, people identifying as LGBTI, males, people with disabilities, and also people from Asian communities. While this is not an exhaustive list of those impacted by sexual violence, these groups have been chosen because of high numbers of survivors or the existence of particular challenges in service delivery.
The groups made recommendations about guidelines for frontline service delivery, crisis support services, and sector and community development. These recommendations were developed into guidelines together with people working within the sector.