Canberrans who are among the most vulnerable to domestic violence have avoided seeking help because they feared police and the justice system, a report has found.
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New research into the creation of family safety "hubs" has provided a snapshot of barriers and concerns faced by community groups who are most at risk of violence, yet least likely to access services.
Those groups included Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women and families, culturally and linguistically diverse women and families, the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex and queer community, people with a disability and young men who had experienced violence in their families.
The report is set to inform the design of centralised service hubs that were a key promise in the ACT government's $21 million spend on family violence prevention last year.
Interviews with frontline crisis workers, which were the basis of the report, showed vulnerable victims could suffer, and often didn't seek help, because services were inflexible and did not address their individual needs.
Among the report's findings were that while a gendered approach to domestic violence was important in responding to abuse of women, it could isolate male victims and members of the LGBTIQ community.
Victims of domestic violence, particularly those previously exposed to trauma, were also afraid of the consequences of asking for help, and feared police involvement and the legal system.
Those fears were particularly prevalent among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island and culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) populations who had experienced intergenerational trauma.
Traditional domestic violence responses were typically geared towards perpetrators leaving and often worked against groups which had a strong cultural drive to keep their families together.
"The way services are currently designed is you go to one service for help as the victim, one service for support for the perpetrator and children are left to fall through the gap," the report said.
"There are limited services, funding or flexibility allowed in these programs to work with the family as a whole.
"The design of the existing service system is driving an ultimatum: family and community or personal safety."
ACT family safety coordinator-general Jo Woods said the research showed a need to tailor the hubs, which are in the early design phase, to cater to different community groups and varied ways they sought help.
"There's a spectrum of violence, which means there's a spectrum of experiences of victims and perpetrators.
"What comes out really strongly is there's really important similarities across people's experiences and really important differences, and there are commonalities across groups that aren't shared by all groups."
Another barrier faced by culturally and linguistically diverse families and communities was a lack of familiarity with Australian laws about domestic violence.
The report identified a lack of support for male perpetrators and a need for a less punitive approach that worked with men to take responsibility for their actions and change their behaviour.
Ms Wood said the level of fear about seeking help, described in the report by some victims, was "a call to action".
"For really good reasons we have a domestic violence sector that's developed around a particular model of support, which is that the way to safety is [for couples] to separate.
"And we have a lot of people who say that they don't want that and so they're left to manage their own safety because the system can't offer them a response that meets their needs and is what they want."
"If the system wants to engage with the whole family we have to think quite differently about safety."
The report identified significant roadblocks to family safety services that could be addressed by the hubs, including capacity pressures on crisis workers, inadequate time for sustained support, a lack of feedback loop between services that meant information could be compared, and increasingly "transactional" relationships between service providers that lacked personal trust.
A design for the hubs is set to be reached by the end of the year.
