Silke Meyer - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Silke Meyer
Child & Family Social Work, 2022
The COVID-19 health pandemic has increased women's vulnerability to all forms of domestic and fam... more The COVID-19 health pandemic has increased women's vulnerability to all forms of domestic and family violence (DFV). In the first weeks of March 2020, most Australian states and territories, like many other jurisdictions, entered into a period of government-directed restrictions including stay-at-home orders, physical distancing limitations and closure of a significant number of community services. With more people confined to their homes, the risk of DFV increased at the same time as access to support services was reduced. In this article, we present the findings of two surveys conducted in the Australian states of Victoria and Queensland to explore the professional experiences of practitioners supporting women experiencing violence during the pandemic. Our analysis offers new insights into the ways in which practitioners pivoted their services to respond remotely to women experiencing violence and the challenges of effectively undertaking safety planning and risk assessment without face-to-face contact. The second half of this article examines the implications of remote service delivery on practitioner mental health and well-being. The findings have global relevance and reveal the critical need to prioritize well-being supports for DFV practitioners in crisis response plans.
Child & Family Social Work
Handbook on Gender and Social Policy
TaskForce has designed and is currently delivering Victoria's first early intervention progra... more TaskForce has designed and is currently delivering Victoria's first early intervention program (U- Turn) focused on the intersection of family violence (FV) and problematic alcohol and other drug (AOD) use for men who are potential perpetrators and who are respondents on Family Violence Intervention Orders (FVIO) in the civil space. TaskForce is running four twelve-week group-based programs throughout 2019 and 2020 for up to fourteen men per group who are recent respondents to FVIOs, who are assessed as 'group-ready', and who experience problematic AOD use issues. Participants will are being referred from Moorabbin Justice Centre, with completion of the early intervention program a condition on their FVIO.Prior to program entry, participants are being assessed for risk and eligibility. Those who are ineligible for this intervention group are being referred into more suitable programs. Following assessment, participants join a three-week orientation group prior to commenc...
This submission has been prepared by members of the Monash Gender and Family Violence Prevention ... more This submission has been prepared by members of the Monash Gender and Family Violence Prevention Centre (MGFVPC).Our submission focuses on how the family violence service system has changed since the Royal Commission and what we believe is still required to ensure Victoria continues to lead the world in improving responses to, and the prevention of, all forms of family violence. In the final section of our submission we have outlined findings from our recent research examining the impact the COVID-19 pandemic on responses to women and children experiencing violence in Victoria.The submission also provides summary details of Royal Commission research completed by MGFVPC researchers as well as current research that we are leading examining family violence and the COVID-19 global health pandemic.
One in three women is at risk of experiencing intimate partner violence (IPV) at some point in he... more One in three women is at risk of experiencing intimate partner violence (IPV) at some point in her life. There are many consequences of IPV which can affect victims' shortand long-term wellbeing. However, victims often do not receive the support they need to stop the abuse. This shortcoming is partly the result of victims' decision to remain silent about the abusive experiences, at least temporarily. In addition, it is associated with victims' choices of support and the responses they receive. Victims' help-seeking decisions are influenced by a range of different factors, including victim and partner characteristics and factors relating to the nature and extent of experienced abuse and control. Victims' responses to IPV, including the decision to remain silent as well as the decisions to disclose the abuse to informal and/or formal sources of support, are commonly well-informed decisions made to the best of the victim's knowledge and personal risk assessment....
This summary reports provides and overview of key findings from the Walking with Dads (WWD) trial... more This summary reports provides and overview of key findings from the Walking with Dads (WWD) trial evaluation.<br><br>The WWD trial is a domestic and family violence (DFV) informed approach to child protection practice, which aims to:Intervene with fathers to achieve safety, wellbeing and belonging for families and childrenPromote a DFV-informed approach to child protection practiceImprove the inclusion and quality of work with fathers in child protection work in generalMeet the needs of Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander children and families.
Given the far-reaching social, personal, and economic costs of crime and violence, as well as the... more Given the far-reaching social, personal, and economic costs of crime and violence, as well as the lasting health effects, understanding how women respond to domestic violence and the types of help sought are critical in addressing intimate partner violence. We use a nationally representative dataset (Canadian General Social Survey, Personal Risk, 1999) to examine the help-seeking behaviors of female intimate partner violence victims (N = 250). Although victims of violent crime often do not call the police, many victims, particularly women who have been battered by their partner rely on family, friends, social service, and mental health interventions in dealing with the consequences of violent crime. We examine the role of income, education, and employment status in shaping women's decisions to seek help, and we treat these economic variables as symbolic and relative statuses as compared to male partners. Although family violence researchers have conceptualized the association between economic variables and the Article at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on May 11, 2016 jiv.sagepub.com Downloaded from Recent international victim surveys, conducted in Australia, Great Britain, Canada, and the United States show that between 20% and 30% of female respondents report experiences of either physical or sexual intimate partner violence (
Policing and Society
Domestic violence (DV) is an issue of global concern, which has been subject to public health and... more Domestic violence (DV) is an issue of global concern, which has been subject to public health and criminal justice reforms for decades. Much attention has been paid to legal responses to DV, specif...
Domestic and Family Violence
Domestic and Family Violence, 2019
Sociology, 2020
Domestic and family violence research recognises mothering is impacted by and implicated in abusi... more Domestic and family violence research recognises mothering is impacted by and implicated in abusive relationships and increasingly attends to the negative impacts of domestic and family violence on children, whether or not they are direct targets of perpetrator abuse. Contemporary research also situates the undermining of the mother/child relationship as common in abusive relationships. Bringing together data from two projects – one investigating the experiences of women with disability, and one focused on women experiencing family violence from their adolescent children – we examine a further way in which mothering is impacted by family violence. While there were distinct challenges for each group of mothers, we argue that adaptable and damaging discourses of the ‘good mother’ impact mothers in situations of domestic and family violence. We argue that unchallenged accounts of ‘good’ mothers as fully responsible for their children animate persistent discourses of mother-blame. These...
Domestic and Family Violence, 2019
This submission has been prepared by members of the Monash Gender and Family Violence Prevention ... more This submission has been prepared by members of the Monash Gender and Family Violence Prevention Centre (MGFVPC), the Monash Gender, Peace and Security Centre (GPS), and the University of Liverpool (UK). It focuses on how the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted the nature and prevalence of domestic violence against women as well as service responses to women and children experiencing violence. Our submission is focused on Australia, the Indo-Pacific, England and Wales.
Spectrogram representations of acoustic scenes have achieved competitive performance for acoustic... more Spectrogram representations of acoustic scenes have achieved competitive performance for acoustic scene classification. Yet, the spectrogram alone does not take into account a substantial amount of time-frequency information. In this study, we present an approach for exploring the benefits of deep scalogram representations, extracted in segments from an audio stream. The approach presented firstly transforms the segmented acoustic scenes into bump and morse scalograms, as well as spectrograms; secondly, the spectrograms or scalograms are sent into pre-trained convolutional neural networks; thirdly, the features extracted from a subsequent fully connected layer are fed into (bidirectional) gated recurrent neural networks, which are followed by a single highway layer and a softmax layer; finally, predictions from these three systems are fused by a margin sampling value strategy. We then evaluate the proposed approach using the acoustic scene classification data set of 2017 IEEE AASP Challenge on Detection and Classification of Acoustic Scenes and Events (DCASE). On the evaluation set, an accuracy of 64.0 % % % from bidirectional gated recurrent neural networks is obtained when fusing the spectrogram and the bump scalogram, which is an improvement on the 61.0 % % % baseline result provided by the DCASE 2017 organisers. This result shows that extracted bump scalograms are capable of improving the classification accuracy, when fusing with a spectrogram-based system.
Journal of Social Work
Summary Domestic and family violence remains a significant challenge to family wellbeing. The ris... more Summary Domestic and family violence remains a significant challenge to family wellbeing. The risk of serious harm from domestic and family violence is disproportionally carried by women and children, yet often the complex reality of family life means that many families have ongoing contact with their abusers. Responses to this problem are frequently siloed across child protection and specialist domestic violence services, leading to a lack of holistic intervention. More recently, there has been increased attention on addressing the role and behavior of abusive fathers, especially where fathers remain in families or have ongoing contact postseparation through coparenting. This paper offers a systemic approach for understanding and addressing such amilies. Findings An integrated theoretical framework is proposed, which draws together key tenets of feminism, family violence, and intersectional theories within a systems-oriented model. It frames families, inclusive of fathers, within t...
Child & Family Social Work
Intimate partner violence (IPV) on average affects one in four women, with the majority of victim... more Intimate partner violence (IPV) on average affects one in four women, with the majority of victim survivors identifying as mothers in national survey data. Children experiencing parental IPV are now equally understood as victims. Extensive research documents the short-and long-term impacts of children's experiences of IPV on their safety and wellbeing. More recently, research has started to examine adolescent children's use of violence in the home as adolescent family violence (AFV). Contributing to this emerging body of research, we draw on narrative interview data from mothers who participated in a larger study on IPV, helpseeking and the perceived impact on children to better understand how mothers make sense of children's use of violence in the home. Mothers identified an emergence of AFV in male children with childhood experiences of adult IPV. Although mothers' experiences of adult and adolescent violence highlight their dual victimisation, mothers frame their abusive children as victims rather than perpetrators. Implications for future research, policy and trauma-informed practice are discussed.
Child & Family Social Work, 2022
The COVID-19 health pandemic has increased women's vulnerability to all forms of domestic and fam... more The COVID-19 health pandemic has increased women's vulnerability to all forms of domestic and family violence (DFV). In the first weeks of March 2020, most Australian states and territories, like many other jurisdictions, entered into a period of government-directed restrictions including stay-at-home orders, physical distancing limitations and closure of a significant number of community services. With more people confined to their homes, the risk of DFV increased at the same time as access to support services was reduced. In this article, we present the findings of two surveys conducted in the Australian states of Victoria and Queensland to explore the professional experiences of practitioners supporting women experiencing violence during the pandemic. Our analysis offers new insights into the ways in which practitioners pivoted their services to respond remotely to women experiencing violence and the challenges of effectively undertaking safety planning and risk assessment without face-to-face contact. The second half of this article examines the implications of remote service delivery on practitioner mental health and well-being. The findings have global relevance and reveal the critical need to prioritize well-being supports for DFV practitioners in crisis response plans.
Child & Family Social Work
Handbook on Gender and Social Policy
TaskForce has designed and is currently delivering Victoria's first early intervention progra... more TaskForce has designed and is currently delivering Victoria's first early intervention program (U- Turn) focused on the intersection of family violence (FV) and problematic alcohol and other drug (AOD) use for men who are potential perpetrators and who are respondents on Family Violence Intervention Orders (FVIO) in the civil space. TaskForce is running four twelve-week group-based programs throughout 2019 and 2020 for up to fourteen men per group who are recent respondents to FVIOs, who are assessed as 'group-ready', and who experience problematic AOD use issues. Participants will are being referred from Moorabbin Justice Centre, with completion of the early intervention program a condition on their FVIO.Prior to program entry, participants are being assessed for risk and eligibility. Those who are ineligible for this intervention group are being referred into more suitable programs. Following assessment, participants join a three-week orientation group prior to commenc...
This submission has been prepared by members of the Monash Gender and Family Violence Prevention ... more This submission has been prepared by members of the Monash Gender and Family Violence Prevention Centre (MGFVPC).Our submission focuses on how the family violence service system has changed since the Royal Commission and what we believe is still required to ensure Victoria continues to lead the world in improving responses to, and the prevention of, all forms of family violence. In the final section of our submission we have outlined findings from our recent research examining the impact the COVID-19 pandemic on responses to women and children experiencing violence in Victoria.The submission also provides summary details of Royal Commission research completed by MGFVPC researchers as well as current research that we are leading examining family violence and the COVID-19 global health pandemic.
One in three women is at risk of experiencing intimate partner violence (IPV) at some point in he... more One in three women is at risk of experiencing intimate partner violence (IPV) at some point in her life. There are many consequences of IPV which can affect victims' shortand long-term wellbeing. However, victims often do not receive the support they need to stop the abuse. This shortcoming is partly the result of victims' decision to remain silent about the abusive experiences, at least temporarily. In addition, it is associated with victims' choices of support and the responses they receive. Victims' help-seeking decisions are influenced by a range of different factors, including victim and partner characteristics and factors relating to the nature and extent of experienced abuse and control. Victims' responses to IPV, including the decision to remain silent as well as the decisions to disclose the abuse to informal and/or formal sources of support, are commonly well-informed decisions made to the best of the victim's knowledge and personal risk assessment....
This summary reports provides and overview of key findings from the Walking with Dads (WWD) trial... more This summary reports provides and overview of key findings from the Walking with Dads (WWD) trial evaluation.<br><br>The WWD trial is a domestic and family violence (DFV) informed approach to child protection practice, which aims to:Intervene with fathers to achieve safety, wellbeing and belonging for families and childrenPromote a DFV-informed approach to child protection practiceImprove the inclusion and quality of work with fathers in child protection work in generalMeet the needs of Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander children and families.
Given the far-reaching social, personal, and economic costs of crime and violence, as well as the... more Given the far-reaching social, personal, and economic costs of crime and violence, as well as the lasting health effects, understanding how women respond to domestic violence and the types of help sought are critical in addressing intimate partner violence. We use a nationally representative dataset (Canadian General Social Survey, Personal Risk, 1999) to examine the help-seeking behaviors of female intimate partner violence victims (N = 250). Although victims of violent crime often do not call the police, many victims, particularly women who have been battered by their partner rely on family, friends, social service, and mental health interventions in dealing with the consequences of violent crime. We examine the role of income, education, and employment status in shaping women's decisions to seek help, and we treat these economic variables as symbolic and relative statuses as compared to male partners. Although family violence researchers have conceptualized the association between economic variables and the Article at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on May 11, 2016 jiv.sagepub.com Downloaded from Recent international victim surveys, conducted in Australia, Great Britain, Canada, and the United States show that between 20% and 30% of female respondents report experiences of either physical or sexual intimate partner violence (
Policing and Society
Domestic violence (DV) is an issue of global concern, which has been subject to public health and... more Domestic violence (DV) is an issue of global concern, which has been subject to public health and criminal justice reforms for decades. Much attention has been paid to legal responses to DV, specif...
Domestic and Family Violence
Domestic and Family Violence, 2019
Sociology, 2020
Domestic and family violence research recognises mothering is impacted by and implicated in abusi... more Domestic and family violence research recognises mothering is impacted by and implicated in abusive relationships and increasingly attends to the negative impacts of domestic and family violence on children, whether or not they are direct targets of perpetrator abuse. Contemporary research also situates the undermining of the mother/child relationship as common in abusive relationships. Bringing together data from two projects – one investigating the experiences of women with disability, and one focused on women experiencing family violence from their adolescent children – we examine a further way in which mothering is impacted by family violence. While there were distinct challenges for each group of mothers, we argue that adaptable and damaging discourses of the ‘good mother’ impact mothers in situations of domestic and family violence. We argue that unchallenged accounts of ‘good’ mothers as fully responsible for their children animate persistent discourses of mother-blame. These...
Domestic and Family Violence, 2019
This submission has been prepared by members of the Monash Gender and Family Violence Prevention ... more This submission has been prepared by members of the Monash Gender and Family Violence Prevention Centre (MGFVPC), the Monash Gender, Peace and Security Centre (GPS), and the University of Liverpool (UK). It focuses on how the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted the nature and prevalence of domestic violence against women as well as service responses to women and children experiencing violence. Our submission is focused on Australia, the Indo-Pacific, England and Wales.
Spectrogram representations of acoustic scenes have achieved competitive performance for acoustic... more Spectrogram representations of acoustic scenes have achieved competitive performance for acoustic scene classification. Yet, the spectrogram alone does not take into account a substantial amount of time-frequency information. In this study, we present an approach for exploring the benefits of deep scalogram representations, extracted in segments from an audio stream. The approach presented firstly transforms the segmented acoustic scenes into bump and morse scalograms, as well as spectrograms; secondly, the spectrograms or scalograms are sent into pre-trained convolutional neural networks; thirdly, the features extracted from a subsequent fully connected layer are fed into (bidirectional) gated recurrent neural networks, which are followed by a single highway layer and a softmax layer; finally, predictions from these three systems are fused by a margin sampling value strategy. We then evaluate the proposed approach using the acoustic scene classification data set of 2017 IEEE AASP Challenge on Detection and Classification of Acoustic Scenes and Events (DCASE). On the evaluation set, an accuracy of 64.0 % % % from bidirectional gated recurrent neural networks is obtained when fusing the spectrogram and the bump scalogram, which is an improvement on the 61.0 % % % baseline result provided by the DCASE 2017 organisers. This result shows that extracted bump scalograms are capable of improving the classification accuracy, when fusing with a spectrogram-based system.
Journal of Social Work
Summary Domestic and family violence remains a significant challenge to family wellbeing. The ris... more Summary Domestic and family violence remains a significant challenge to family wellbeing. The risk of serious harm from domestic and family violence is disproportionally carried by women and children, yet often the complex reality of family life means that many families have ongoing contact with their abusers. Responses to this problem are frequently siloed across child protection and specialist domestic violence services, leading to a lack of holistic intervention. More recently, there has been increased attention on addressing the role and behavior of abusive fathers, especially where fathers remain in families or have ongoing contact postseparation through coparenting. This paper offers a systemic approach for understanding and addressing such amilies. Findings An integrated theoretical framework is proposed, which draws together key tenets of feminism, family violence, and intersectional theories within a systems-oriented model. It frames families, inclusive of fathers, within t...
Child & Family Social Work
Intimate partner violence (IPV) on average affects one in four women, with the majority of victim... more Intimate partner violence (IPV) on average affects one in four women, with the majority of victim survivors identifying as mothers in national survey data. Children experiencing parental IPV are now equally understood as victims. Extensive research documents the short-and long-term impacts of children's experiences of IPV on their safety and wellbeing. More recently, research has started to examine adolescent children's use of violence in the home as adolescent family violence (AFV). Contributing to this emerging body of research, we draw on narrative interview data from mothers who participated in a larger study on IPV, helpseeking and the perceived impact on children to better understand how mothers make sense of children's use of violence in the home. Mothers identified an emergence of AFV in male children with childhood experiences of adult IPV. Although mothers' experiences of adult and adolescent violence highlight their dual victimisation, mothers frame their abusive children as victims rather than perpetrators. Implications for future research, policy and trauma-informed practice are discussed.