Building safe and respectful cultures in disability services for people with disability: Report

The early stages of this research project began in 2012, with the release of the Disability Services Commissioner’s (DSC) Learning from complaints occasional paper 1: safeguarding people’s right to be free from abuse. The paper noted that a primary abuse prevention strategy should be addressing factors such as ‘culture, attitudes and relationships within services’ to build ‘cultures of respect’.

Building Safe and Respectful Cultures is a research project born from this early learning from complaints, findings from the Parliamentary Inquiry, and feedback from the Abuse Prevention and Response Forum that my office ran in September 2017. It became clear that while there are many initiatives addressing secondary and tertiary prevention of abuse, primary prevention was an area that still required further work – and so we adopted research from the United Kingdom into early indicators of concern as the framework for our project.