Planned Areas for Action
Area of Action 3
Processes to monitor and enforce legal sanctions.
Responsibility
| Lead | Other |
|---|---|
| Courts, Police and Corrections | Justice, Department of Child, Youth and Family Services (DCYFS) and Women's Affairs |
Action details
Continue to establish and implement processes for ensuring that the legal sanctions under the Domestic Violence Act 1995 are effectively monitored and enforced.
Link to goals and objectives
Goal 2. Objective 2(v).
Timeframe
Ensuring that legal sanctions under the Domestic Violence Act (DVA) are effectively monitored and enforced is ongoing. This action will focus on addressing any inconsistencies and gaps in monitoring and enforcement practice12 and will start early 2002. Processes should be established and implemented by the end of June 2003.
Rationale
Consistently enforcing protection orders under the DVA is important to holding respondents accountable for their violent behaviour and for maintaining the safety of those protected by such orders. Community workshop participants raised concerns that the enforcement of protection orders is variable. Establishing and implementing processes for ensuring that legal sanctions under the DVA are consistently and effectively enforced across the country, and monitoring enforcement, should go some way to addressing variances in practice, ensuring respondents are held accountable, and maintaining the safety of protected persons.
Preliminary targets
- To have in place by June 2003 effective processes for monitoring and enforcing legal sanctions under the DVA.
- To increase consistency in enforcement practice across the country by June 2006.
Preliminary measures
- Current monitoring and enforcement processes and practices are reviewed and recommendations for improvements are made (if needed).
- Recommendations are implemented (where relevant) on time.
- Feedback from service providers and local communities, following the implementation of recommendations (where relevant) and at the end of the five-year timeframe, indicates an overall improvement in enforcement.
12 Such as the enforcement of protection orders other than provisions related to programme attendance.
