Five Immediate Reforms to the ACT’s DFV-RAMF — and How to Build an Independent Risk-Assessment Audit System

The ACT’s Domestic and Family Violence Risk Assessment and Management Framework (DFV-RAMF) was meant to align agencies, improve safety, and standardise responses to family violence. But it’s become a closed-loop system — one that often pre-decides outcomes, omits evidentiary balance, and lacks any form of external scrutiny.

Reform doesn’t need to be radical. It needs to be competent, transparent, and measurable. Here are five immediate steps that would make the DFV-RAMF consistent with its own guiding principles — and the broader ISO 31000:2018 Risk Management standard that every ACT directorate is supposed to follow.

1. Independent Audit and Oversight

The DFV-RAMF currently operates without external verification. No independent body regularly tests whether its risk tools, referral decisions, or “multi-agency meetings” produce accurate, fair, or proportionate outcomes.

Reform:

Establish a Risk-Assessment Audit Office reporting to the Auditor-General or the ACT Inspector of Correctional Services. This office would:

• Randomly sample DFV-RAMF cases quarterly.

• Review risk-scoring, documentation, and decision-making against evidence.

• Publish anonymised results and trend reports.

This simple transparency mechanism would immediately lift the evidentiary and ethical standard across participating agencies.

2. Evidence-Based Calibration of Risk Tools

The current framework treats its risk assessment matrix as infallible, despite lacking published validation data. Tools such as the "risk factor questions" and “professional judgement” modifiers are applied inconsistently across agencies.

Reform:

• Commission an independent validation study comparing DFV-RAMF risk ratings with actual outcomes (e.g., recidivism, verified harm, false-positive rates).

• Publish calibration data annually, as is routine for actuarial risk instruments in corrections and health.

• Require agencies to document any deviation from tool outputs with a written rationale.

3. Gender and Context Balance

DFV-RAMF documentation and training materials overwhelmingly frame risk in gender-binary terms — assuming male perpetrators and female victims as the default. This contradicts data from the ABS, AIHW, and AIFS showing that at least one in three victims are male and that coercive control behaviours occur across all genders.

Reform:

• Replace gender-coded language (“she/her victim”, “he/his perpetrator”) with gender-neutral risk variables.

• Incorporate male, LGBTQ+, and elder-abuse scenarios into training and case templates.

• Require reporting of all victim demographics to ensure service access is equitable.

4. Transparency in Inter-Agency Decision-Making

The DFV-RAMF’s Case Conferencing process allows agencies to exchange allegations and “flags” without notifying affected individuals or recording evidentiary standards. This can have career- or liberty-limiting consequences without procedural fairness.

Reform:

• Mandate contemporaneous minutes for every DFV-RAMF meeting.

• Require agencies to disclose risk-escalation rationales if a person is referred for high-risk management.

• Give the respondent access to redacted records through FOI or an Independent Risk Review portal, similar to parole or child-protection review boards.

5. Integration with ISO 31000 and CMTEDD Risk Framework

The ACT Government already mandates ISO 31000-aligned risk management across directorates, yet the DFV-RAMF remains siloed. It uses “risk” terminology but omits core principles: context, communication, consultation, monitoring, and review.

Reform:

• Rewrite the DFV-RAMF procedures to explicitly reference ISO 31000 clauses 5–8.

• Require agencies to record risk ownership, controls, residual risk, and treatment plans in standard format (likelihood × consequence).

• Include DFV-RAMF in annual enterprise-risk assurance cycles managed by CMTEDD.

This would finally integrate family-violence risk into the ACT’s broader governance and performance framework.

Designing an Independent Risk-Assessment Audit System

If we accept that “what gets measured gets managed,” then an Independent Risk-Assessment Audit System (IRAAS)must become the cornerstone of DFV accountability.

Core functions of an IRAAS:

1. Sampling and Verification: Randomly audit at least 5 per cent of all DFV-RAMF assessments each quarter.

2. Methodology: Apply inter-rater reliability tests, error-rate analysis, and outcome tracking to measure accuracy.

3. Feedback Loop: Issue corrective-action recommendations to participating agencies within 30 days.

4. Public Transparency: Publish annual performance and bias metrics (false positives, demographic skew, average time to closure).

5. Appeal Pathway: Allow individuals subject to DFV-RAMF decisions to request an audit of their case where procedural error or data bias is alleged.

Governance:

The IRAAS should be statutorily independent, reporting through the ACT Auditor-General or Ombudsman. Staffing should include:

• One senior criminologist or risk scientist (chair)

• One legal practitioner experienced in procedural fairness

• One lived-experience advocate (victim and respondent rotation)

• One data analyst and one ethics officer

Why Reform Matters

Every false-positive in the DFV-RAMF undermines public trust and diverts resources from those genuinely at risk. Every unvalidated tool used in a legal context exposes the Territory to liability. The aim isn’t to weaken protection for victims — it’s to make protection evidence-based, accountable, and justifiable.

The ACT can lead nationally by moving from rhetoric to risk governance. The framework already exists; what’s missing is transparency, auditability, and courage.