Family Courts

Information sharing in our courts can be complex.

In a family violence context, this results in victim survivors needing to retell their story over and over again, increasing the risk of re-traumatisation.

Improving information sharing was one of the key recommendations of the Royal Commission into Family Violence. We were engaged by the Victorian Behavioural Insights Unit to address this challenge by better understanding the gaps, barriers and opportunities within our Magistrates’ Courts.

We conducted ethnographic research in Melbourne, Ballarat, Heidelberg and Broadmeadows Magistrates’ Courts. In each court, we conducted contextual interviews with staff including the Family Violence Registrar, Applicant Support Practitioners and Respondent Support Practitioners.

We identified 23 main actors involved in a typical family violence matter. Each of these actors both sought and shared information—often highly technical, mostly through conversation. Each court location functioned very differently due to the variation of the volume and type of family violence matters.

Initially tasked with capturing and sharing raw research data, we soon found that the complexity of the situation would mean the data would be impenetrable. We used information design to distil a large volume of complex interactions down to insights that could be easily consumed and acted upon.