LGBTIQA+ Family Violence Support
You have the right to leave your house to seek safety.
For further advice, please contact our Rainbow Door service
At Switchboard we know it can be hard to reach out for support if you have, or are experiencing family violence or sexual assault.
We want LGBTIQA+ and questioning people experiencing harm to know that no one deserves to be abused or sexually assaulted - regardless of their situation, or if they’ve left their relationship(s) or not.
Through our Rainbow Door service, we want to validate the strength it takes for people to share their experiences and are here to listen.
Support is available through the Rainbow Door helpline for LGBTIQA+ community members and their family and friends to talk about what is going on for them.
The helpline offers you a place to share your experience with a peer family violence support worker who gets what LGBTIQA+, polyamorous and SM relationships look like. Depending on your needs we can provide phone support, information, risk assessment, safety planning and referral.
What is LGBTIQA+ family violence?
Lesbian, gay, bisexual, gender diverse and transgender, intersex, queer and asexual people of every background and circumstance can experience family violence.
Family violence, as defined by the Victorian Family Violence Protection Act as behaviour by a person towards or from a family member. Family Violence is identified in many ways including:
physical or sexual abuse
emotional or psychological abuse
economical abuse
threatening
coercing
controlling or dominating the family member
causing a family member to feel fear for the safety or wellbeing of that family member or another person
behaviour that causes a child to hear or witness, or otherwise be exposed to the effects of above behaviour.
Get support from Switchboard
If you are in Victoria, you can contact Switchboard through our service Rainbow Door by phone, text or email. Rainbow staff can offer you information, support and referral, risk assessment and safety planning.
If you are unsure about where to go for assistance, need to talk about what’s going on for you or would like to see a counsellor about your relationship/s then Rainbow Door staff can talk to you and offer support and options for where to go.
The staff at Rainbow Door are specialist peer support workers, we all identify as part of the LGBTIQA+ community.
We know that people accessing our services can be experiencing a crisis or difficult time, and often at the hardest time of your life. Our goal is to work with you, to find a service that is right for you, to help connect you to a service, check-in in with you if you have to wait for the right service for you and offer you information that will help you navigate what can be a complex support service system.
Rainbow staff can offer secondary consultations to workers from other organisations who are seeking support to work with their LGBTIQA+ clients.
If you would like more information about Family Violence in LGBTIQA+ communities, this article written by Kate O’Halloran published in the DVRCV magazine Advocate (Spring/Summer 2015) is a good place to start.
A Resource to help practitioners responding to family violence provide LGBTIQA+ inclusive support.
Rainbow Door has partnered with Safe + Equal to develop a tip sheet to help practitioners responding to family violence provide LGBTIQA+ inclusive support, assessment, safety planning and referral.
Safe and Equal is the peak body for specialist family violence services that provide support to victim-survivors in Victoria.