Safety and Accountability Audit Consultation

The safety audit, developed by Ellen Pence of Praxis International, formerly of the Domestic Abuse Intervention Project in Duluth, Minnesota, is a systematic investigation of one or more points of institutional action on a case, and the ways in which actions by different personnel are coordinated to produce case outcomes.  A Safety Audit explores how institutions handle case processing and helps expose the ways standard practices obscure or diminish women’s experiences of violence.  An audit can be limited to a single institutional step in case processing, such as conducting a pre-sentence investigation, or it can investigate a series of steps – for example, each step in the protection order process.  Similarly, an audit can be designed specifically to uncover a system’s biases for or against specific groups of people: ethnic minorities, migrant workers, or people with alcoholism, for example.

A safety audit is not a performance review of individual staff, nor is it meant to uncover personal inadequacies or assess an individual’s effectiveness.  An audit examines how the information gathered by staff is recorded, distributed, analyzed, and used by other personnel within the same or in complementary systems.  Its goal is to see how, when and if standard institutional practices – both those in job descriptions and those that evolve in work culture – ensure the safety of victims and the accountability of offenders.

A community can use the safety audit as:

• An organizing strategy that builds positive inter-agency relationships through the establishment of a non-hostile, problem-solving team process.

• A method of analyzing and identifying systemic problems, such as gaps in linkages, resources and training needs, and possible solutions.

• An evaluation tool to measure the effectiveness of the community’s capacity to enhance victim safety.

• A planning tool that outlines the steps needed to improve the community response to domestic violence.

© Praxis International

Using Pence’s model, BWJP provides safety audit consultation and training to communities wishing to audit criminal or civil justice systems – for example, police dispatch, prosecution, probation, judiciary, jail systems or protective orders.  In addition, because the Office on Violence Against Women has approved the safety audit as a way for its “Grants to Encourage Arrest” grantees to evaluate their justice systems, BWJP provides training to these grantees as well.  BWJP can also help communities identify their “audit-readiness.”

• If you are an OVW “Grants to Encourage Arrest” grantee or wish to audit a criminal justice system, please contact BWJP at 1(800) 903-0111, ext. 1.

• If you are an OVW “Rural Program” grantee or wish to audit any other kind of system, please contact Praxis International at 1(218) 525-0487.

For additional general information on the safety audit process, outcomes, roles, and logistics, visit Praxis International or explore the results of the Minneapolis Safety Audit conducted by BWJP.