When a family-violence incident occurs, the response rarely falls to a single agency. Victoria has built a coordinated system — the Multi-Agency Risk Assessment and Management framework, known as MARAM — that is designed to connect the police officer at the door, the nurse in the emergency department, the schoolteacher who notices a change in a child, and the magistrate considering an intervention order, all around a shared understanding of risk.
Understanding how that system works matters not just for practitioners, but for anyone who has experienced family violence, supports a person who has, or simply wants to know how the state responds when someone is in danger.
What MARAM is — and where it came from #
MARAM was established under the Family Violence Protection Act 2008 (Vic), with its current legislative form shaped significantly by the Family Violence Protection Amendment (Information Sharing) Act 2017 — legislation that followed directly from the landmark Royal Commission into Family Violence, which handed down its final report in 2016.
The Royal Commission found that agencies were working in silos. Critical information about patterns of abusive behaviour — the escalation of threats, the frequency of police callouts, a perpetrator’s access to weapons — was sitting with one organisation while another, making a safety decision, had no idea it existed. MARAM was the answer: a common framework that obliges prescribed organisations to identify, assess and manage family-violence risk in a consistent way, and to share relevant information to do it.
The framework is administered by the Department of Families, Fairness and Housing (DFFH) and sits alongside two distinct but interlocking information-sharing schemes.
The two information-sharing schemes #
Two legislative schemes operate under MARAM’s umbrella, and it is worth distinguishing them.
The Family Violence Information Sharing Scheme (FVISS) allows prescribed information-sharing entities to share information about an adult victim-survivor or an alleged perpetrator without consent, where sharing is necessary to assess or manage family-violence risk. Consent is still the preferred approach wherever safe and practicable — but under FVISS, it is not always required. This is a deliberate departure from the default privacy rules that normally govern health and welfare information.
The Child Information Sharing Scheme (CISS) operates in parallel, allowing prescribed entities to share information about a child’s wellbeing and safety. The two schemes often activate together in family-violence contexts, since children are so frequently affected by violence in the home — whether as direct targets, witnesses, or both.
Both schemes carry strict limitations. Information shared under FVISS or CISS can only be used for the purpose for which it was shared. It cannot be used against a victim-survivor in unrelated legal proceedings. And the schemes do not override obligations around legal professional privilege, therapeutic privilege in specific circumstances, or information that would identify a confidential source.
Who is in the network #
The reach of MARAM is deliberately broad. Prescribed organisations — those with legal obligations under the framework — include Victoria Police, the courts (including the Magistrates’ Court and Children’s Court), public hospitals and health services, mental health services, alcohol and other drug services, housing and homelessness services, schools and early childhood services, child protection, disability services, and the corrections system.
Private general practitioners, private hospitals, and some community organisations can also become prescribed entities, and the list has expanded steadily since 2018.
Each organisation has obligations calibrated to its role. A hospital emergency department is not expected to conduct the same depth of risk assessment as a specialist family-violence service — but it is expected to ask screening questions, identify risk indicators, document what it finds, and refer or share where risk is identified. The framework describes this as a tiered model: all prescribed organisations must identify and respond to family violence at a minimum level; specialist services and those with more intensive contact have deeper obligations.
How risk is assessed #
Central to MARAM is a set of evidence-based risk factors drawn from decades of research into family-violence lethality and escalation. Practitioners across all prescribed organisations are trained to look for indicators including: a perpetrator’s history of violence (including against previous partners), strangulation or choking, threats to kill, access to weapons, use of coercive control, recent separation, pregnancy, and the presence of children.
No single factor determines risk level. MARAM asks practitioners to consider the full pattern — including what a victim-survivor themselves says about how scared they are, which research consistently shows is one of the strongest predictors of serious harm.
Risk is typically categorised as standard, medium, or high, with high-risk cases triaged to Multi-Agency Risk Assessment and Management meetings, known as MARAM meetings (the acronym doing double duty). These meetings bring together practitioners from the relevant organisations — often a specialist family-violence service, Victoria Police, child protection, and a housing or health worker — to collectively manage a high-risk situation. The meetings are confidential, structured, and documented.
How police fit in #
Victoria Police plays a central role in the MARAM ecosystem. Under the Family Violence Protection Act, police have a positive duty to investigate family violence and to make a Family Violence Safety Notice or apply for an intervention order where risk is identified. Officers are required to complete a risk assessment — currently using the L17 family violence report — at every family-violence attendance, and that information flows into the broader MARAM system.
The police L17 data feeds into the Central Information Point (CIP), a centralised mechanism — operated by a specialist team within the courts and justice system — that compiles information from police, corrections, and child protection for family-violence practitioners making urgent safety decisions. The CIP is not a database open to all prescribed entities; it is a targeted tool for the highest-risk situations, accessed by specialist practitioners who are managing imminent risk.
What it means in practice for people experiencing violence #
For a person experiencing family violence, the practical effect of MARAM is that — in theory — they should not have to repeatedly tell their story to every new service they encounter. A risk assessment completed by a specialist family-violence worker can, with appropriate consent or under FVISS provisions, inform decisions made by housing services, child protection, or courts without that person having to relive their experience each time.
It also means that a perpetrator’s pattern of behaviour — across multiple agencies, multiple relationships, multiple incidents — can be seen as a whole, rather than as isolated events. This matters because one of the documented dangers in the pre-MARAM system was that a perpetrator’s history was invisible to agencies making safety decisions: each incident looked like a first offence.
Advocates and service providers have noted, however, that the framework’s effectiveness depends on implementation quality, adequate resourcing of specialist services, and workforce capacity. MARAM’s obligations are only as strong as the training and time available to practitioners on the ground — and workforce pressures across health, housing and community services remain a documented challenge.
Privacy, safety and the tension MARAM navigates #
MARAM does not erase the tension between privacy and safety — it asks practitioners to navigate it deliberately. The default under FVISS is still to seek consent from a victim-survivor before sharing their information. Sharing without consent is permitted where doing so is necessary to manage risk and where seeking consent might itself endanger them — for example, where a perpetrator monitors communications, or where the urgency of the situation makes consent-seeking impractical.
The framework also explicitly recognises that victim-survivors from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds, LGBTIQ+ communities, and people with disability face compounding barriers to safety that a one-size approach cannot address. Intersectionality is embedded in the MARAM practice guides, though advocates continue to push for structural reforms that go beyond guidance documents.
For anyone seeking to understand Victoria’s response to family violence, MARAM is not the whole answer — but it is the architecture through which a great deal of the response flows.
Where to get help #
- Safe Steps (24/7 family violence response): 1800 015 188
- 1800RESPECT (national sexual assault and family violence counselling): 1800 737 732
- Sexual Assault Crisis Line: 1800 806 292
- Lifeline (24/7 crisis support): 13 11 14
- Beyond Blue: 1300 22 4636
- 13YARN (24/7 crisis support for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples): 13 92 76
- Crime Stoppers: 1800 333 000
