At times devastating, always powerful: new SBS drama Safe Home looks at domestic violence with nuance, integrity and care

• Tasked with raising the centre’s profile amid rumours of funding cuts, Phoebe is quickly confronted with her own assumptions of the policies and services used to protect victim-survivors.
• While shadowing prickly lawyer Jenny (Mabel Li) at the magistrate’s court on her first day, Phoebe reads through a list of intervention orders.
• Safe Home, a new television series from SBS, is compelling, at times devastating, but always powerful in its commitment to articulating difficult truths around domestic and family violence with nuance, integrity and care.

Domestic and family violence in Australia

• Safe Home offers an important critique of the assumptions and expectations that influence public understanding of domestic and family violence.
• While the Australian government has recently launched a National Plan to End Violence Against Women and Children, experts have emphasised the significant, long term funding needed to meet its goal to end violence against women “in one generation”.
• Read more:
  A new national plan aims to end violence against women and children 'in one generation'.

Telling stories of crisis

• Safe Home was inspired by creator Anna Barnes’ experience working at community legal centres in Melbourne.
• Diana (Janet Andrewartha) struggles to leave her controlling husband Jon (Mark Mitchinson), a retired teacher well-regarded in their small town.
• Read more:
  New data shows 1 in 3 women have experienced physical violence and sexual violence remains stubbornly persistent

The personal becomes political

• We encounter the spectre of strategies used against victim-survivors: physical abuse, economic abuse, verbal threats and put-downs, control and coercion, love bombing and revenge porn.
• We are confronted with perpetrators who evade common stereotypes to appear, on the surface, likeable, friendly, charming and sympathetic.
• The situations faced by victim-survivors intersect with – and are exacerbated by – current crises surrounding housing, homelessness and the cost of living.
• In Safe Home, the personal becomes political.