Doing trauma-informed practice in law reform: Working with domestic and family violence victim-survivors

Law reform bodies play an important role in the process of improving the law in significant ways. At the core of the law reform process is public engagement. In reviews concerning domestic and family violence, sexual violence or gender-based violence, it has now become routine to engage with victim-survivors. Despite this, there is a lack of guidance for law reformers on how to do this in a way that minimises potential re-traumatisation of victim-survivors. This article takes a two-pronged approach to address this gap. First, the article furthers conceptual understandings of trauma-informed practice as it applies in law reform contexts by developing a novel ‘victim-centric, trauma-informed law reform’ conceptual framework. Second, the article details how the Queensland Law Reform Commission secretariat applied this framework during the Commission’s Non-Fatal Strangulation Review to generate concrete trauma-informed law reform practices. In doing so, we demonstrate to law reform bodies globally how the novel conceptual framework can be applied and provide a foundation for such bodies to build their own collection of trauma-informed practices for engaging with victim-survivors. While we focus on engaging with domestic and family violence victim-survivors, the conceptual framework and practices we discuss could be adopted to apply to other victim-survivors too.