BackFront-line family violence services: the missing link in prevention
Recently, a small team from the Innovation and Impact Unit at CNV attended and co-presented at PreventX 2026: Stories for Change, Australia’s leading conference on the prevention of family and gender-based violence.
9 June 2026
Hosted by Safe and Equal, each year, PreventX brings together practitioners, advocates and leaders from across the country to reflect on how storytelling can help shift the conditions that allow violence to persist. For CNV, it was an important opportunity to contribute to a national conversation about prevention that is grounded in advocacy, lived experience and social justice.
Frontline Services as Drivers of Change
Our presentation highlighted the unique and essential role frontline services play in prevention.
Frontline services were founded by feminist activists who understood something profoundly important: that you cannot respond to violence without challenging the social conditions that enable it.
From the very beginning, these services were built on the belief that the personal is political.
They emerged not just to fill gaps left by mainstream systems, but as a deliberate act of political and social change.
Long before national frameworks defined primary prevention, frontline services recognised that preventing gender‑based violence means addressing gender inequality, systemic oppression, and the structures that shape people’s everyday experiences of harm.
At PreventX, the team shared how CNV’s practice has always operated with an intersectional feminist lens and informed by lived experience. Our work is not only about responding to harm; it is also about amplifying voices, identifying systemic gaps, mobilising communities and advocating for the cultural and structural change needed to prevent violence before it occurs.
Prevention is often defined too narrowly as “primary prevention”. We picture whole‑of‑population campaigns, education programs, and social marketing. And while these are important, they don’t tell the full story. We can overlook the constant, everyday prevention work undertaken by frontline services: the advocacy, the identification of systemic gaps, the community activation, the leadership grounded in lived experience, including the lived experience held by the workforce itself.
Our presentation reinforced that specialist frontline services are not just responders. They are advocates, leaders and changemakers. They see where systems need to mobilise and improve, they stand alongside victim-survivors, and help build the momentum needed for long-term transformation.
The team also shared examples of CNV’s advocacy and innovation, from integrated service responses and recognising children as victim-survivors in their own right, to prevention initiatives such as Solving the Jigsaw and men’s behaviour change programs including Making aMENds.
PreventX 2026 provided an important opportunity to elevate the voice of frontline services in national prevention conversations and to reaffirm a core truth: lasting change depends on centring lived experience, challenging inequality and staying committed to advocacy that transforms systems as well as lives. We look forward to continuing to contribute our expertise as a front-line service to prevention initiatives and decision-making in communities and across all levels of government, because together we can end violence against women, children and diverse communities.