The aim of this report is to provide concise guidance to those practitioners who directly work with female victims of domestic violence; whose role is to provide information, advice and support to help enable women to access a range of legal and non-legal services and resources, and ultimately to help them and their children, to move safely towards living violence-free lives. These specialist practitioners are sometimes referred to as 'advocates'; 'support workers'; 'victim workers'; 'outreach workers'; or 'navigators'. This report draws upon the independent evaluations of a number of multi-agency projects which aimed to support female victims of domestic violence, and which were funded under the remit of the Crime Reduction Programme (CRP) Violence Against Women Initiative (VAWI). More information about the evidence base for this guidance is detailed at the end of this report. Readers should refer to a related report called: Tackling Domestic Violence: providing advocacy and support to survivors from Black and other minority communities (2005) also by Alpa Parmar, Alice Sampson and Alana Diamond for specific good practice guidance on supporting survivors from different minority ethnic groups.

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