Engender Equality is Tasmania’s statewide provider of therapeutic services for victim-survivors recovering and healing from family violence, primarily delivered through medium to long-term therapeutic counselling. At present, there are approximately 200 people on Engender’s waitlist statewide, with an average wait time of 24 months in the South, and 12 months in the North and North West.
These disturbing and heartbreaking numbers continue to grow, year on year, as growth in demand from victim-survivors outstrips Engender’s funding from the State Government. The negative and often irreversible impacts of such long wait-times on victim-survivors, and their children, are well documented (see Engender’s 2026 report ‘Delayed Support, Heightened Harm: The Impacts of Long Wait Times for Specialist Family Violence Services’).
Engender strives to deliver relevant and responsive therapeutic services to Tasmanians who have experienced intimate partner violence, where all people accessing our services receive timely and tailored support, suitable for their needs.
To be an effective support service for victim-survivors of intimate partner violence, Engender recognised the need to diversify our therapeutic services to include a short-term counselling response. It was anticipated that this approach would better support people who will benefit from a responsive and short-term counselling intervention whilst also serving to reduce our wait time for medium to longer term counselling.
In 2025, Engender used its cash reserves to pilot a therapeutically beneficial and cost-effective program to test this theory. This program was called the ‘Brief Intervention Pilot Program’ or ‘BIPP’.