Family Support Centre & SAFENET — Solomon Islands' National Referral Network for Survivors of Gender-Based Violence

Founded in Honiara in 1995 by the Victim Support Group, the Family Support Centre (FSC) was Solomon Islands' first — and for years its only — secular organisation offering confidential counselling, legal advice and referral to survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault and child abuse.
FSC now anchors SAFENET, a national referral network of government and non-government agencies (police, hospitals, crisis centres) that moved from Ministry of Health to Ministry of Women, Youth, Children and Family Affairs oversight in a 2017 restructure and began expanding into outer provinces from 2019. According to UN Women, survivors reached through SAFENET rose from 1,939 in 2019 to 3,165 in 2021, with referrals to further services rising from 901 to 1,647 over the same period.
FSC itself, marking its 30th anniversary in 2025, reported serving over 1,000 women that year and runs a regionally recognised Male Advocacy Programme engaging men as violence-prevention advocates. It has been a partner of the International Women's Development Agency (IWDA) since 2016, with funding also from Australia's DFAT, the European Union, the Pacific Community (SPC) and the Pacific Islands Forum.
The scale of need remains large: a 2009 national study found nearly two in three ever-partnered women aged 15–49 reporting physical or sexual violence, and a hospital case-series recorded domestic-violence injury admissions rising to a peak of 45 in 2010 at the National Referral Hospital alone — a reminder that service growth is still catching up with prevalence.

Read the full analysis: https://www.solomonislandsinfocus.com/family-support-centre.htm