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A world-first research project, here in Australia, is hoping to take learnings from lone-actor terrorism and apply it to domestic violence in order to prevent family and intimate partner homicides. Researchers say there are a lot of similarities in the perpetrators - their planning of attacks, histories and another common thread, they're motivated by grievances. Troy McEwan is the chief investigator & Professor of Clinical and Forensic Psychology at Swinburne University's Centre for Forensic Behavioural Science. She says the group is working to implement lessons from across the different research areas to prevent further deaths.

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00:02Fixated threat assessment centres kind of emerged about 20 years ago initially in the UK and then
00:07in Australia and also in the Netherlands and other parts of Europe and they're joint multi-agency
00:12centres so they bring together forensic mental health policing and correctional services and
00:18also in some contexts victim support services. Their real job is to identify cases where people
00:24with serious mental illness might be in a position where they're not well treated and their symptoms
00:30are very active and in that specific context they're engaging in behaviours that probably are
00:35causing harms to themselves in terms of their own wellbeing but also potentially to other people
00:39and so the F-TACs, the Fixated Threat Assessment Centres, try to identify those cases early through
00:45their contacts with public figures and other kinds of agencies and use that to get people back into
00:50care. Now what we're trying with the intimate partner homicide and family violence here is a
00:56little different because mental illness isn't, doesn't play quite the same role but we're using
01:01some of the same principles to say hey we can bring together joint agency embedded working to find ways
01:08of identifying cases that could be of concern and making sure those cases are linked in and that
01:14really comes from work done by one of the people on our team Hayley Boxall as well as other colleagues
01:20around the world saying there seems to be a group of people who have these fixations, these abnormally
01:25intense preoccupations with the grievance and that seems to be driving them to work.
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