What the evidence says
Two qualitative studies, both drawing on practitioner and provider reports rather than quantitative outcome data, describe a consistent pattern: when governments expand victim-protection legal frameworks or serve higher-need populations, the resourcing attached to that expansion does not keep pace. Sharman (2025) reports that the introduction of a new criminalization offense increased the complexity of support workers' workloads with no corresponding increase in government support for training or understanding the new offense. The same study finds that no mandatory or optional government-provided cross-sector training existed in Queensland to help practitioners interpret the new legislation, and that where non-government training on strangulation was available through an outside charity, support workers' ability to attend it was inconsistent because of high existing workloads, the cost of attendance, and a minimum full-day time commitment. Separately, Grant (2024) reports that perinatal healthcare provision for women at risk of children's social care involvement is inadequate under current staffing and resource levels, citing specifically that midwives working with children's social care require additional input many feel they lack the capacity to provide.
Across both studies, the causal mechanism offered is the same shape: a policy or population need expands (a new criminal offense, a population with elevated child-protection involvement) while staffing, training, and support resourcing stay fixed, producing a gap between what the service is expected to do and what it is resourced to do. Neither study, however, quantifies the size of that gap. There is no measured value for how much workload increased, what proportion of workers could not access training, what the cost barrier amounted to in currency, or what resourcing level would close the perinatal care gap. All findings here rest on qualitative, descriptive, associational evidence at tier A, with high confidence in the direction of the reported effect but low-to-medium confidence in its magnitude, since none of the source studies attempted quantification.
The evidence is silent on several outcomes a reader might expect on this topic: there is no claim here linking resourcing levels to victim safety outcomes, service utilization rates, staff turnover, or client-reported satisfaction. The claims describe provider-reported strain and provider-reported inadequacy, not measured downstream harm.