Doncaster Children's Services Trust has radically overhauled the way it supports children, young people and families affected by domestic abuse over the past five years. However, further change has also been achieved on a cultural level through the trust encouraging its local partners to adapt a whole-family approach to working with families.
The Growing Futures project, which marked its fourth year of taking cases in September , was set up in response to a high incidence of domestic abuse in Doncaster. Alicia Lee, the project's team manager, says the problem was being seen through high re-referral rates back into social care.
She says involving every family member in the service is vital for the trust to achieve its long-term aim of breaking established cycles of domestic abuse. The DfE funding was used to appoint a team of four domestic abuse navigators DANs , a new support role that works with families assessed at high risk of domestic abuse. Lee says for families to be assigned to a DAN there also needs to be some additional complex need such as substance misuse, mental health or learning difficulties as well as identified concerns for the children.
She says DANs have been recruited from a range of backgrounds including counselling and family therapy. Risk assessments are carried out continually for these families and in most cases the same DAN will work with the victim, perpetrator and children. However, Lee says in certain circumstances such as where victims may have separated from their partners the whole-family approach may not be effective. The service offers a perpetrator engagement worker to help find appropriate support for hard-to-engage individuals.
Or to get them to see that in terms of the role of social care this is about the impact on the children," explains Lee. She says often perpetrators disclose that issues such as loss, abuse or neglect in their own childhood have not been addressed.
