What can be done to help women rebuild trust after overcoming domestic violence?

A Stop – Start Response: Social Services’ Interventions with Children and Families Notified following Domestic Violence Incidents

Nicky Stanley *, Pam Miller, Helen Richardson Foster, and Gill Thomson

Nicky Stanley is Professor of Social Work at the University of Central Lancashire. She managed the research study described in this paper and is currently undertaking research on services for

male perpetrators of domestic violence as well as leading on the national evaluation of social work practices. She is co-editor of Child Abuse Review and has published books on such issues as domestic violence and child protection, mothers’ mental health needs and inquiries in health and social care. Pam Miller, MSSW, was a Research Fellow on the project, ‘Children and families experiencing domestic violence: Police and children’s services responses’. Pam is

currently a Research Officer at the NSPCC and is undertaking research into services in London for children and young people who live with domestic violence. Helen Richardson Foster, MSc, was a Research Fellow on the project, ‘Children and families experiencing

domestic violence: Police and children’s services responses’. Helen is currently a freelance social researcher and her research interests include domestic violence, parenting and work

with vulnerable children and young people. Dr Gill Thomson is a Research Associate who works within the Maternal and Infant Nutrition and Nurture Unit at the University of Central Lancashire. Gill was employed on the study reported here for approximately ten months and

was primarily involved in the collection and analysis of the police data. Gill’s current research projects relate to socio-cultural influences of women’s experiences of maternity care and infant

feeding.

*Correspondence to Professor Nicky Stanley, School of Social Work, University of Central Lancashire, Preston PR1 2HE. E-mail: [email protected]

Abstract

The harm consequent on children’s exposure to domestic violence is recognised in legis-

lation in England and Wales. This paper reports on a study of the social work response to

184 families notified by the police to children’s services in two English authorities.

Families were tracked through case records over 21 months subsequent to the notifica-

tion. The perspectives of social services’ practitioners and managers were also captured

through interviews. Only a small proportion of families received a service in the form of

an initial assessment or further intervention; the notification triggered a service for just

five per cent of families. Families who received a warning letter only were just as likely to

# The Author 2010. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of

The British Association of Social Workers. All rights reserved.

British Journal of Social Work (2011) 41, 296–313 doi:10.1093/bjsw/bcq071 Advance Access publication June 19, 2010

be re-referred as those who met with no response. Those families receiving a service

were likely to experience repeated notifications and assessments. The limited time

period for completing assessments contributed to initial assessment workers’ lack of

engagement with perpetrators of domestic violence. Current structures for assessment

and intervention contribute to a stop-start pattern of social work that seems ill-suited

to building the trust and engagement needed to challenge the complex and enduring

experience of domestic violence.

Keywords: children, domestic violence, social services, interventions

Accepted: May 2010

Introduction

In England and Wales, the 2002 Adoption and Children Act identified ‘impairment suffered from seeing or hearing the ill-treatment of another’ (s. 120) as a form of significant harm. This inclusion of children’s experience of domestic violence within the category of child abuse owed much to the accumulating body of evidence on the impact of domestic violence on chil- dren. Such research has included accounts of mothers and children (McGee, 2000; Mullender et al., 2002; Buckley et al., 2007) and reviews detailing the impact of exposure to domestic violence on children (Cleaver et al., 1999; Edleson, 1999; Holt et al., 2008). The legislation crys- tallised the shift from a conceptualisation of domestic violence as an adults’ issue to a view that children were intimately involved in the problem. However, it also had the effect of drawing a new and potentially vast group of children and families into the auspices of children’s social services.

In the 1980s and 1990s, statutory social work in the UK was much criti- cised for its failure to acknowledge the presence and impact of domestic violence in families (Farmer and Owen, 1995; Stanley, 1997). As social work has become more sensitised to the issue, criticisms have moved to focus on the nature of the response. International research has explored key questions such as what priority is allocated to domestic violence (Irwin and Waugh, 2007; English et al., 2005; Devaney, 2008) and whether the social work response to domestic violence is able to balance the needs of children with those of victims and perpetrators (Humphreys, 2007). The extent to which children’s social services work collaboratively with other key agencies operating in this field, especially third-sector dom- estic violence services, has also been explored (Banks et al., 2008; Cleaver et al., 2007).

These concerns link to wider discussions about social work’s capacity and readiness to engage with men and fathers (Scourfield, 2003; Featherstone, 2009). Domestic violence provides the focus for some of these debates, as a failure to engage with male perpetrators who are also fathers appears

A Stop – Start Response 297

to leave social workers in the difficult-to-defend position of demanding that mothers who are the victims of abuse protect their children from exposure to that experience (Lapierre, 2008). The study reported here provided the opportunity to examine social work practice in England in relation to families experiencing domestic violence and to explore some of these issues.

Methodology

This study was undertaken between 2007 and 2009 and utilised two research sites in north and south England that were well matched in terms of the size of the children’s population. While one was a metropolitan area with a very diverse population, the other contained a mixture of urban and rural areas with ethnic diversity concentrated in the towns.

The main stage of the research constituted a study of professional prac- tice that included retrospective analysis of agency records and interviews with practitioners and managers. Cases were originally identified as dom- estic violence incidents in police records and were tracked through to social services’ case files. Findings regarding police practice and inter- agency work between police and children’s social services are reported else- where (Stanley et al., 2010); this paper focuses on children’s social services’ response to notifications. The sample was created by selecting all incidents of domestic violence notified by the police in January 2007. This allowed follow-up of children and families in social services’ records over a period of twenty-one months following the original notification.

Identifying markers assigned to police records were used to locate files on notified cases in children’s services’ records. However, in common with similar research studies (Beeman et al., 2001), the researchers experienced difficulty in matching up police and social services records and the original sample of 251 domestic violence incidents was reduced to a total of 184 families who, between them, had 196 reported incidents (some had more than one incident) for January 2007. This process of attrition can be attrib- uted to a number of factors, including multiple notifications, files being lost or unavailable and the likelihood that some notifications were never received.

As only a small proportion of the notified cases received a service com- prising an assessment or intervention, the number of cases in which it was possible to examine social work interventions in depth was reduced to twenty-eight. In order to increase the sample size at this stage of analysis, a booster sample was constructed of notified cases from February 2007 that received an initial assessment or further intervention. This increased the total number of cases receiving a substantial social work intervention to forty-six, facilitating examination of sub-groups.

298 Nicky Stanley et al.

Since case records only convey what is recorded and since practice in our two sites in relation to notifications had developed between 2007 and 2008, a series of semi-structured interviews was completed with twenty-five social workers, administrative staff and managers who volunteered to be inter- viewed in both sites, asking them about information contained in notifica- tions, systems for managing notifications and their practice in relation to families experiencing domestic violence. Interviews were recorded with the participants’ agreement and informed consent procedures were adopted. Ethical approval for the study was given by the University of Central Lancashire’s Ethics Committee.

Other stages of the research included a survey of innovative practice in relation to the management of notifications of domestic violence incidents in England and Wales and interviews with young people, survivors and per- petrators of domestic violence. Participants were recruited separately through relevant services so they had no relationship with one another. Nineteen young people aged ten to nineteen participated in five focus groups held in settings in which they were familiar with discussing domestic violence in a group. Eleven survivors of domestic violence who were parents were contacted through specialist domestic violence services and interviewed individually, as were ten perpetrators (all fathers) recruited from both voluntary and mandated perpetrator programmes. These inter- views aimed to capture perceptions of domestic violence and its impact on children and young people as well as expectations and experiences of services. Some of these data are reported here to reinforce the findings on professional practice.

The analysis of file data entailed entering anonymised data into prede- signed data collection forms and from there into spreadsheets. Quantitative data were coded and analysed using SPSS. Qualitative data were extracted from the spreadsheets and thematically analysed; case vignettes that allowed interventions to be mapped across the follow-up period were also developed. All interviews were transcribed and NVivo was used to sort the data for analysis. Themes were identified both in accordance with the existing literature and as they arose from the data using Grounded Theory principles (Strauss and Corbin, 1990; Charmaz, 2006) with cat- egories being double-checked and refined in the course of analysis.

Findings Sample characteristics

The sample of 184 notified families located in social services files included 333 children of whom slightly over half (51 per cent) were aged under five. Police records noted the ethnic appearance of 277 children: 77 per cent were described as white European; 5 per cent dark European; 13 per cent

A Stop – Start Response 299

Black African; 5 per cent Asian; and less than 1 per cent Arab. Police records for the 196 incidents did not record or were unclear about where- abouts for 25 per cent of the potential child witnesses. Forty-five per cent of children were recorded as directly witnessing the violence in these inci- dents; 5 per cent were not at home at the time. Although police records did not always distinguish a single perpetrator, the majority (93 per cent) of identified perpetrators were men. Fifty-three per cent of the adults involved in incidents were identified as ex-partners, while 47 per cent were described as current partners. For the majority of children (62 per cent, n ¼ 208), both the adults involved in the incident were their birth parents.

Cleaver et al. (1999) emphasise that the risks for children are highest when domestic violence occurs in the context of other problems. Table 1 shows that seventy-five identified perpetrators (four of whom were women) were described by the police at the incident as being drunk or having been drinking or had a self-identified alcohol problem. Similarly, thirty-seven victims were identified as having alcohol problems and this is consistent with the considerable body of evidence highlighting the role of alcohol as a contributory factor in domestic violence incidents (Gilchrist et al., 2003; Galvani, 2004). Fourteen perpetrators and one victim were identified by the police as having a drug problem. Fourteen perpetrators and nine victims were described as having a mental health problem by either their partners or themselves.

Among those families receiving a service, one parent was recorded as having a learning disability and in two families, a child was identified as having a learning disability. Physical health issues were found to affect two parents and seven children in families receiving a service. Families where the child or parent had learning disabilities or physical health issues were over-represented in the cases receiving family support or safe- guarding services but this might have been a reflection of the fact that more was known about families that received a service.

The vast majority (86 per cent) of incidents took place at the victim’s home, emphasising the fact that domestic violence occurs in the place where children should expect to feel safe. The range of incidents was wide, with the researchers using the information contained in police records to classify 54 per cent as low-level or purely verbal incidents, 20 per cent as medium-level incidents that involved verbal abuse with some physical abuse but without any injuries being sustained and 26 per cent as high-level incidents involving a high level of violence or a verbal argument with threats to kill. Injuries were inflicted on adults in 30 per cent of the incidents; children were injured in three incidents.

The notification forms received by children’s services contained rela- tively little information about the extent of children’s involvement in the incidents. However, the original police records revealed more about the context and it was clear that children were intimately involved in many of the incidents. Thirty-six incidents occurred after a former partner was

300 Nicky Stanley et al.

denied access to the house or children (usually because he had been drink- ing) and sought to enter the home by violent means. Twenty-six incidents occurred in the context of contact visits or handovers and fifteen incidents appeared to be related to arguments about parenting or disciplining the children. Children made the call to the police on nine occasions.

No further action cases

File data from the 184 cases were analysed to determine the service pathway cases followed in the first instance. As Table 2 shows, 60 per cent of cases resulted in ‘no further action’. Three-quarters of these ‘no further action’ cases had no or low (i.e. previous notifications or referrals that had been closed on receipt with no further action) previous levels of involvement with children’s social services in that authority. This contrasted with the finding that nineteen of the twenty-eight cases that received a family support or safe- guarding assessment or intervention were already open cases. The pattern was therefore one by which families most likely to receive a service were those with whom children’s services were already involved. Notifications triggered a new service for only 5 per cent of the sample.

The failure of so many of these notified cases to reach children’s services’ threshold for intervention was attributed by social workers to the low level of seriousness of the incidents and 60 per cent of the cases following a ‘no further action pathway’ were classified by the researchers as verbal alterca- tions only. However, 55 per cent of the cases in the sample in which an adult

Table 1 Victims’ and perp

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