A briefing form the “Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel” has been released as part of a series of publications to highlight work undertaken from safeguarding partners and those working in child protection.
The Domestic Abuse Act 2021 sets out that children are victims of domestic abuse in their own right, when it is perpetrated against their parent or carer.
The Panel reviewed cases and identified patterns where children had been seriously harmed, abused, neglected, or in extreme cases, had died.
The reviews found a number of failings when it came to domestic abuse, such as:
Lack of understanding of domestic abuse
The review found most practitioners use the term “domestic abuse” without a full understanding of the nature of the abuse and its impact on the child and family.
The Panel found those responsible for the child’s welfare would simply state that “domestic abuse” was a concern without providing much, or any, context of the abuse which led to potentially avoidable harm to the child and non-abusing parents.
In 72 cases that were reviewed, only 35 described the type of abuse committed.
No “whole system” response
Cases where multi-agency working was evident only in cases deemed as “high risk”, where practitioners had used the risk identification checklist known as the DASH (Domestic Abuse, Stalking, Harassment and Honour Based Violence risk identification checklist).
The Panel found 13 out of 72 reviews referenced multi-agency risk assessment conferences (MARAC). These were used primarily as designed, in response to only the adult victims/survivors.
Their ability to co-ordinate and ensure responses to children was not found to be evident.
Where a need for specialist domestic abuse support was referenced in cases, this was in the context of “signposting” adult victims/survivors to the specialist services.
Those services were not involved in ongoing multi-agency child safeguarding arrangements.
Distinguishing domestic abuse from “parental conflict”
The Panel found that physical violence was overused as an indicator of domestic abuse, and as a means to assess the risk posed to children.
This was found to reflect a lack of understanding of abuser’s use of coercive and/or controlling behaviours.
Other acts of abuse were more likely to be viewed as “low-level” and so were not reacted to appropriately.
In some cases, these “low-levels” incidents were found to be conflated with the term “parental conflict”, a completely different term requiring completely different intervention.
Suggestions for improvement
The Panel found that practitioners must rectify these areas in order to affectively manage risk in households. They offered these suggestions for local areas to better improve their response to safeguarding cases:
- Reflecting the priority in the new Domestic Abuse Plan 8 (published 30th March, 2022) to bring national government departments together in a whole-system response, child safeguarding partners should recognise their central role in the local response to domestic abuse. They should connect closely with the community safety partnership or domestic abuse board to ensure priorities and work plans align, including commissioning and budget priorities, with clear accountability mechanisms.
- Local child safeguarding and domestic abuse partnerships should involve specialist domestic abuse services and experts by experience (children, young people and adults) in the development of strategies and local responses, including commissioning, service design and delivery. Specialist services, including those working with minoritized and disadvantaged victims and their families, should be appropriately recognised and resourced for this work.
- Local partnerships should look at local safeguarding systems and responses as a whole, focusing not only on the “front door”, and move beyond the need to “manage demand” resulting from domestic abuse notifications.
- Training should be embedded across all safeguarding partners for all practitioners to ensure they provide a domestic abuse-informed response, and for this to be supported within supervision and reflective practice opportunities.
- Rapid reviews and local child safeguarding practice reviews should involve local specialist domestic abuse services in every review where domestic abuse is mentioned, whether the domestic abuse is perceived to be current or historic. Specialist services should be appropriately recognised and resourced for this work.
- Rapid reviews and local child safeguarding practice reviews should identify and record the protected characteristics of each family member, along with details of the whole family, to ensure that families’ diverse needs, experiences and wider family networks are identified and analysed appropriately.
To read the full review click here.
Join nearly 1,000 other family lawyers – sign up to our newsletter
One Response
Multi agency approaches are welcomed for victims of Domestic abuse. Too often coercive control is overlooked and unrecognised in family court which can and does lead to devastating consequences. The family courts need to ensure that, where local authorities are working to keep domestic abuse survivors safe, they also support this joined up approach. Too often, survivors are forced to flee domestic abuse with their children, with support from multi agencies, only to be failed by the family court and forced into contact with their abusers. As children are victims too, this is a very serious issue that needs urgently addressing in the family court. Victims should not be continually forced to have unwanted contact with their abuser – this is inhumane and goes against children’s fundamental rights to be safe. The whole systems approach needs to include the family courts’ support and cooperation in acknowledging domestic abuse and making decisions that protect children from further harm.