What is Prevent, Protect and Repair
The report ‘Prevent, Protect and Repair’ publishes the findings of six Joint
Targeted Area Inspections (JTAI) carried out between September 2016 and March
2017. The report considers the extent to which children’s social care, health
practitioners, the police and probation officers are effective in safeguarding children
who have experienced domestic abuse. It reviews the practices of individual
agencies, as well as multi-agency working. Read the full report.
The report focuses on three key areas:
Long term strategy — having a long term plan in place which focuses on the
bigger picture and aims to change perceptions and behaviour on a large scale;
Focusing on the right things — ensuring that focus is on the right individuals
and understanding incidents in the family context rather than in isolation; and
Information sharing — sharing information across a range of services and
agencies and encouraging effective joint working.
Whilst findings show that services have gone a long way to address some very
complex challenges, and have dealt with the enormous volume of cases of
domestic abuse, there needs to be a subtle shift in the way services understand
and respond to domestic abuse.
While much good work is being done to ‘protect’ children and victims, more needs
to be done to ‘prevent’ domestic abuse, and ‘repair’ any damage that is caused.
What were the findings in relation to long term strategy
Services were observed to be mainly working in a reactive, ‘incident-led’ way, and
they focused on the immediate challenges of isolated incidents of domestic abuse. In
doing this, they have failed to see the bigger picture, such as any history of abuse, or
patterns of abuse in the family context. This has meant that interventions have often
been ineffective as they have failed to have a long-term impact.
The report suggests that there needs to be a clear public service message aimed at
reducing the prevalence of domestic abuse as part of a long-term strategy. This should
include changing perceptions about what family interactions can look like, and what
forms a healthy relationship. This should help to shift behaviour on a large scale.
What were the findings in relation to focusing on the right things
When dealing with incidents of domestic abuse, services have focused too much on the
victim, asking ‘why doesn’t she leave?’ rather than ‘why doesn’t he stop?’. The
immediate solution has often been to remove the victim and children from the
perpetrator, whilst putting responsibility on the victim to protect their children.
However, research tells us that separation can escalate risk to the victim.
There needs to be a greater focus on children’s emotional needs to prevent the
long-term emotional and psychological impact of witnessing abuse. The report found
that the needs of some children in the family were less well understood than others,
and the needs of younger children and older children were often assumed to be the
same. Also, the voices of very young children were often ignored; even in cases when
young children are unable to talk, their interactions and behaviours should be
observed in order to understand their feelings.
There needs to be more collaboration from services in order to put children’s
behaviours into context. Failure from services to see the bigger picture and
understand underlying contributory factors has often led to children getting into
trouble for misbehaving at school. Furthermore, the report states that some
adult-focused agencies, notably probation and adult mental health services, did not
ask about children’s welfare at all when dealing with a domestic abuse incident.
What were the findings in relation to information sharing
The report states that it is unclear what information can be shared amongst and
between services, with whom, and when. The absence of information sharing protocols
has led to poor decision-making about when to share information. Often, information
sharing was delayed due to concerns around consent, but in most of these cases, the
safeguarding concerns in relation to the children should have overridden the need for
consent.
The report also highlighted problems with data collection, which was often
complicated and inconsistent across services. In particular, the complexity of the
systems across health services created barriers to information sharing.
Furthermore, the report highlights the importance of a range of services meeting
regularly, including schools and the school nurse, to ensure that important
information about individuals is being communicated. The ability to share
information quickly and effectively is critical to whether or not agencies are able to
work together to identify risks, understand a problem and find a solution.
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