The Improvement Service has been supporting Barnardo’s Equally Safe Service, in partnership with Aberlour and Falkirk Council, to consider the impact that domestic abuse-informed systems and practice, through the roll out of the Safe & Together Model, is having on families experiencing domestic abuse across Falkirk.
Equally Safe Falkirk works with survivors, children and young people, perpetrators of abuse, and professionals who support those impacted by domestic abuse. Equally Safe Falkirk offers a range of support through its Trauma Support Service (TSS) and Family Group Decision Making (FGDM) processes, whereby survivors can choose which part, or parts, of the service is best suited to their needs and circumstances. For example, some may request support to help them and their children heal from trauma, others may want to engage in developing a family plan through FGDM, and others may prefer the option of accessing group support. Some survivors may find it helpful to receive support from all parts of the service.
Equally Safe Falkirk also provides Safe & Together training for professionals to ensure a better understanding of domestic abuse and improve outcomes for survivors, children and families who have experienced, or are experiencing, domestic abuse.
The Safe & Together Model is an internationally recognised suite of tools and interventions designed to help social workers and other key professionals to engage with families experiencing domestic abuse in a child-centred, strengths-based way. The Safe & Together Model aims to help change how practitioners work with families impacted by domestic abuse. The key principles of Safe & Together include:
- Keeping children safe and together with the non-offending parent
- Partnering with the non-offending parent as the default position
- Intervening with perpetrator(s) to reduce risk and harm to the child
Equally Safe Falkirk offers Safe & Together Overview and CORE training, Train the Trainer training, Supervisor training, and also delivers a series of Safe & Together awareness and briefing sessions to a range of partner agencies, including housing and social work, guided by their Safe & Together training plan developed in partnership with Falkirk Council.
The Equally Safe Falkirk Development Officer also provides support to professionals within Falkirk to embed the Safe & Together model through facilitating a Mentors Reflective Group.
This case study highlights the impact of adopting the Safe & Together model in practice when working with families across Falkirk who have experienced, or are continuing to experience, domestic abuse. It captures the experiences of those delivering support to survivors and their children, and the enablers and challenges associated with implementing the Safe & Together model in practice.
This case study overview is informed by information obtained through a practitioner survey, the Equally Safe Falkirk DES-funded activity report, and real case studies from survivors who have received support from the Equally Safe Falkirk service.
Outline of the approach
The Safe & Together Principles support practitioners with assessment and decision-making when working with survivors and their children experiencing domestic abuse. The support offered by Equally Safe Falkirk demonstrates how these principles can be applied in practice to ensure that domestic abuse responses keep children safe & together with the non-offending parent; partner with the non-offending parent as the default position; and intervene with perpetrators to reduce risks and harms to children.
The following are examples of ways in which the Equally Safe Falkirk service has embedded the Safe & Together principles in their work with survivors, children and young people, perpetrators and practitioners.
Keeping children Safe & Together with the non-offending parent
Practitioners representing a range of multi-agency services across Falkirk, including education, health, social work, criminal justice, disability services, family support and domestic abuse services, were given the opportunity to complete a practitioner survey between October and November 2024.
The majority of responses from the survey reflected on a noticeable difference in outcomes for families when a Safe & Together approach was implemented. This included increased confidence in survivors and fewer children being taken into care where domestic abuse was the main contributing factor. One practitioner responded by saying that by using a Safe & Together approach, more women and their children were supported to leave the family home and were living separately from the perpetrator with a child contact plan in place to promote family safety. This demonstrates how the Safe & Together model enables practitioners to support survivors and their children to be safe and together through robust safety planning and confidence building.
The Safe & Together model also provides a framework through which survivors and their children feel validated and listened to. As a result, survivors and their families are more likely to meaningfully engage with support as they have less fear about children being removed from their care and are instead offered opportunities to engage in networks of support.
Furthermore, the safety and wellbeing needs of women and children are being better met as a result of adopting a Safe & Together approach, including being supported to find suitable accommodation and putting in place appropriate safety planning. The key principle of keeping children safe and together with the non-offending parent underpins engagement between practitioners and survivors, and in turn, survivors feel more confident in making choices to keep themselves and their children safe.
Partnering with the non-offending parent as the default position
Responses from the practitioner survey highlight that the Safe & Together model helps to support existing strengths-based practice when partnering with the non-offending parent, particularly in the language used when working with survivors. The importance of adopting strengths-based language was highlighted as being ‘key’ when partnering with survivors.
For example, one practitioner shared that “the biggest change for me as a practitioner has been use of language. For example, I would not make a comment about a victim of domestic abuse ‘minimising’ their partner's behaviour, I recognise this person is doing their best to get through the abuse and sometimes it isn’t safe for them to acknowledge or admit what is going on…”.
This demonstrates that practitioners feel confident using the tools and principles from the Safe & Together Model in practice to partner with survivors and support them to identify their strengths. In turn, survivors who have accessed support from Equally Safe Falkirk also highlight the importance of strengths-based practice:
Attending the groups within Equally Safe Falkirk has made me feel safe, seen and heard, instead of being blamed and ashamed.
They helped me see strengths I never knew I had...
Thank you so much to you all for the help and confidence you have given me and my daughter.
In addition, the Safe & Together Model provides a framework for practitioners to use to institutional advocacy with other agencies on behalf of survivors, particularly those who weren’t using strengths-based practice in their engagements, assessments and reporting.
Colleagues noted that using the tools from the Safe & Together Model enabled them to feel more confident when advocating for survivors and made assessments more robust. Practitioners also shared that they felt confident in challenging partner agencies and other professionals where they identified unhelpful, blaming language still being used.
For example, a case study from a survivor receiving support from Equally Safe Falkirk highlighted how the Equally Safe worker was confident in advocating for the survivor and challenging partner agencies who were using blaming and accusatory language by highlighting the level of control that the perpetrator had over the survivor and highlighting the scale and impact of the abuse.
This illustrates how the tools and skills provided by the Safe & Together Model support practitioners to adopt a strengths-based approach when working with survivors and partner agencies. Through partnering with the non-offending parent as the default position, survivors feel more confident in recognising their own strengths and efforts in keeping themselves and their children safe and protected.
Intervening with perpetrators to reduce risk and harm to the child
Equally Safe Falkirk offers support to both practitioners working with perpetrators, and to survivors and their families, to reduce the risk of harm. In particular, Equally Safe Falkirk facilitates FGDM meetings that involve developing a family plan and supporting both the perpetrator to recognise and change their parenting choices, and the survivor and their child(ren) in accessing relevant support services such as the Trauma Support Service and the women’s wellbeing group.
In addition, workers can use tools from the Safe & Together Model, such as the Perpetrator Pattern Mapping tool, which supports practitioners and survivors to identify and recognise perpetrator patterns and behaviours and the impact of these behaviours on the survivor and their children. The case study below demonstrates how different tools included in the Safe & Together training can support both practitioners, perpetrators and survivors to identify harmful behaviours and the impact that these are having on the whole family.
Case study
The perpetrator is separated from the survivor and is the father of two children under 5 and is the step-father of an older child. Both the perpetrator and the survivor received support from Equally Safe’s Trauma Support Service, with the survivor also receiving support from FGDM.
The perpetrator was keen to change his behaviour so he could spend time with the children unsupervised. Equally Safe Falkirk provided him with support which enabled him to reflect and work on addressing his own previous trauma, explore what positive relationships are, and understand the impact of his behaviours and choices on his children. The Trauma Support worker continued to work with the perpetrator whilst he was in prison (for an unrelated offence) as well as liaising with other partner agencies and services to hold him accountable and visible for his abusive behaviours.
The worker supported the perpetrator to attend a Child Protection Case Conference where it was agreed that he could have written contact with the eldest child. This contact eventually evolved into fortnightly video chats being arranged.
The Safe & Together ‘Choose to Change’ guide enabled the perpetrator to identify family members who wanted him to succeed and those he could contact when he needed additional support. He was also able to identify that his substance use had been a trigger and exacerbated the abuse.
Practitioners shared several examples of how the Safe & Together model has supported them to feel more confident working with perpetrators and framing their behaviours as a parenting choice. This included feeling more confident to directly challenge the perpetrator’s behaviours and framing this as a parenting choice, as well as feeling more confident challenging other agencies to hold perpetrators accountable for their behaviours. For example:
I have had conversations with perpetrators about their thoughts and wishes around the kind of parent they want to be and are currently, challenging them at times about how they would feel if their child, when older, was experiencing abuse like the perpetrator is doing to the survivor parent. Offering support for them to look at their own behaviours; signposting to mental health support/ Equally Safe [Falkirk].
As well as providing support to practitioners to challenge other agencies to hold perpetrators accountable, 67% of practitioners who completed the survey agreed that the roll-out of Safe & Together made perpetrators more visible within multi-agency settings, and that Safe & Together has supported a shift in focus from survivors to perpetrators in meetings and documentation.
Results
Between April 2024 and September 2024, Equally Safe Falkirk offered support to 147 survivors, 286 children, and 58 perpetrators. Overall, 130 survivors accepted support from at least one part of the service, and 27 survivors and their children reported having improved outcomes at closure.
Training in the Safe & Together Model has significantly improved staff knowledge and confidence in applying the key principles in practice. Before undertaking the CORE training, 89% of participants said they rarely or didn’t at all use the Safe & Together Model in their work.
After the training, 83% of staff said they were completely or very enthusiastic about applying the CORE skills and principles to their practice. Furthermore, Falkirk Council has committed to funding two places on the Safe & Together ‘Train the Trainer’ course, which will increase the number of trainers available to deliver the training and enable more practitioners across Falkirk to undertake the Safe & Together training and support them to apply a domestic abuse-informed approach to their practice.
The Safe & Together Model and the implementation of the key principles have had a profound impact on the survivors and children supported by Equally Safe Falkirk. The below statement is a written comment from a young person who accessed support and outlines the importance and impact of adopting a domestic-abuse informed approach in keeping children safe and together with the non-offending parent:
…I am so unbelievably proud of my mum and grateful she is my mum. It makes me glad to know me and my family are safe because of her.
This highlights how adopting the Safe & Together model in practice has enabled survivors and their children to identify and celebrate their strengths and has promoted family wellbeing and safety through keeping children safe and together with the non-offending parent; partnering with the non-offending parent as the default position; and intervening with perpetrators to reduce risk and harm.
Learning
Evidence from the practitioner survey, activity report and survivor case studies highlight a range of key learning, challenges and enablers associated with the effective implementation of the Safe & Together model:
Lack of consistent implementation of the Safe & Together model across systems and services
A key theme which was highlighted in the practitioner survey and survivor case studies was the lack of consistency in adopting the Safe & Together approach across systems and services. It is clear that there is inconsistent communication across multi-agency partners in relation to domestic abuse, which can create a fragmented approach to supporting survivors and their children.
Responses from the practitioner survey highlighted that whilst those who had completed the 4-day CORE training felt confident in applying the key principles within their own roles, there were often challenges when working alongside other professionals who have not been trained in the Safe & Together Model and are not familiar with the principles.
This illustrates the importance of consistency across teams and services in relation to staff training and development to ensure that there is a shared framework for multi-agency partners to use when supporting survivors and their children.
Continued support following training
Continued support and guidance following the Safe & Together training was cited as being key to implementing and applying the knowledge and skills in practice. Specifically, colleagues highlighted the valuable role of practitioner forums in refreshing knowledge, accessing peer support and continuing learning.
In addition, practitioners noted that ongoing practice support, such as regular case reviews, discussions with other trained colleagues and regular mentor meetings, were key enablers in the implementation of the Safe & Together model.
Furthermore, colleagues highlighted a desire for more opportunities for further support following completion of the Safe & Together training. Suggestions included refresher courses, ‘how to’ practice videos that could be easily accessed when using the assessment tools, and case studies and tools for workers within specific settings (such as the children’s hearing system).
Whilst many colleagues highlighted the value of practitioner forums and ongoing practice supports, others commented that they often didn’t have the time to attend meetings due to other diary commitments, high caseloads and restricted capacity.
In fact, a lack of time, resource and capacity was highlighted as a common barrier to implementation across service provision. Despite this, Equally Safe Falkirk and their Women’s Unite Survivors Participation Group remain committed to spreading the messages of Safe & Together to highlight the importance and impact of domestic abuse-informed practice across systems and services in Falkirk and beyond.
Perpetrator visibility and engagement
Whilst the Safe & Together Model provides tools which enable increased visibility of perpetrators in meetings and reporting, there are still significant gaps in practice around holding perpetrators accountable for their actions (especially within specific settings such as the child protection process). The inconsistent provision of training and lack of awareness about domestic abuse-informed language and practice from partner agencies, other professionals and children’s hearing panel members, was highlighted as a barrier in ensuring that perpetrators remain visible and accountable in these contexts.
In addition, practitioners highlighted that whilst Safe & Together offers a suite of tools and resources that support working with perpetrators, there is often a lack of engagement from perpetrators themselves, which can pose challenges in keeping them visible and accountable.
Resources
Coercive control awareness video