Episode four - Bristol City Council

Dr. Jess Wild from Research in Practice discusses Bristol City Council’s approach to child protection work with Katrina Murphy. Katrina shares how the council works with families where there is domestic abuse or where domestic abuse is a concern.

Talking points

• Focused and comprehensive work on mothers, but more limited work with fathers.
• Developing a whole family approach.
• Appreciating and listening to voices of lived experience.
• Intersectionality and the need to examine the roles of poverty, inequalities and disadvantage in the lives of families. 
• Moving away from a focus on individual problems, and onto the structural challenges, encountered by families. 
• Thinking about, and challenging, the language children’s social care routinely use and the impact that this has upon responses to, and engagement with children’s social care intervention. 
• Domestic abuse specialist workers located within social work teams, trained in the Safe and Together model. 
• Avoiding blame and reflecting on the role of shame, and the implications for holding people who harm to account. 
• Expanding holistic support for families, including in relation to housing and employment support. 
• The value of communicating success stories to catalyse and drive change.

Challenges and opportunities

• Challenges with the way the children’s social care system is set up, and unchanging.
• The problems with child protection timescales, which don’t match those of other agencies (such as mental health or substance use services). 
• Responding to the impact of poverty, inequalities and disadvantage in the lives of families and ensuring they don’t ‘slip through the net’.