Community Groups Treatment Programme – GLDVP – 17th June 2009
Your chance to be a part of the community groups treatment programme
The Greater London Domestic Violence Project has recently been funded by Comic Relief to roll out a community groups treatment programme (cgtp) across London. This programme is for children, young people and their mothers who have experienced domestic violence and provides a community based setting for them to share and talk about their experiences. It is originally a Canadian model and has been piloted and successfully evaluated in LB Sutton.
Historically, recognition of the needs of children living with domestic violence in the UK has been largely confined to refuge services. Research in the UK suggests that the majority of children who have lived with domestic violence would prefer to talk to other children with similar experiences. For most children outside of the refuge system this is sadly not an option due to the severe lack of community-based programmes for children who have witnessed domestic violence.
The programme runs over a twelve-week period for children aged 4 – 21. Children are divided into age-specific groups. Core issues addressed are:
* validation of the children’s experiences;
* understanding abuse;
* reducing self blame;
* safety planning;
* managing appropriate and inappropriate expressions of emotion.
The programme offers a concurrent component for mothers to also attend a group. Mothers are supported to understand how the violence has impacted on the child and how best to help them through the healing process.
Collaboration and commitment across partner agencies has been the absolute key to success in operating and sustaining the community group programme. The benefits of such a multi agency approach are huge, as not only do staff increase their knowledge and skills in this area of work, so too do they make it transferable to other work settings. In addition, staff taking part from specific agencies, bring the expertise from their primary work environment and utilise that in group to assist children who are encountering difficulties in other aspects of their lives. We know from Victoria Climbe, Baby P and other child protection cases the dangers of failure to work together in practice and this is particularly true in relation to children living with domestic violence. Providing a coordinated community programme reliant upon multi agency collaboration has the potential to improve services to children and women experiencing domestic violence and to maximise their continual safety and well-being.
How you can be involved
We have organised an exciting showcase event which we would like to invite you to.
Date: 17th June 2009
Times: Either 12.30pm – 2.30pm or 3pm – 5pm
Venue: Better Bankside, The Community Space, Great Guildford Street, London, SE1 0SY
Map: http://www.betterbankside.co.uk/map/?x=532115&y=180274&bizid=400&showbiz=1
The showcase will feature footage of some groups that have been previously run in LB Sutton. You will also have the opportunity to hear a mother speak about her experiences of attending the groups. There will be a Q&A session and we will explain the next steps in this exciting project!
Refreshments will also be provided.
Who should attend?
We are offering five places per borough for the showcase event. Therefore it is important that the right people attend in order to maximise the benefit of the event. We require most attendees to hold strategic level roles within the borough as we will be asking each borough to sign up to take part in the community group’s programme. Therefore we will need you to have the ability to authorise such a commitment. We are also happy to have one frontline practitioner attending who has prior knowledge about the issues involved in undertaking group work with children affected by domestic violence.
Please download and fill in the attached booking form and return ASAP to Joanna.sharpen@gldvp.org.uk of fax: 0207 785 3865.
We will be recruiting coordinators for each borough and will be offering free training within the next couple of months. A ‘job description’ for this post will be circulated shortly. It would be helpful if you can think about who may be appropriate to take on this role within your borough, before the showcase so that we can answer any questions you may have at the event.
Training for coordinators (2 days) will take place in July and training for facilitators (3 days) will take place in September. These training sessions will be provided free of charge. The original authors of the Canadian model will be running this training for us.
GLDVP will also provide monthly support and networking events on key themes (eg: engaging mothers, working with teens, dealing with disclosures of abuse etc). We will also hold yearly conferences and an evaluator will be appointed to evaluate how each borough gets on with running the groups, with the aim of producing an interim report after 1 year and a full report after 3 years.
