33: Children never just witness domestic abuse

NSPCC Learning Podcast

Domestic abuse can both directly and indirectly disrupt the relationship between a parent and their child (Humphreys et al, 20061; Buchanan, 20182). Abuse can happen in any relationship, and both males and females can be abused or be abusers.
It’s important to recognise that children are never just witnesses to domestic abuse but they also experience it. For the last ten years, the NSPCC has been running a service called Domestic Abuse, Recovering Together (DART™) which is a ten-week group work programme to help children and families overcome the adverse effects of domestic abuse.
To mark DART’s ten-year anniversary, we invited some of the team who were involved in delivering the service, including one of our scale-up partners, My Sister’s House Women’s Centre, to talk about the impact it’s had on children and families they’ve worked with.
You’ll hear about:

• how DART differs from other domestic abuse services and how it has evolved over the past decade
• what it’s like to be at the frontline working with children and families who have experienced abuse
• how we’ve widened our reach to support more mothers and children by partnering with other organisations and what this has achieved
• the impact of current circumstances such as the pandemic and lockdown on domestic abuse.

Read the podcast transcript on the NSPCC Learning website.
💬 About the speakers

Claire Burns is an implementation manager at the NSPCC and has 12 years of experience in health and social care. Her role involves taking evidence-based interventions and scaling them up to help others deliver them and developing research responses.
Natalie Everson works for My Sister’s House Women’s Centre and is an experienced and skilled domestic abuse and sexual violence advisor as well as a DART programme co-ordinator. Since 2017, she has facilitated and delivered the DART programme across the West Sussex locality.
Mel Hughson has worked at the NSPCC for nearly 36 years and has been involved in domestic abuse services since the early 1990s. She is the lead practitioner for DART at the NSPCC Liverpool Service Centre and is involved in the scale up and knowledge transfer of the service to other agencies and practitioners.
📚 Related resources

> Find out about the signs of domestic abuse

> Read our latest evaluation of the scale-up of DART

> Learn more about how the service works and how to deliver it in your local area

Intro/outro music is Lights by Sappheiros