Starting from Scratch

What would be the first thing to do if you were starting from scratch? 

Not the usual question I am asked. In the past it would have been “how much is there?”; more recently the enquirer would be asking for priorities from a list of recommendations. But I was meeting last week with Sarah Townsend, Principal Advisor to Te Puna Aonui, the New Zealand joint venture to improve the whole-of-government approach to family and sexual violence.

While there is some awareness across New Zealand at an individual level of the issue of child to parent violence and abuse, there is very limited provision for families, who may be met with misunderstanding when they seek help, and no specific support programmes in place. Anita Gibbs has built up much greater awareness of issues around foetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD) through her work at Otago University, and Sue Hobbs similarly has led the growing awareness around disability and safeguarding adults; but it is hard to find other leaders in the field. Sarah commented that the landscape feels like it did here perhaps 10 – 15 years ago. She is looking at systems and provision in other countries, as part of her Winston Churchill Memorial Trust Travel Fellowship., with a view to informing policy makers and others in New Zealand.

Typically, in the UK at least, the development of services for families has been bottom-up – emerging scattered around the country as individual practitioners develop provision in their own area. Many of my early posts were looking at small enterprises where organisations had identified an issue in their work and were then looking for ideas and funding to make a very specific difference. (For instance here, and here.)

Sarah is working as a civil servant and is an unusual position in that she has some power to feed into policy and the direction of work right from the start, so what do you focus on first? Raising public awareness? Training professionals and front-line services? Making funding available to support programmes? All are needed, and all depend on the others to make the system work. We spent a very pleasant hour with a coffee in the sunshine by the Grand Union Canal, clarifying our thoughts and attempting to solve the conundrum. You can read more about our wider discussions from Sarah here

In the end, my recommendation was to make use of existing national parent support systems such as Parent Help. First, they will most likely already be coming across this issue as families reach out for help, and so to build capacity there with additional training would be an efficient use of time and resources and would make sense before engaging on a national awareness raising programme in the media and developing wider training. In other countries, parenting helplines have proved incredibly valuable as a first response, as well as providing longer term support for families, using NVR for instance, and importantly providing data and analysis through annual reports. (See Family Lives for instance in Britain.) Whatever priority is chosen is clearly out of my hands, but it is incredibly exciting to see impetus coming from the top for a change and I look forward to watching how that develops in the future. Thank you Sarah for the opportunity to mull it over with you.