Supporting Children’s Recovery: How Trauma-Informed Practice Complements Safe & Together
By Nic Douglas, European Regional Manager, Safe & Together Institute
Throughout my work implementing the Safe & Together Model across Europe, I’ve increasingly recognised a fundamental reality: For domestic abuse–informed practice to be effective, it needs to be supported by appropriate interventions for children and young people.
The Safe & Together Model provides the domestic abuse–informed framework to assess perpetrator patterns and the impact their behaviour has upon the whole family. It enables us to recognise the strengths of, and partner with, protective parents. But this must not come at the expense of practical support for children to begin to heal from the trauma caused by domestic abuse perpetration.
This is where trauma-informed practice becomes essential—and why organisations like Innovating Minds, through their Healing Together programmes, offer something crucial to the work of child protection and domestic abuse services.
Assessment and Intervention
The Safe & Together approach enables us to assess and document the specific impact of perpetrator patterns on each child. It supports an understanding of how coercive control creates fear, unpredictability, and damage to attachments. We can articulate what children have experienced, getting us closer to understanding what interventions may be needed.
Children may need support to learn how to regulate their nervous system, understand their feelings, and begin their healing journey. They often require practical support from safe, trained adults in familiar settings. This is where trauma-informed practice fills the gap.
Innovating Minds’ Healing Together programmes are grounded in neuroscience and attachment theory, providing practitioners with structured, evidence-based ways to help children understand how their body and brain respond to threats, learn body-based regulation strategies they can use independently, develop a sense of safety in their own bodies, and build emotional literacy.
Crucially, these interventions don’t require children to narrate their experiences of abuse. They focus on regulation, understanding, and healing, which makes them accessible to children who aren’t ready to talk or for whom talking isn’t the most effective intervention.
Building Practitioner Capacity
Both the Safe & Together Institute and Innovating Minds share a fundamental commitment to developing practitioners, not just creating specialist therapy posts. When organisations train frontline practitioners (e.g., social workers, family support workers, teachers, youth workers) in trauma- and domestic abuse–informed principles and practice, something shifts. These practitioners gain confidence, see the impact of their work, and feel equipped to support children effectively.
In one local authority that is successfully implementing the Healing Together programmes, a family support worker with eight years of experience described the training as “transformative.” She began using grounding techniques before entering family homes, bringing a calmer, more attuned presence to families in crisis. She reported: “It’s affected my practice in terms of the energy I take into a home. I’m more present, grounded, and able to support families better because of it.”
This is systemic change. When we equip existing practitioners with knowledge and tools, we build real capacity across the workforce.
A Whole-Family Approach
Safe & Together emphasises partnering with non-abusive parents as protective resources. Survivors of domestic abuse are themselves trauma survivors. When they’re struggling with their own dysregulation and hypervigilance, their capacity to support their children can be compromised.
The Healing Together programmes include parents alongside the child support, helping survivors of domestic abuse understand their own trauma responses and those of their children, develop regulation skills, and strengthen the protective parent-child relationship. This creates a shared language within families and reinforces the most powerful protective factor for children’s recovery: the relationship with the survivor.
Real Outcomes
A young person in one service who received support from a Healing Together practitioner showed measurable improvements in emotional literacy and anxiety management. They began teaching younger family members the regulation strategies they had learned. Their parent reported using the techniques themselves when feeling overwhelmed.
These aren’t clinical outcomes measured in isolation. They’re shifts in whole-family functioning, which is exactly what Safe & Together aims to support.
The Safe & Together Model provides the assessment framework, the perpetrator pattern–based lens, and the principles for maintaining accountability whilst supporting survivors. Trauma-informed practice provides the practical intervention that helps children heal.
When practitioners assess using Safe & Together principles and intervene with a trauma-informed approach, we can create the conditions for sustainable change. Children receive what they need: clear assessment of the harms they’ve experienced, a protective parent who understands and supports them, and accessible, evidence-based support for their recovery.
That’s the future we need to build.
Additional Resources
Podcast: Season 5 Episode 11: Empowering Children: Healing from Domestic Abuse with Dr. Asha Patel
Safe & Together Institute’s domestic abuse–informed trainings
Safe & Together Institute’s upcoming events
David Mandel’s book Stop Blaming Mothers and Ignoring Fathers: How to Transform the Way We Keep Children Safe from Domestic Violence
