Early Gains as Safe & Together Reaches Five London Boroughs

Domestic abuse cases often leave children’s social care workers focused on what a mother did or didn’t do to protect her children, while the person actually causing the harm stays out of view. In 2021, five East London boroughs—building on earlier work already underway in Hackney and Waltham Forest—used Home Office funding to roll out the Safe & Together™ Model across their children’s social care teams, in formal partnership with the Safe & Together Institute and Respect, the UK’s perpetrator-intervention accreditation body. Independent evaluators from London Metropolitan University’s Child and Woman Abuse Studies Unit tracked the first year.

Across the five boroughs, 287 staff completed the introductory Overview Training and 205 completed the intensive four-day Core Training, while implementation leads ran 264 one-to-one case consultations to help caseworkers apply the Model to real cases. In Hackney and Waltham Forest, the two boroughs where the approach has been in place longest, case data showed both an increase in domestic abuse being identified and a decrease in the number of children on care plans or taken into care where domestic abuse was a factor; early data from Redbridge and Newham moved in the same direction.

Social workers told evaluators that the Model gave them relief from an unspoken expectation that survivors alone were responsible for keeping their children safe, and that having a consultation service and structured questions made them more confident approaching perpetrators directly. Evaluators also flagged gaps still to close: behaviour-change programmes remain scarce for African/Caribbean/Black British perpetrators, and current case-management systems don’t yet let boroughs track interventions with perpetrators directly—both named as priorities for Year 2.