Why Perpetrator Complaints Rise as Safe & Together Takes Hold in London

When children’s social care teams start holding perpetrators of domestic abuse accountable for their behaviour, many perpetrators file complaints against the social workers involved. A 2025 briefing by Maria Garner and Liz Kelly of London Metropolitan University’s Child and Woman Abuse Studies Unit examines this pattern in the Safe & Together London Partnership. The partnership is a group of London boroughs using the Safe & Together™ Model, which moves responsibility for children’s safety away from the non-abusive parent and onto the perpetrator’s choices. The Year 2 evaluation first noted more complaints in the two boroughs that had used the Model the longest. For this briefing, the evaluators brought together complaints staff from across the boroughs to look at the issue, and they drew on interviews with social workers and supervisors.

Waltham Forest has recorded a 700% increase in formal complaints from perpetrators since it introduced the Model in 2019, along with many more informal complaints made directly to social workers. Most complaints shared several features: counter-allegations against the victim-survivor, objections to being called a perpetrator, MPs copied in, and threats to report the social worker to Social Work England or to “take it all the way” to the ombudsman. Supervisors understood these complaints as attempts to intimidate workers and avoid being held to account. Without support from their teams, workers risked starting to avoid perpetrators altogether, particularly workers who were newly qualified or from minoritised backgrounds. Each borough recorded complaints differently, so no one could track the trend across the partnership.

Complaints teams had already begun limiting the room perpetrators have to manipulate the process. They agree a short statement of each complaint at the outset, and they build strong links with social work teams so that workers come to them for advice. Recommended next steps include basic Safe & Together training for the independent adjudicators who review escalated complaints and a closer look at guidance on rejecting unreasonable complaints. The briefing closes with a draft form for recording complaints from perpetrators consistently, which the partnership will pilot over the next year.