Domestic Violence – A Systemic Therapy Approach to Risk, Responsibility and Collaboration
This webinar was recorded and is now available as a Talk on Demand. Click here for more details.
Friday 2 October 2020 - A Live Webinar
Led by Dr Arlene Vetere
- Includes a recording of the event with access for a year (14 days post the event)
- Bookings close at 9.00am BST Tuesday 29 September
This webinar will outline the systemic safety methodology for safe relationship therapy when physical and emotional violence is known to have occurred. It is in response to the increase of violence in the home during the lockdown period, and the challenges of working remotely with these clients. It will assist practitioners to assess when it’s safe enough to work relationally, and when to offer alternatives.
READ MORE...The systemic safety methodology has emotional, physical and relational safety as the highest priority. It works within a working triangle of the connections between the risks of further violent behaviour, helping people to take responsibility, and collaborative practice. The work is never without risk – we know what we know and we know what we don’t know, but we don’t know what we don’t know. We will consider the management of risk in the context of possible further violence.
The work is based on Arlene’s collaboration with Jan Cooper a social worker and systemic therapist and the “Reading Safer Families”, an effective independent family violence intervention service. An integration of trauma, attachment, narrative, and feminist theories with systemic theory and practice, it develops safety plans to help people stop the violence, and then explore the potential for repair, safe contact and safe separation as needed. Most of the family members Arlene and colleagues work with are living with the intergenerational legacies of violence and chronic fear and danger.
FULL PROGRAMME
13.00 BST (08.00 EDT)
The Risk of Future Violence: Managing and Assessing the Risk
The webinar will open with some contextual starting points for therapeutic work with intimate relationships, couples and families. Arlene will then explore the management of risk of future violence and its ongoing assessment. Risk is managed through the use of the “stable third” person and slow, careful safety planning, tailored to the particular circumstances of the family/couple relationship. Safety planning identifies internal and external triggers for dangerous physiological arousal, and resources. These might include times when a difficult interaction did not become a dangerous one, and safety strategies to predict and prevent violence. The talk will conclude with the systemic assessment of risk and the adaptations needed to the safety methodology when working online.
14.00
Discussion
14.15
Break
14.30
Responsibility and the Relationship with Explanation
Arlene will develop ideas on how therapists can help couples and families take responsibility for safety and to be accountable for their actions that harm others. In this way of working, responsibility is seen as the ability to respond, to listen, to stand in the shoes of the other, and to take appropriate action. We shall pay attention to how family members talk about their violent behaviour, minimising the passive voice versus the language of agency.
15.45
Discussion
16.00
Break
16.30
Collaborative Practice, and Contra-Indications for Relational Therapy
Finally, we shall look at how it is possible to work collaboratively and transparently when family members might be required to work with us through the child protection process. We shall outline a contextual and systemic way of writing reports on behalf of children who live with fear and violence at home. The webinar will close with the contra-indications for safe relationship therapy when violence is known to have occurred.
17.30
Discussion
18.00
End