Organisation’s name: London Borough of Redbridge

Job title of employee: Senior family support worker

1. What is your current role and previous experience in this area?
My current role – senior family support worker. I’ve had a lot of DA training but never really worked with perps before. I’d been working with survivors for longer. Perpetrator work I’ve been doing for around a year.

2. How did you find the 4-day individual work with perps training? Was it informative,
engaging?
I really really enjoyed the course. There was space for everyone to speak and contribute, and the trainers made me feel really comfortable to speak and everyone shared stories and practice.

3. What was most useful?
I think previously in 1 to 1 I used to use the word perpetrator in front of the men, now I refer to them as clients. I like that the intervention is framed as helping the perpetrators as well as their survivors. I also gained insight into how hard it is for perpetrators to disclose their incidents and engage with the material. Doing these activities myself and realising how hard this is increased my empathy for perps engaging with the change process. The resources were
also really great, and we were shown how to use them in our practice which is really helpful.

4. How will you use this moving forward in your role, or how have you been using it? What
do you do differently now?
I had a session the next day with a perpetrator and he felt the difference. He stated “you’re asking really different questions”, I explained I want to understand. I’m doing sessions at the moment and now I spend time relationship building and getting to know them, building trust as a foundation for the work, whereas before I may have just jumped in. Perpetrators have responded really well to this change, sessions are smoother and more fluid. I’ve also learned to be comfortable with silence. I feel more confident. I have been able to pass these tips and techniques to my team, and now relationship building is really prioritised in perpetrator work, and staff members are spending time having a chat before they jump into the content of the session, and this is working really well.

The practice and culture of the whole team have improved as a result of 2 team members attending the training as they have passed on their learning. We are sharing what we’ve learned, how to ask questions, and how to start sessions. We have shared the resources we learned and everyone uses them in their work. The resources have been so useful to everyone and have made the work more varied and effective for the men.