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that they don’t understand that.’
The situation was likely to worsen, she warned,
with rising unemployment – particularly among
women – and changes to tax credits, housing benefit
and the introduction of an overall benefit cap that
would inevitably hit bigger families particularly hard.
The removal of ring fences also made it difficult to
track the reductions in funding for vital services.
‘In our society, when it comes to alcohol, we
have huge mixed messages,’ said children and
families substance misuse consultant Wendy
Robinson. ‘There’s the heavy promotion of alcohol at
one end, and at the other end of the spectrum if you
do have an alcohol problem then it’s something to
be ashamed of.’
ENTRENCHED PATTERNS
Fixed and entrenched patterns could develop in
families, she said, and what was necessary was
‘evidence-based practice and practice-based
evidence – let’s learn from the services we’re lucky
enough to have’.
When engaging with families it was vital to
remember that ‘reluctance and ambivalence’ were
not the same as ‘denial’, she stressed, and that, for
children, ‘resilience is not the same thing as coping.
Our work is to ensure that the child has a voice, a
presence and a primary influence, and to work to
ensure that the parent works to protect the child,
and not the other way around.’
On that subject, child psychotherapist and family
worker at BDP Casa Family Service Islington, Retta
Bowen, told delegates that ‘we often encounter
children who are parenting their parent. They’ll say
things to them things like “please don’t drink too
much” and “when are you coming home?” It’s
important to remember that, as well as the child
we’re working with, the parent has usually been
through those same traumas and is using alcohol to
manage unmanageable feelings.’
It was vital to build trusting relationships, and help
parents to ‘regulate, self-soothe and recognise that
they’re traumatised by their experiences’, she said.
Services also needed to be explicit about their
mission, FDAP chief executive Carole Sharma told
the conference, and ensure that those values were
shared by the entire workforce.
RECOVERY
Any service was a learning environment for both
practitioners and service users, she said, and although
‘recovery’ was a word that was often misused, there
were ways to determine if a workforce was ‘recovery-
orientated’. ‘Are they optimistic for the service users,
do they establish partnerships with service users and
their networks, and facilitate mutual aid? Also, have a
look around where you work and take down all the
posters with rules and regulations and images of
death,’ she urged. ‘We need to professionalise
ourselves – not just say we’re working with others, but
show that and make sure our clients know that.’
Independent consultant Esme Madill shared the
results of Comic Relief’s alcohol hidden harm
project, which had funded five projects using a
range of different interventions over a five-year
period, to look at what worked best for the children
of substance-misusing parents.
‘Broadly, what we found to be most effective
were services that were child-centred, whole-family
orientated, therapeutic and evidence or experience-
based,’ she told the event – particularly those child-
centered services that gave children places to go
and things to do. ‘Some of them told me it was the
highlight of their week,’ she said.
GROUP WORK
In terms of the older children interviewed for the
project, many said that while important changes had
often taken place during one-to-one work, group
work had been hugely important as it had made
them feel less isolated. ‘They’d say things like “it
made me realise I wasn’t the only one going through
this, and that was a huge relief”.’
Almost all the projects had said they needed
longer-term interventions, she stressed – ‘not less
than five to six months, and able to extend that
support later according to client need’. Full
involvement of universal services was vital, she said,
with primary school teachers in particular ideally
placed for recognising when things start to go
wrong. ‘You need strong leadership, you need to
invest in partnership, and you need to evaluate the
work and act on the findings,’ she told delegates.
‘We only have one asset, and that’s our
workforce,’ said Carole Sharma. ‘It’s all we’ve got.’
News focus |
Analysis
May 2013 |
drinkanddrugsnews
| 7
www.drinkanddrugsnews.com
‘Practitioners, if
supported and
managed and trained,
can intervene to help
children. But we still
hear of people
working in children’s
services saying “I
don’t want to get
involved with drugs
and alcohol...”.’
VIVIENNE EVANS
‘In better-off families
it’s easier to hide...
If you’re living in
poverty you’re likely
to be in contact with
services... so any
problems you have
will be more visible.’
NAOMI EISENSTADT