Donate
One women facing another women explaining something to the other.

Engaging with those who harm

It’s vital that domestic abuse professionals address the safety of victims, ensure children are appropriately supported and increase accountability and responsibility of perpetrators, so more families can become safer sooner.

Key course features

Our Engaging with those who harm training aims to:

  • Provide professionals with an empirically supported structure for tackling issues such as denial, disengagement, and disguised compliance.
  • Address the challenges of an organisational culture that can develop around domestic abuse cases that focuses on separation and isolation as a long-term strategy to manage risk, rather than an immediate safeguarding action or a last resort.
  • Encourage learners to consider the goals of building rapport and engagement to support managing risk and achieving long-term safety and stability.
  • Provide a proactive framework for agencies and professionals to confidently, professionally and safely establish direct working relationships with domestic abuse perpetrators without compromising robust safeguarding and support for victims and children.

Course overview

Our Engaging with those who harm training aims to build confidence and skills in responding directly to the perpetrators of domestic abuse. This includes extending existing professional competencies in holding them to account, assessing their readiness to engage in in-depth specialist behaviour change work, and effectively using referral pathways to access those interventions.

Data suggests victims still living with the perpetrator will experience abuse for six years before they get effective help – that’s double the time that it takes for those who are not living with the perpetrator. Too often we ask, ‘why don’t you leave?’ when the reality is much more complicated and there may be reasons why someone remains in an abusive relationship.

It’s vital that domestic abuse professionals address the safety of victims, ensure children are appropriately supported and increase accountability and responsibility of perpetrators, so more families can become safer sooner.

Our Engaging with those who harm training is based on Engage, an organisational framework and set of practical resources for working with individuals perpetrating domestic abuse. Engage is a behaviour management model developed by Emily Alison (behavioural psychologist) and piloted, delivered and evaluated by Cheshire Without Abuse and SafeLives’ ‘Beacon’ sites. This training has been piloted in multiple settings and contexts across the UK.

Exceptional training with lots of experience in the room and expertise of the trainers - lots of understanding gained about the long term effects of DA on children and how this is long term and can negatively impact on perpetrators so that abuse is ongoing and can scan several generations

Previous learner

Time commitment

The course comprises four days virtual training (delivered on Zoom), delivered in two blocks, and the completion of an assessed worksheet that is submitted online.

For those gaining accreditation, the total time commitment is 55 hours, and you must attend all four days of training. For those not gaining accreditation, there is no additional time commitment outside the training hours.

Eligibility

Applicants must have a current active caseload of perpetrators in the community. This is to ensure that you have a varied range of case examples for your worksheets

Applicants must have a line manager or equivalent within an appropriate organisation, who can vouch for you for the entire time you are on the course and completing the worksheets.

To promote diversity and widen our learners’ network, we limit the number of successful applicants from the same organisation. A maximum of two learners from a single organisation will be admitted to one course. Please consider this before you apply to avoid any disappointment.

As a child protection social worker I often complete one to one work with perpetrators and I now feel able to identify core values and use this to unpick abusive behaviour whilst building rapport. The motivational interviewing skills were really useful and how to empower perpetrators to make meaningful changes rather than simply 'isolating and separating' which as a social worker I have encouraged in the past and not completed further work with a perpetrator

Previous learner

Price

To make this course more affordable to domestic abuse services, we have two costing options available. If you wish to undertake this course and gain accreditation, the cost of the training is £845 per learner.

If you do not want accreditation but wish to undertake the training, the cost is £500 per learner.

Subsidies

We are committed to supporting smaller and specialist services to access our services, and we’re pleased to offer a limited number of  subsidised places for this course on two tiers.

  • Subsidised (£600) - Learners from registered charities with an annual income of less than £1 million
  • Super Subsidised (£350) - Learners from registered charities with an annual income of less than £500,000.

Please note, subsidies are only available on the accredited cost of £845.

How to apply

Applications for the Engaging with those who harm training are now closed.

Register your interest in future training

Accessibility

We welcome learners of all backgrounds and abilities. We encourage you to share with us any details on accessibility and diversity needs so we can ensure the right support is in place. You can also contact the training team if you have any queries via training@safelives.org.uk.

You may also be interested in

A group of people, two women are writing

Foundation: Training for outreach workers

Our Foundation: Training for Outreach Workers enables domestic abuse specialists to strengthen the support they offer to victims and survivors using a risk-led approach

Subscribe to our newsletter

Sign up to receive our monthly newsletters about the latest training, events, research and fundraising initiatives at SafeLives. Together, we can end domestic abuse, for everyone, for good.

Sign up