Call For Proposals: Preventing abuse in families facing adversity – NSPCC

By Iain MacDonald3rd November 2016Reports & ResourcesChild Abuse, Child Protection, Practice Learning, Report, Research

NSPCC has put out a call for a rapid literature review to identify interventions, campaigns, activities and community behaviours which are effective in preventing parents facing adversity going on to abuse or neglect their children.

The NSPCC is looking to fund a researcher or team to conduct a rapid literature review to identify the interventions, campaigns, activities and community behaviours which have been found to be effective in preventing parents facing adversity going on to abuse or neglect their children.

One of the NSPCC’s strategic goals is to prevent abuse in families and communities facing adversity. By adversity the NSPCC means that a family is experiencing one or more of the following: parental mental health problems, parental alcohol and substance misuse and/or domestic abuse. These three adversities create significant risks for all forms of child abuse and neglect.

Up to 1 million children live in families where there is drug misuse (Manning V. et al 2009)
Up to 3.5 million children live in families where there is alcohol misuse (Manning, V. et al 2009)
More than 1.75 million children have been exposed to domestic abuse (Radford et al 2011)

The NSPCC has plans to launch Prevention Centres, where they work with local partners located in different towns and cities in the UK, to reduce abuse in families and communities facing adversity.

By ‘prevention’ they are using a three-level model which consists of:

Primary prevention – universal approaches to reduce the potential incidence of abuse and neglect
Secondary prevention – targeted approaches where there is a greater likelihood of abuse or neglect based on the identified risk factors of parental mental health problems, parental alcohol and substance misuse and domestic abuse
Tertiary prevention – to promote the recovery and prevent further deterioration in cases where abuse or neglect has already been identified.

It is anticipated that the NSPCC prevention centres will work at the primary and secondary prevention levels and in rare cases at the tertiary level, so the literature review should reflect this balance.