Transcript for
Child-focused approaches to complex problems – part two
Professor Sarah Wendt (00:00): Be curious together, be caring together around asking those questions of, yeah, I’ve been scared before, what does fear do to me? So what would fear do to a child? That might bring other perspectives to then open up conversations of power? So how power is enacted through fear, intimidation, secrecy, and all those other dynamics. Then you can become curious in how power is exercised in intimate relationships or parent-child relationships. And that can help create a language that then you can take beyond the child and a parent up into how our society is also organised.
Narrator (00:41): Welcome to the Emerging Minds Podcast.
Dan Moss (00:46): Hi everybody. My name’s Dan Moss and welcome to episode two of Child-Focused Approaches to Complex Problems. Today, we’re very fortunate to be able to continue our conversation with Professor Sarah Wendt at the team at the Social Work Innovation Research Living Space at Flinders University or commonly known as SWIRLS. Sarah and her team have recently written a paper with Emerging Minds called Child-Focused Practise Competencies: Structural Approaches to Complex Problem. This paper is available at the Emerging Mind website on www.emergingminds.com au.
(01:26): The paper examines intersectional, structural, and child-focused responses to the interconnecting issues of intergenerational disadvantage, parental mental illness, substance use, violence, and trauma. In this episode two, Sarah and the team focus on the practise approaches that help to work with children and families affected mainly by family violence and trauma and how this structural approach to these issues can help to unpack the effects of these problems on all family members, but most particularly infants and children while drawing out stories of adult agency or resilience or connection with their children in helping to think about children’s safety and social and emotional wellbeing.
(02:12): Throughout this podcast, you will be hearing from Professor Sarah Wendt, who is the director of SWIRLS at Flinders University, Dr. Kate Seymour, who is a social worker and criminologist, and currently employed as senior lecturer at social work at Flinders University. Nicola Trenorden, who is an associate lecturer in social work at Flinders University, and Kirsty Lowe, who has 20 years as a clinician in the field and is currently an associate lecturer in social work at Flinders University.
(02:44): To begin part two of this excellent podcast, I began the conversation by asking Sarah why it is important for all practitioners to have the ability to help and support children who have experienced trauma to tell their stories, these stories that are so often denied of them in safe and supportive ways.
Professor Sarah Wendt (03:05): So when we think about trauma, trauma is a concept that can encapsulate many different things. And so when we think about trauma in children’s lives, often children experience things like sexual assault or sexual abuse or physical violence or neglect. So when we think about trauma and you start to operationalize or think about what does that mean to even name sexual physical abuse and neglect is really difficult to say that that actually happens to children. It’s hard for a society to say that and it’s hard as practitioners to recognise that. So even our first piece of the puzzle when we understand secrecy or self blame is that society really struggles with these concepts. And so if you think about that struggle, children therefore by their age or their development don’t have a voice often because of power dynamics between adults and children, but also they don’t even have the voice or the language or experience to even speak sometimes the violence, the abuse, whether that’s sexual or physical.
(04:13): So why is it important as a practitioner that we bring a safe space for children to be able to speak these things is absolutely vital and it is a high skill to be able to hold a child in a safe place to have these conversations. And I say that for two reasons. Firstly, we need to be ready to have that conversation and the child needs to be ready to have that conversation. It can’t be rushed and it can’t be quick because otherwise we will unintentionally again layer that with trauma, layer that with secrecy or rush, which could unintentionally keep building a story of self blame. So these conversations need time, they need space, they need curiosity, they need relationships to be able to have them.
(04:59): When you create a safe space, you can then open up as a social worker some of those structural ideas with a child, believe it or not. We might think they’re complex ideas, but to be able to talk about with a child that there is power in society, there is power between an adult and a child, or there’s power between men and women, or there’s power between Black and white people. To be able to open those conversations and explore those with children, I would argue can bring self blame down into a context in which children are living, which then ultimately can shift secrecy and how we talk about these things. So it takes it from the child owning it and thinking that it’s to do with them. And again, it takes it to having a conversation with children about the worlds in which we live.
Dan Moss (05:50): I asked Nicola about her experience and the difference it can make for a child when you start as a practitioner to give yourself permission to ask children careful and safe questions about the stories of their lives.
Nicola Trenorden (06:05): Because remember, as adults, often, we can come across adult centric in our approaches, we rely on our voice and questioning, and that can be really uncomfortable for children, particularly where there’s been lots of experience of adversity or they haven’t been trusted or heard or validated. What Sarah had said before is spot on, that we are in a culture that doesn’t always validate what children are saying or we might dismiss it. And particularly I’ve worked in school settings for the last few years with children where they might be seen as the naughty problem child. So anything they say is within that kind of container so they’re not believed. And so they’ll come into a space with you thinking that you’re going to do the same, you’re not going to believe them. So that presence and connection with them is important and that you are showing just three tiny little things that you believe in them, that you are there for them.
(06:52): And look, I guess my expertise is in using a whole lot of approaches to enable that to happen. So again, non-verbal practises, using child-friendly resources to help children, whatever is implicit because with blame and secrecy, they maybe told not to share anything there may be threats. So finding an array of ways that they can solely tell the story. And as Sarah said, not to rush. And that’s fundamental with any kind of trauma work that you don’t rush. So one of the key principles, and I’m very much guided by a phase based approach to trauma responses, which is safety and stability. And stability is all about how do you help resource a child to feel like they’ve got some sense of control over these overwhelming feelings, whether their emotions or their physical responses before you enter into that space where they might tell you things.
(07:41): And obviously you can’t control that sometimes, but it might be that there might be some practises around being able to co-regulate together initially. I do agree with Bonnie Badenoch that I think it’s really unfair to expect children to regulate. If they’ve come from trauma context, we need to start with co-regulation. So one exercise I use that is really helpful with children is an activity called Draw the Music and we’ll just have pieces of paper together, put on some music that they like. Obviously, it’s calming music, sort of at heartbeat rate. And I’ll just say, “Just draw with the music and just flow with whatever comes.” And I’ll actually mirror a copy with them. And so there’s co-regulation happening in a way that is child friendly. I’m sort of talking around the age of maybe seven to nine.
(08:20): And in that very simple exercise, a whole lot of things are happening around regulation, safety. There’s an adult next to you following you and copying you, and it’s also non-directive. So it’s sort of opening the space for the child to lead, which is something they may not also have had many opportunities for. Something as simple as that, and there are many different exercises, is inviting the child into a space where you care, they matter, and that you’re here to listen to them. And I guess as you create that really safe space, children will start to feel a connection with you and then there may be things that they tell you.
(08:57): Most cases in my experience, that does happen. And so it’s important then that you go back to those stability practises about, “Okay, I can see that and you’re telling me these things and this is making you really nervous. Let’s just remember that we can go back to doing some drawing now, we can bring out that clay and we’ll co-regulate together and maybe you can take that clay with you when you go home.” And that can be something you can do when you’re feeling really unsafe at home. So you’re giving that child some agency and capacity to cope with those overwhelm feelings wherever they are.
Dan Moss (09:26): I asked Nicola about working with a family because sometimes the non-offending parent will be going through their own struggles or challenges. They might be feeling guilty or angry, maybe even thinking that the child should have done something to avoid what happened to them. I asked Nicola, what conversations can you have with parents to support them to form the supportive team around the child, which most effectively helps that child to recover from their experience of trauma?
Nicola Trenorden (09:53): I think it’s like something I said before about starting with conversations around some understanding of development, depending on the age of the child and the kind of needs of that child. Sometimes normative development is not understood, so children’s behaviour can be misread as being naughty or willful. And then if you add trauma on the top of it, that can be confusing for parents. They might think that they’re not parenting well enough or are not really attuned to what the children’s needs are. So often starting with knowledge around children’s development is an important thing and really helpful. I find when I work with parents often they’ll be quite surprised that these are some of the things that are happening for that child at that age. So it really does start again with relationship, which has been a theme right throughout our conversations.
(10:40): So it’s having that warm connection with the parent as well in your conversations, but not stepping to the side around gently challenging some of those misunderstandings. And there’s a lot of them out there. I often have a chart that’s quite a user-friendly chart around, it’s kind of like somebody chart of the different ages and stages around development. It’s also got some brain development in it. And some of the theories, I’ll just say, “Well, these are some of the theories around development.” Really easy to understand for parents to kind of see, “Oh, okay, that makes a of sense. You know, right now, they do need to assert their will because that’s part of them growing up.” So it sort of takes the focus off of the parent per se, puts it on a page where there’s some information and it can launch into a discussion that’s perhaps a little bit more even cool rather than pointing the finger at the parent.
(11:32): But I think also you might have that conversation and you’ve got to allow time for that to process. Parents may have not heard some of the information before, so allowing space in follow-up visits to have more conversations. It’s not necessary just a one-off conversation.
Dan Moss (11:47): I asked Sarah about her practise thoughts about making power overt in helpful ways with non-offending parents.
Professor Sarah Wendt (11:55): I was just thinking of subtle things to try and open up a conversation with a parent, particularly when children have experienced particular traumas or violence or abuse is also hard, but I’m thinking about how as a practitioner you can encourage the non-offending parent or those adults around them to have that conversation is to, I think about taking a step back and trying to be in the shoes of the child. And you could open up questions like, instead of focusing on what’s wrong with your child, why don’t we ask questions like, what may have happened to your child? Or, what is it like to feel scared? What do you think fear does to children? If you are scared, how does that make you feel?
(12:42): So it’s about being curious about behaviour. And so instead of having assumptions that we can often all have as adults and buy into stereotypes of children, trying to partner with non-offending parents to sit alongside and be curious together, be caring together around asking those questions of, yeah, I’ve been scared before, what does fear do to me? So what would fear do to a child? That might bring other perspectives to then open up conversations of power. So how power is enacted through fear, intimidation, secrecy, and all those other dynamics. Then you can become curious in how power is exercised in intimate relationships or parent-child relationships. And that can help create a language that then you can take beyond the child and the parent up into how our society is also organised.
Dan Moss (13:36): I then asked Sarah, given what we know about the prevalence of family domestic violence in society, is it enough now for this work to be only the domain of specialist family violence practitioners in terms of having child-focused conversations, particularly with women? Or is this something that all practitioners and social workers need to be skilled in dealing with?
Professor Sarah Wendt (14:00): Domestic and family violence is extremely prevalent, and so we have national plans to address this. We have services to provide responses to it, and we have specialist agencies to really dig deep into some of this work. But I would argue because of the prevalence of domestic and family violence, all social workers should have knowledge, basic knowledge on how to respond to it safely and therefore how to refer safely. So I’m going to talk about two ideas of what I mean by specialist, and I want to unpack that a little bit.
(14:35): So in our understandings of domestic and family violence, we need to thank practitioners, researchers and policymakers that have largely responded to this issue to bring it to the national agenda. Underlying that is a lot of what I call specialist knowledge about how we understand power and control or coercive control, the different tactics of a perpetrator, and the impacts that domestic and family violence have on women and their children. This is what I call specialist knowledge. And so I think that there is a high level of skill that’s needed to respond to domestic and family violence where we need specialists to spend time with children and victims, but also perpetrators.
(15:16): Having said that, there is specialist knowledge about how you respond safely, and I would argue that all practitioners need that specialist knowledge to generally respond safely to domestic and family violence. That means, one, recognising it, two, having an understanding of the safety and wellbeing around it, and three, knowing your role and therefore how to partner with more long-term specialist agencies. I’m finding as we start to understand domestic and family violence more and more and how we are starting to really challenge ourselves in how we think about power and with the knowledge of intersectionality, the knowledge of agency and that power is exercised in multiple ways, I still think that these ideas as abstract as they seem can still be brought into a space with a conversation with a woman.
(16:09): So you can talk about ideas of responsibility as adults. You can talk about agency as adults or choice, what restraints those choices. You can talk about how power is exercised individually, culturally, structurally. And so I think if we come with a curiosity with women, not positioning them maybe as we used to as being powerless or only victims, because we hear lots of stories about women moving against victimhood. Let’s be curious about how women think about themselves, their own responsibility, their agency, how we think about responsibility of parents, moms, dads, family, society, but also invite in space there what does agency mean in these conversations and how does that influence our ways of being and the meanings we construct around our family life. I think these tools can build conversations to shift the different perspectives in which we think about domestic violence in all its complexity.
Dan Moss (17:11): I asked Kate how practitioners could have sensitive conversations with mothers about their own agency in keeping children safe and attending to their child’s social and emotional wellbeing needs, while also taking care not to blame women for the violence perpetrated by fathers or other men or to unwittingly collude in mother blame.
Dr Kate Seymour (17:34): It’s really tricky territory, and I think the cold hard truth is that the parent does have a responsibility for the safety of the kid to the extent that they can. And I always think about a time in practise where I was working with a man who was in jail for all sorts of violent offences, and he started to talk with me about his anger, his fury in fact at his mother for the domestic violence that they had both lived in as a result of his father. And having exploring that, that I had to grapple with the fact that his fury whilst misdirected, but also not, that we needed to engage with that. So whilst he needed to understand that there were things that she couldn’t do, he was also valid in his questioning around why was I left in these situations and why did whatever happened and whatever.
(18:27): So without blaming her, there were valid questions for him to ask and for him to have had conversations with her, not in order to blame her or to make her responsible, but in order to bring both of those voices to the centre. And I guess what that taught me is that we need to be compassionate and understanding and sensitive around what women are living with and what they’re having to cope with. However, there is the impacts of that on children also. We can’t dance away from that either. And how we do that without blaming I think is really difficult. But I think there is something there around children practically can’t make any choices in that context depending on their age and all the rest. So I think we do have to have conversations with women around recognising that what they do have control over and what they don’t have control over about, but that actually their decisions don’t affect them only. And that’s the hard edge of it.
(19:24): And I think this is where the line between professional practise and societal discourses and our own thinking inevitably come together because what we know is as a society, we have trouble naming that stuff. There are all sorts of grey areas and blurriness around, is this violence or is this something else? So I think there’s that broader context which makes it difficult and means that as practitioners we can go down that road of, “Oh, well he’s not really nice, but maybe it’s not blah, blah, blah.” So I think that’s the first level. But I think that we can engage with women to shift the conversation from whether what he’s doing is right or wrong or good or bad and what she’s doing is good or bad, but to actually just shift quite sidewards in order to ask very careful and sensitive questions around, “How do you think that Joe might be experiencing that? Or when this is happening over here, where is Joe and what do you notice about?”
(20:22): So just very subtly shifting the focus from what’s going on between the adults to actually thinking about how the child might be experiencing that. So shifting the focus. You’re not saying, “I don’t want to hear about that,” but you’re actually just bringing that child into the room and bringing somebody else, the impact on somebody else into the room in a way that you can look at and explore as neutrally as possible without it being a, well, have you thought about it? It’s more about letting the conversation shift a bit. But also recognising that for women that can be beginning to grapple with themselves as having been in a domestic and family violence situation, is that there’s actually also intense shame associated with that for women that I think we underestimate. And that what a barrier that is to actually being able to name that stuff, to acknowledging it, that there’s a lot of identity work, if you like, in that around how one sees one oneself.
(21:23): And so I think if you can engage in some of those discussions, which are big discussions and difficult, then you might be able to start to grapple with what it means for that woman and how that’s played out in her life, but also it enable her to perhaps understand her children’s responses and experiences in a different way, but also to engage with those children in a way that doesn’t just reenact that victim role.
(21:49): So I think commonly women in these situations will experience that kind of the children young or old kind of reacting against and perhaps seeing, beginning to see their mum as a victim or as an abused woman who hasn’t gotten out of that. All of those broader discourses that can then play out within the family in particular dynamics that are also really difficult for women to live with. And there may also be alignment with the father for younger boys that might be really complex. So I think talking with women about ways in which they can, number one, think about that, but number two, actually engage with their children about why things happen in the way they happen and the kind of compromises and balances that she’s had to maintain, then it provides a way forward I think.
Dan Moss (22:36): Thinking now about the safety and wellbeing of children when engaging with male perpetrators of violence, coercion, or control, I asked Sarah about how practitioners, how all practitioners can approach these engagements.
Professor Sarah Wendt (22:51): To try and answer this shift towards wanting to engage with perpetrators and the narrative and the discourses around keeping them accountable or responsible, I want to open up some conversations again about the generalist and the specialist. I think that we have to understand how to engage men safely when we notice domestic and family violence, particularly around those things we understand in terms of safety, lethality and wellbeing. So it’s those core things of recognised respond and refer. But I also want to say that when we go to engage men around responsibility and accountability, we are turning our focus too using fathering as a way to open up conversations. And I think that there are some wonderful aspects of that because it enables us to open up conversations with men about what they hope for, some of their ethics around their relationship with their children, and that can be a way in.
(23:47): But I also want to say in terms of specialist knowledge, we need to also be very careful about what we’re maybe unintentionally reinforcing. And so in these conversations, I don’t think conversations can just be about fathering. Conversations also need to be about masculinities and different forms of masculinities. And so the contention often comes with fathers want to have a relationship with their children, but they hold contempt, they can be unsafe, and disrespectful still to their partners. How you balance and open up those conversations around what do we think about fathering and how do we think about respectful relationships with women, I’m not sure those two can coexist in isolation. They actually have to come together. That is the specialist knowledge where we need to open up conversations about our society, what do we mean by fathering masculinities? Which masculinities are we talking about? And how does that feed into understandings about families, about adults, about children, and also about safety?
Dan Moss (24:55): I asked Kate about what she’s finding in her research around effective engagement strategies with male perpetrators
Dr Kate Seymour (25:04): In general, we know working with anyone that if you back people into a corner and don’t give them much room and shake your finger at them, that most people respond defensively as a general truth. That’s as likely to be true of working with perpetrators as it is of anyone else. But I think in talking about a man’s use of violence, obviously you need to name it and all of that kind of stuff, so you can’t dance around that. But on the other hand, conversations about things like fathering do give an opportunity to talk about the impacts on children, the kind of messages, the kind of learnings that the children of the family might be getting around what they can expect and what they’re entitled to, and what women are entitled or what men are entitled to.
(25:48): And that often that externalisation from the man’s own behaviour and whether that’s right or wrong or good or bad, or whether how he’s perceives that as shame, as shameful or blaming can just lift it out of that real emotiveness of shame to thinking about what is bigger than him and what the future can bring for his children and how that carries on beyond him or in a way that’s bigger than him. And so that can give some space and something to work with. That just lifts people out of the shame of the moment or the going over and over what they’ve done that’s not good to focus on what could be redeemed and what could be different.
(26:31): So I think conversations with others who have used violence against women and children in their family can actually engage in some of similar discussions as with the mother, similar, but very different, obviously. But in terms of starting to think about what’s going on for the kids in the family and just starting to recognise how even if the kids aren’t present, what they may be noticing, what might be going on for them is important in its own right. But also I think there’s also something around father’s relationships with their sons and with their daughters and the ways that may play out differently. And I think we probably need to be more focused on that, more attentive to that so that the way that son’s reactions or responses or experiences of their father’s violence may have some quite profound differences than daughters. They may not too, but they may. And I think there’s been research that shows us, that highlights the kind of complexities for young men and boys who have a really difficult time around sort of identifying with their father, but also struggling with that.
(27:45): So I think that’s something that should be brought to the fore in these conversations. But also the way that a child today is an adult tomorrow, and that when we talk about trauma and the impacts of violence upon children, it’s those very same children who are also, or who may in a couple of years be perpetrators. And we need to recognise that they are the same people so that the impact of trauma doesn’t just end at childhood, but that adult perpetration is linked to trauma. And we need to be able to have those conversations both as a society and at the policy level, but also with perpetrators of violence, not in a way that lets them off the hook or says, “It’s not your fault,” but there are connections between the child experience and the adult experience. Whilst that’s uncomfortable, I think it’s only by engaging with that that we can actually start to disentangle some of those connections.
Dan Moss (28:43): That concludes episode two in Child-Focused Approaches to Complex Problems. In this episode, you heard Sarah, Kate, Kirsty, and Nicola discuss their views on how to use a structural and child-focused lens to develop safe, trusting, and open relationships with children and their parents affected by trauma and violence. It has been such a privilege to talk to Sarah and the team from the Social Work Innovation Research Living Space, or SWIRLS at Flinders University. It’s been so great to be able to work with the team on some papers and other content over the last four years and particularly at present. I hope that you’ve enjoyed listening to this double episode as much as I have in facilitating it. I’m Dan Moss. Thank you and goodbye for now.
Narrator (29:35): Visit our website at www.emergingminds.com.au to access a range of resources to assist your practice. Brought to you by the National Workforce Centre for Child Mental Health, led by Emerging Minds. The National Workforce Centre for Child Mental Health is funded by the Australian Government Department of Health under the National Support for Child or Youth Mental Health Program.