“There is a material risk the system becomes overloaded and diluted, rather than strengthened”
Where does domestic abuse sit in the midst of “unprecedented change” in children’s social care?
Dan Ruaux, Director of Children, Young People and Learning at West Sussex County Council, sat down to discuss how social care practice is evolving, how leadership faces up to widespread reform, and why more focus is needed on child victims of domestic abuse.
This is the latest in the RIVA Conversations series.
As a Director of Children’s Services, what are the leadership challenges you’re facing?
A good place to start would be the unprecedented change across our system. There are multiple reforms landing at pace but, as yet, a limited national shared articulation of how they fit together. We are entering a critical 18-month period characterised by the convergence of inspection, reform delivery and sustained financial pressure, with a sharper focus on things like evidencing improvement.
Local Government Reorganisation is compounding complexity. Emerging footprints suggest that local authorities are becoming smaller and more numerous – while police and health partners are consolidating into larger geographies. This adds complexity to issues such as domestic abuse that depend on multi‑agency alignment.
Against this backdrop, the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026 and the Education White Paper are core building blocks of a re‑designed, integrated system. If implemented cohesively they provide mechanisms to address root causes of disadvantage, like domestic abuse. They intend to invest in vulnerability in early years through Best Start in Life & Family Hubs, shift the system to earlier, relationship-based intervention through the Families First Programme, and strengthen joint working on complex cases through Multi‑Agency Child Protection Teams (MACPTs).
I believe these reforms represent a necessary system shift from reactive to preventative, and service-led to lived experience-led. But the question for me is about the how: all these changes create competing priorities that need to be balanced within finite capacity.
The leadership challenge is to align reforms into a single, coherent narrative and delivery model. I would suggest that without this coherence there is a material risk that the system becomes overloaded and diluted, rather than strengthened.
How does someone in your role view domestic abuse as an issue?
For any director of children’s services, domestic abuse is one of the most common and harmful drivers. It directly impacts safeguarding, emotional wellbeing, education outcomes, trauma, and pre- and post-natal life chances. Our overriding purpose is reducing harm and domestic abuse is at the heart of that – it’s not a periphery issue. It's about improving stability for children and their families, and social and cultural cohesion. Domestic abuse is a critical lens to understanding inequality, trauma, and intergenerational and contextual harm.
How is children’s social care changing the way it addresses domestic abuse?
The direction of travel is undeniably positive. The primary statute legislation [Domestic Abuse Act 2021] has only just been passed in the last 10 years or so. I think we’ve been really progressing, particularly in the understanding of trauma, whole family working, and recognition of coercive control. I think the reforms should help embed this. The principles are there, but practice is emerging and uneven.
Not all the sector guidance links into coercive control. We know to tackle domestic abuse we had to move away from blaming the mum. We have to recognise the victim experience and emphasise perpetrator accountability. This is getting so much better than when I was first training, but there's still women being seen as failing to manage abuse, rather than being victims of it.
Practice change is percolating and our systems are evolving but they err on the side of risk dominance, rather than the side of reducing harm to women. Where you have a system that remains risk dominant this obscures lived experience, and obscures the focus on cause rather than symptoms. I see across the system cultural change is embedding, but to land this we need sustained leadership training and practice training and cultural shift.
Why has social care practice ended up with varying quality of responses to domestic abuse, and what could improve this?
This consistency question could apply to any of the critical issues driving social care need – drugs and alcohol, poverty, unmet parental need. To ensure consistency requires the right capacity and competence in the workforce, and setting the right organisational and cultural conditions within not just the children’s department, but political and executive buy-in across the council. This is what allows capability and confidence to flourish in addressing domestic abuse – and therefore delivers better outcomes.
This means access to subject matter experts within your organisation. They act as your check and balance, and the brake and the accelerator. They ensure you can recognise not just the risk, but the need underlying that risk, and know the tools at your disposal to create change. Doing this means quality assurance – good supervision and training.
There is also something around system maturity. There are really good examples of partnership where parts of the system are delivering highly-effective strength-based interventions, and other areas where it's more procedural and risk dominated. This isn't stuff specific to the council, but about the Community Safety Partnership. So how do we ensure we're using all platforms to ensure we're developing the whole system? Where do police sit, the voluntary sector sit? What is the maturity of these relationships? This is a real challenge under local government reorganisation. It will create acute barriers – and we need to navigate effectively. The right investment in workforce development matters, but these things always drop off early when under pressure. We need a clear set of standards and practice frameworks. The reforms will deliver this, but how do we use them consistently?
RIVA argues that we need to move domestic abuse responses away from the current risk paradigm. How possible is this in the context of children’s social care practice, culture and legislation? What would it take to make this shift?
Moving away from risk dominance is challenging, but necessary. There is a statutory framework and there are elements that are preventative. However, there is also a hierarchy of risk and legal gatekeeping. Risk management is deeply embedded within our culture, language and accountability, and it has to be.
What is mustn’t do is translate understanding of risk into fear of failure and inspection. Risk shouldn't lead your practice and we can’t remove it entirely – nor should we. We should be intervening in the right way for children and that leads with lived experience. For me the movement has to be towards relationship- and strengths-based practice, and on reframing from risk elimination to risk management. This needs leadership bold enough to state this shift and drive it collaboratively across the system.
Finally, we have seen very little definition from government on what provision services should provide to children now recognised as victims in their own right under the Domestic Abuse Act. Is this also an area of uncertainty for children’s services? Is there anything you'd like to see changed to see children given greater spotlight?
There is a gap between bold policy intent and lived experience on the ground. It is ambiguous. Have we agreed what good looks like in practice? Because without that we see gaps and variability. This is where statutory guidance should come in. We know there is redrafting and change in the wider inspection framework – and I hope this will better peg this out.
I also think there isn’t enough discussion on recovery for child victims. And there is also a question about the integration between children and adults DA services. We need to hear more children’s voices and to understand the impact domestic abuse has on their social networks, attachments and trusting relationships, and resilience and education.
I welcome the shift from seeing children as witnesses to distinct victims with distinct needs and rights. I believe we have some of the best child protection in the world, particularly for early years and younger children. But it's not as effective in understanding what that trauma means in later stages of childhood and adolescence.