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, discusses the scale of reform in children’s social care and the leadership challenge this presents with only “a limited national shared articulation of how they fit together”. In this context Dan highlights the evolving, necessary shifts in risk management around domestic abuse, but highlights the need for a greater focus on the voice of child victims.
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. At their best, they create the conditions to improve the lived experiences of children and families by understanding and responding to underlying need earlier and more effectively. 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 of vulnerability and demand across the system. It directly impacts safeguarding, emotional wellbeing, educational 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, improving lived experience, and strengthening social and cultural cohesion. Domestic abuse is a critical lens through which to understanding inequality, trauma, and intergenerational and contextual harm. It is also rarely an isolated issue and is often part of a wider family context that shapes children's experiences, relationships and long term outcomes.
How is children’s social care changing the way it addresses domestic abuse?
The direction of travel is undeniably positive. The Domestic Abuse Act and broader reforms have helped create stronger foundations for change. I think we've been really progressing, particularly in our understanding of trauma informed practice, whole family working, coercive and controlling behaviour, and the importance of understanding lived experience. I think the reforms should help embed this. The principles are there, but practice is emerging and uneven.
Not all guidance has historically reflected the realities of 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. There is also a growing focus on understanding perpetrator behaviour and patterns of harm, rather than focusing solely on incidents. 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 can still err on the side of risk dominance, rather than the side of reducing harm and improving lived experience. Where you have a system that remains risk dominant this obscures lived experience, and obscures the focus on cause rather than symptoms. I see cultural change embedding across the system, but to land this we need sustained leadership, workforce development, reflective supervision and a continued commitment to trauma informed practice. Ultimately, culture is what determines whether policy intent becomes a different lived experience for children and families.
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 and better lived experiences for children and families.
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 understand the tools at your disposal to create change. Doing this means quality assurance – good supervision and training. It also means building a culture that values professional curiosity, understands trauma, and supports practitioners to see the whole family context rather than individual presenting issues in isolation.
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 practice is more procedural and risk dominated. This isn't specific to councils alone, 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 them 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 to improve outcomes and lived experience across the whole system?
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 frameworks, 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 all of your practice and we can’t remove it entirely – nor should we. The challenge is not that we focus too much on risk, but that risk can sometimes be understood too narrowly. 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. That means understanding coercive control, family context, perpetrator behaviour and the underlying needs that create vulnerability. 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'd particularly like to see a stronger focus on recovery, resilience and long term lived experience outcomes, not simply immediate safety. We know children experience domestic abuse differently at different stages of childhood and adolescence, and our support offer should reflect that.
I welcome the shift from seeing children as witnesses to recognising them as 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. The next phase of reform should help us better understand and respond to those experiences so that children not only become safer, but are able to recover, thrive and achieve better long term outcomes.