Senior CYP Domestic Abuse Advocate talks about domestic abuse

Shane Pulling is a Senior CYP Domestic Abuse Advocate at the YOU Trust. He talks about what the job entails, and why he enjoys it.

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Transcript

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My name is Natalie and I work for the You Trust and I'm the Somerset Domestic Abuse Service manager. And I have Shane with me. Shane, would you like to introduce yourself? Yeah. Hello. My name is Shane and I am the senior CYPVA, which is, senior children and young people violence advisor. Okay. And, Shane, can you tell me what a YPVA or young person violence advisor does Yeah. So I work with, really 7 to 18 year olds, and that can be children that have witnessed domestic abuse. Sometimes. Well, quite a lot of the time I work with, young people that have been in their own intimate relationships, and experienced abuse. I look at emotions and feelings work with them. We also look lots into healthy relationship. Work with them to help them understand what's normal and what can be seen as abusive in a relationship. Yeah. Brilliant. And, Shane, what do you aim to do with your clients? So my aim, my my ultimate goal for them really is to grow up into loving, healthy relationships. So my role is to, do some safety planning with them. So that can be looking at, like ring doorbells or things like that. So locks on windows and plan what they would do in an event where they see that abusive person, where they would go if they were out on the street to keep themselves safe and make sure they go into a shop. So there's people around. So we're somewhere where there's CCTV. I also look, so if they haven't already done so, we can look at, like, non-molestation orders. And also because children are victims in their own right now, whether they've experienced it directly to them or whether they've witnessed it between parents. That's key for the work that we actually really do, so Brilliant. Shane, how can we, as a service, help to prevent violence against women and girls? So I think the main part of it really is the safety planning. And the safety planning is really crucial in our job. So that will be one of the, one of the first things we do with them. And, yeah, look into how they can keep themselves safe, whether they're in their home, whether it's internet safety. I've worked with, people that have had abuse online from partners trying to. Yeah, trying to be really mean and abusive online. So looking at blocking that person, keeping diaries, keeping journals of, anything that happened so that they were able to, record that, give evidence to the police, and that would be also part of my job. I can support them in, police interviews. We also support them in court if they go through court. Yeah. And then another program we also look at, with children is aspire, which would be children that are abusive to parents. Really. So I work with a couple at the moment who've been abusive to parents. And if you look deeper into it, they've quite often experienced some trauma in their younger years as well. So working with them to understand what's right and what's wrong and what's healthy and what's unhealthy is really key to helping them understand, relationships. Brilliant. Thank you, Shane. And lastly, what is it that you love about your job? I love my job. Just because I get to I get to go and help people. I see children, I've done all sorts of job, so I've worked with adults. But working with children just gives you that sense of real achievement and trying to help them grow up to learn and live healthy relationships that I worked with a young girl not long ago, last week, I think it was, and she asked me the same question. She asked me why I do my job, and I said to just because I care. I want to help people like you, grow up to lead healthy relationships. So I asked her what she wanted to do as well, and she said to me, she said she wanted to grow up to be a social worker, which I was like, oh, brilliant, because that's growing up to help people. So it's really key that, I think we have a great team that I work with, with very supportive, though we have quite a lot of flexibility in our job. So we can we can see children at home, we see children in school, make sure it's a safe place for them. Yeah. And I just I love being able to go out and be a role model for, especially males. If I can role model them growing up, hopefully then that stops abuse to women and girls. If I can be the best version of me and I can help them be the best version of themselves.