Partnered with a Survivor: David Mandel and Ruth Reymundo Mandel

Season 6 Episode 8: The Prevention-Response Nexus: Keeping Children Safe While Breaking Cycles of Abuse

• Season 6 • Episode 8

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Imagine a world where our most vulnerable babies are protected without automatically severing their connection to their family. That's the vision Lauren Seager-Smith brings as Chief Executive of the For Baby's Sake Trust, where they're revolutionizing responses to domestic abuse during pregnancy and early childhood.

The numbers are staggering: approximately 50,000 babies under two are referred to social care in England each year due to domestic abuse, with 2,000 entering out-of-home care. Each placement costs taxpayers £281,000 annually—but that's just the economic cost. The human toll is immeasurable.

Lauren shares how their innovative program works therapeutically with both parents from pregnancy through the baby's second birthday. Unlike traditional approaches that focus exclusively on mothers or default to family separation, they engage fathers who use abusive behaviors while simultaneously supporting mothers and protecting children. What makes this approach particularly effective is its recognition that pregnancy represents a critical intervention point where many parents are highly motivated to change.

The program reveals profound insights about intergenerational trauma. Among participating parents, 73% of fathers and 74% of mothers have experienced six or more adverse childhood experiences themselves. "For many of our fathers, they want a different story for their baby," Lauren explains. This motivation becomes the foundation for intensive work around emotional regulation, trauma processing, and building attunement with their infant.

Perhaps most striking is the economic case for prevention. At approximately £9,000 per year per family—versus £281,000 for a child in care—programs like For Baby's Sake offer a fiscally responsible alternative to our current crisis-response systems. Yet despite this clear math, governments continue prioritizing expensive reactive measures over prevention.

This conversation challenges us to think differently about protecting children. Can we create systems that hold those who use violence accountable while supporting their capacity to change? Can we recognize the profound connection between maternal and child welfare without placing impossible burdens on mothers? Most importantly, can we find the courage to invest in prevention, even when immediate crises demand our attention?

Join us for this thought-provoking discussion that reimagines what's possible when we truly commit to breaking cycles of harm and supporting healthy family connections from the very beginning of life.

Learn more at: https://forbabyssake.org.uk/

Now available! Mapping the Perpetrator’s Pattern: A Practitioner’s Tool for Improving Assessment, Intervention, and Outcomes The web-based Perpetrator Pattern Mapping Tool is a virtual practice tool for improving assessment, intervention, and outcomes through a perpetrator pattern-based approach. The tool allows practitioners to apply the Model’s critical concepts and principles to their current case load in real

Check out David Mandel's new book "Stop Blaming Mothers and Ignoring Fathers: How to transform the way we keep children safe from domestic violence."

Visit the Safe & Together Institute website

Start taking Safe & Together Institute courses

Check out Safe & Together Institute upcoming events

Ruth Reymundo:

and we're back and we're back hey, there, hey, how are you happy to?

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see you this morning. Oh yeah, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. Oh so, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. Maybe I'm the bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.

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Oh, so bright-eyed. Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.

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Maybe I'm the bright-eyed and bushy-tailed one.

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Yeah, you're like the Energizer Bunny sometimes. Yeah, that's true this morning. So anyway.

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Well, welcome back to Partner with a Survivor. I'm David Mandel, ceo of the Safe and Together Institute.

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And I'm Ruth Reymundo, development officer and the co-owner of the Safe and Together Institute.

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And we've got a great episode here. We're going to be talking about young children, infants and domestic abuse and innovative approaches to working with those children and hopefully keeping them out of home care you know, keeping them safe and together with their protective parents. You know, keeping them safe and together with their protective parents, right? So, um, and we've got a great interview here lauren seger smith, chief uh, executive, uh of the for the baby safe trust. So, but let's, before we do that, let's do a land acknowledgement. Where are we coming from?

Ruth Reymundo:

well, we are coming from tunxis, mesaco land, uh, part of the greater Algonquin nation, and we are near the Farmington River and it is again still springtime lots more leaves on the trees this time and I always like to tell you how the land feels, because that's incredibly important in understanding how to be connected to the land. But we are in the time of spring where we see all of the fruits and flowers kind of coming out and getting ready to just grow, and we are honoring the indigenous and native First Nation elders, past, present, and all of those emerging as well, who are bringing their wisdom to this world so that we can all live sustainably together and nurture each other. So that is our land acknowledgement.

Ruth Reymundo:

That's great, I'm going to do the bio here and introduce everybody.

David Mandel:

I'd love to introduce Lauren. Lauren Seeger-Smith is Chief Executive of the For the Baby's Sake Trust. She's been in that role since May 2023. And she comes in with a huge amount of experience around leading charities related to growth and development, around children's rights and trauma-informed whole families approaches. She was previously CEO of Kidscape, a charity that provided help with bullying, where she led to its development of strategy and governance, expanded services and grow its income, and that she was national coordinator of the Anti-Bullying Alliance. And she's also held a number of high profile board positions, including trustee of Children England and membership of the Action for Children England Committee. So just with that, lauren, I just want to welcome you to partner with a survivor.

Lauren Seager-Smith:

Thank you so much. It's such a privilege to be here with you today.

David Mandel:

Yeah, and I want to just tell our audience, you know what brought me, you know, to pay attention to your organization, which has been around a number of years at this point I think you're on your 10th anniversary, um, but I saw a piece and you explained this.

David Mandel:

You know, as we were getting into the show beforehand and prepping, you know, you did a freedom of information request of government to look at really the intersection of domestic abuse and reports to social care and children zero to two going into out-of-home care, and the numbers you found were, I think, staggering and not surprising, at least from my perspective. You know that you were saying and we're just talking for our audience, we're talking, uh, zero to two, so we're not talking about zero to 17, we're not talking about all children that, um, that domestic abuse was, that was the primary reason for referral to social care for 50 000 children a year zero to two in england that was your kind of estimate you worked out and that 2,000 of those aged kids would go into out-of-home care in a given year. You also found that the two top reasons for referrals to social care were parental mental health and domestic abuse. And we know that embedded in the parental mental health will be histories of domestic abuse as well. So that's even probably a greater factor than just that number shows, and that ruth and I were talking beforehand, and that a child in social care costs government 200 281 81 000 pounds a year something like

David Mandel:

5 000 pounds a day, a week, a week, a week, yeah, a week yeah the numbers start getting big and you start being like, yeah, but but so anyway, can you just talk to us about that information, why it should be relevant to people, how it's relevant to the work you do at um, at, for baby's sake, trust, and just kind of get us into this.

Lauren Seager-Smith:

Yeah, of course, thank you. So the For Babies' Sake Trust is here to break cycles of domestic abuse and give babies the best start in life, and so we do have a distinct focus on the impact of domestic abuse in the first 1001 days, so the impact in pregnancy and in those early years, and so what we've been trying to do is really understand what's happening for our babies in the UK, and that's actually quite difficult information to get your hands on. And so we did a couple of things. We did a freedom of information request to police forces last year to try and look at the number of babies that were present at police call outs for domestic abuse and and those there were staggering numbers there of babies that were present. And then, following that, we wanted to know what was going on with with social care and domestic abuse, because, again, it was quite difficult to find out exactly what was happening for babies. And so we put put out that Freedom of Information request and, as you said, what we found which wasn't a surprise to us and, as you said, not necessarily to yourselves because you work in this space but that we were also seeing very, very high numbers of babies who were being referred to children's social care where domestic abuse was a contributing or a primary factor, and that's so important because we know that what happens in those early years has a profound impact on the rest of our lives. And so we also know, though, that pregnancy is a really high risk time for domestic abuse. So research suggests that around one in five children will experience domestic abuse by the time they're 18, but that at least 30% of domestic abuse begins in pregnancy, and so a lot of the work that we're doing over here in the UK is to really raise awareness of the high risk of domestic abuse in pregnancy, the really significant numbers that we're talking about here of families who are impacted by domestic abuse in pregnancy, and how can we really improve that response to parents, to mothers, to fathers in the perinatal period, so that we're detecting the levels of domestic abuse and that we're responding appropriately.

Lauren Seager-Smith:

And we saw some additional research actually in the last couple of weeks that I don't know if it's true in America as well, but our midwives and our health visitors all have to ask the question.

Lauren Seager-Smith:

They have to ask mothers whether they're experiencing domestic abuse, and of those who have asked the question, they all ask the question. They see a 0.5 percent disclosure of domestic abuse, when we actually know that if you look at the statistics around the numbers who experience domestic abuse and the amount of domestic abuse that begins in pregnancy, it should be 12 times higher than that, and so what we're actually seeing is really small numbers of mothers disclosing that they're experiencing domestic abuse, and there's lots of reasons for that. It's really scary to tell someone that you're experiencing domestic abuse anyway, but within pregnancy you can feel even more vulnerable and we know that for a lot of mothers they're really scared about what that means for their baby and what that would mean for interaction with social care and that risk of their baby being removed, which relates back to where we started with the statistics around referrals to children's social care.

Ruth Reymundo:

I want to kind of bring in the pivot.

Ruth Reymundo:

I want to pivot because that's what we do. I want to pivot to the parent who's causing the problem. Want to pivot because that's what we do. I want to pivot to the parent who's causing the problem. And you know, a lot of times when we speak about mothers and babies and maternal health and fetal health and baby wellbeing, we focus very much on moms. But you all have a therapeutic methodology where you're focusing on both of the parents and you're really working with them to try to give them parenting skills that will support and nurture that child. So I just want to hear a little bit about that pivot pivoting to the parent who is causing the problem. Working with the parent who is caring for the child, who is pregnant, who may need that accelerated support. How is it that you are focusing on the parent who is causing the danger in the home and causing the trauma and stress for the child during these critical developmental stages, when they are supposed to be providing security and nurturance and care? You want to talk a little bit about your approach to that.

Lauren Seager-Smith:

Yeah. So again, we were pioneering, I would say, in this space. So when the work began, we were founded in 2008 by a philanthropic founder who had sold his business and around about the same time he'd been really moved by the story of baby Peter Connolly in the UK press and, for those listeners that are not familiar with the story of baby Peter, he was very brutally murdered by his parents and our founder really wanted to put his money and his legacy into changing this situation. Why did we keep seeing these homicides of very young babies? And so the charity started by doing a lot of research with different collaborators, different academics, people in this space, to really understand what was going on within these families.

Lauren Seager-Smith:

And what kept coming up time and time again was the role of domestic abuse and the intergenerational nature of domestic abuse within these families and the connection that this had to very high risk around babies.

Lauren Seager-Smith:

And in addition to that was the need for an approach that really looked to understand those trauma histories within families and look to really support the development of babies and an understanding of that high risk to babies within that 1001 days. So it began, I suppose unusually, by looking at domestic abuse, by looking at early years and by looking at safeguarding right from the start, and out of that came the For Babies Sake programme. So For Baby's Sake is a whole family programme. It's therapeutic and it's trauma informed and it works with co-parents who want support to change where there's a pregnancy and there's domestic abuse, and we work separately with each co-parent and on the whole it's mothers and fathers. So sometimes we work with same-sex co-parents and we work with them up until the baby's second birthday. So it's important to stress that this isn't couples therapy. This isn't about keeping the family together for the sake of the baby, which sometimes the name can be misleading this is about really looking to break break those cycles of abuse and give that baby the attuned care that it needs.

Lauren Seager-Smith:

And what we found during that research stage as well was what a huge protective factor it can be for that baby if you support both parents with attunement to that baby. So a big part of the program yes, we're looking at domestic abuse within the relationship, but we're also looking at attunement and attachment to the baby and what does the baby need and we found that with our co-parents and important to stress that want help to change. So our parents using abusive behaviours largely the fathers they want help to change. It's also a real motivator for them. Many of them and we'll come on to this have very, very difficult upbringings themselves and they want a different story for their baby and so we use that motivation of pregnancy to support them on that change journey.

Ruth Reymundo:

So there's, you know, there's the very immediate and human concern for an infant, a child who is in their critical, critical developmental phase, to be nurtured, to be safe, to not have to live in instability and deficiency and and you know all of the things that cause baby's developmental delays, whether that be from nutritional deficits, from stress or trauma, or that be from physical injury, from being abused and neglected.

Ruth Reymundo:

But also I really want to point out that these type of programs are so critical when you hear governments and all of our governments are speaking in a concerned way about the future of our populations. In the UK there's a lot of talking points about the lack of babies and infants in society, like what is the workforce going to look like years from now? And I just want to land this for people who are working in government and who are working in sustainability or who are working in systems that protecting the well-being of infants and children at a young age, keeping them connected to a parent who is protective, to a family member, to kin who are protective, working directly with their parent, who may be neglectful, who may have mental illness, who may be domestically violent, which also means they're abusing their child is critical to these efforts that our governments say that they are keen to do to support healthy populations in the future. So I just want to put a pin in that. The cost of it 281 pounds a thousand pounds 281,000 pounds a year.

Ruth Reymundo:

You know the human loss, the the pain and suffering and the loss of stable, sustainable families and individuals who can contribute to society is a real factor that we all have to. We all have to be concerned, yeah.

David Mandel:

And I think it's actually interesting and if I can bring it back, ruth, to what you were saying earlier, asking earlier about the work with the fathers who are often the person engaging in abuse, and explore that more a little bit with Lauren, because I'm going to tie a couple of things together for our audience and come then flick it over to you, which is, you know, there's a lot of conversations, in the US at least, about sort of boys and boys and men falling behind economically and socially Right, and I think there are similar conversations about the manosphere, you know, that show adolescence, you know is, you know, as they came out of the UK, that's getting everybody talking, you know, so it's and and I read a lot of that that that social and public policy literature. A lot of it's not academic, a lot of it is sort of policy literature and they often point back to boys falling behind, starting in their households with trauma and vulnerability, though they don't quite name domestic abuse. Actually it's kind of funny. It's a whole other conversation about that.

David Mandel:

But what I I'm really curious because I think you know that you're really tackling one of really vulnerable period. There's broad implications, like Ruth is saying, but they're also uniquely. You're also working with fathers who have been using domestic abuse in many cases, who are asking for help. So can you describe and you also kind of named it as a high-risk period, so you're grounded in all these things. Can you describe for our listeners a little more what that looks like, that work with that person who may be using violence, and how you do that whole family approach?

Lauren Seager-Smith:

Yeah, I think what's really interesting we've been running the For Babies Safe program for 10 years now, so I have worked with over 700 families now over that time, and so that's been really helpful, I suppose, in helping us build up an understanding of the demographics of our families and what we're seeing. And I think what really struck me when I came to work for the For Babies' Sake Trust was the very high levels of adverse childhood experiences amongst the parents that we support. So, of our parents, 73 percent of fathers have six or more adverse childhood experiences. 74 percent of mothers have six or more adverse childhood experiences and, really interestingly, of those of those parents, 65 percent grew up with domestic abuse in the home at the hands of their fathers, but 31 abuse in the home at the hands of their fathers, but 31% said it was at the hands of their mothers, which is something that I'd never seen before a statistic like that and so I think what it's really helped me to understand is the profound impact that that can have, and we're also working with really high numbers of younger parents as well, and as high in some areas, as 25% of our families, of our parents, were care experienced themselves as well, and so it's really working, I think, to understand what does that mean for for our parents when they they come together and they have a baby. So they've been recently intimate and they've come and they've had, they've had a baby um, and being able to support them on that journey to, to parenthood, is really profound. And so when we talk about how, how do we work with our parents, it's around really understanding what's happened to them, going on on that journey with them, and so, where it's the father and, as we said, predominantly it tends to be the father and, as we said, predominantly it tends to be the father that's using the abusive behaviors.

Lauren Seager-Smith:

There's very high levels throughout the program of risk management, um, and we use um sarah three to support us with that throughout the course of the time that the, the parents, are with us. So really important to stress that. So we're constantly on risk because we're not naive um to to what can happen and really being able to have eyes on. So it's important to stress that, um, but we're really working to support them to understand what their behaviors have been, the impact of their behaviors, and what is it going to take to break the cycles and rewrite the scripts for them, and so it's about helping them acknowledge harm caused and to really think about what lies beneath that harm. And that goes back to what you said, david.

Lauren Seager-Smith:

Around you know everything that we're learning around um, the impact of growing up in a patriarchal society, some of the norms that we're seeing, some of those messages that are given. We talk about the boy code with our fathers what? What is it that you've learned growing up? What are your gendered scripts? What are they telling you and what harm is that causing? So there's lots of work around that, but there's also, then, work around really exploring and understanding trauma histories with those parents, and they're really profound, and so the core of the work is the inner child work that we do in terms of therapeutic practice around supporting that understanding, and then, alongside that, there's a lot of work around emotional regulation as well.

Lauren Seager-Smith:

So, once you've really understood what's led, what are these scripts, what are these stories that you're telling yourself? What's that looking like and manifesting like in terms of your behaviours? What impact does that mean your behaviours are having on others around you and how can we work with you to start to change those behaviours? And we work with these families for a long period of time and I think that's the other thing to stress that we feel really committed to that. You know, for some of our families that's two and a half years of work, weekly contact for two and a half years, and it takes time to change, but we do believe that people can change their behaviors.

Ruth Reymundo:

You know, it's appalling to me on a level that we often have programs that pretend that within 12 weeks or 24 weeks of a online behavior change program, that somebody is going to materially change the learned behaviors of a lifetime.

Ruth Reymundo:

You know, just to put a pin in it, most people have learned their coping mechanisms and behaviors through modeling, through behavioral modeling from a parent or from authority figures, a parent figure and so really diving down into disrupting those behavioral patterns is so and, yes, you know, disruption is critical to us keeping children safe, first of all, if they are with a parent who has a history of domestic abuse.

Ruth Reymundo:

One of the things that I do worry about when we focus on ACEs with parents, particularly who are domestic abusers, with parents particularly who are domestic abusers, is that we're focusing on the trauma itself, but not necessarily the disruption of the behavior or giving that parent alternative skill sets and checking in with them that they're able to apply those skills in situations where they feel highly stressed or they feel incapable or they may even feel entitled to use that behavior. So how are you working on a real behavioral level, not just with knowledge of trauma, not just with knowledge of ACEs, but with really true skill set, parental skill set, how to be a good parent, how to discipline a child in a way that is nonviolent and is constructive, that's not going to do harm, that's not going to do trauma. I'd love to hear a little bit about that.

Lauren Seager-Smith:

Yeah, that's really important. So for us, it's very much about empowerment and strengths based and teaching practical skills around ways to recognize your emotions and your feelings, being able to to name those and be able to safely regulate. And for some of our parents, that's about safe safety planning. For sure, but it's about time out and recognizing when you need to remove yourself from a situation and being able to to safely do that. And it's important to stress as well that um 50 of our co-parents safely separate during their time with us as well, and so sometimes, you know, for our parents, it's about helping them understand that it's not going to be safe or feasible to be together right right and this is, I think this is where a lot of professionals, I think, have a little bit of a.

Ruth Reymundo:

there's a little bit of a tension here, Because the data shows that, though a couple may not be able to continue to live together and parents together in a way that is constructive that separating, separate from each other each of them can be concerned about the wellbeing of the child, about the safety of the child, and they can learn how to parent. And I think this is where the the thought that everybody needs to stay together and parent in the same unit really does a lot of damage, because there are there is a lot of people who, once they leave that relationship and gain some skills and gain some maturity, their focus truly is I want to be a better parent than my parents were. I want to give my child a better experience of life than I was given as a child. Now, not everybody is that way, but a lot of parents are motivated by the wellbeing of their children, where they are not motivated by the wellbeing of their partner. It's a real different thing.

David Mandel:

Yeah, I'm wondering, lauren, if you've got a particular story of a journey of one of your clients you can share, in a way that's obviously anonymized, about sort of their who's using violence, using abuse, and sort of how they came to the program motivated. Because I think this is outside of a lot of people's experience and not outside of my work with men's behavior changer or my understanding of the field, which is that children, like kind of Ruth was saying that even for people who are using abuse, children are going to be one of the greatest motivators for change. And there was, there's been studies and research and stuff that really makes me say look, this is the window, particularly new parents, new fathers, you know, where they want to do a different, they're motivated to change the script, the history. So this is nothing new to me, but I'd love you to share a story directly from the program, if you can, about the motivation of a young man you know and sort of his, something about that journey in general in more detail, kind of off the back of what we're saying.

Lauren Seager-Smith:

Yeah. And you know what we're doing a lot more work around helping to share our parent voices. Yeah, and we've just launched a parent advisory group that are going to be doing more work with us.

Lauren Seager-Smith:

But if people visit our website for baby, say trust, we have got animations which have got actual parent voices right and so you can hear on the on the home page of our website, you'll see one of those stories, so you'll hear dad's voices for yourself and and you'll hear mum's voices, um, which is really important, but you very, it's not very often that you get to hear the voices of dads and I think what's something that really struck me, david, we did a podcast with NSPCC, which is probably the leading child protection um charity in in the UK, and one of our fathers spoke on that podcast and it was the first time I'd ever heard this where a dad was really acknowledging and showing such a strength of understanding around the harm that his behaviours had caused for the first time, really understanding that and really displaying that motivation to want to change, but also acknowledging that there was always an element of risk that he knew that for him, emotional regulation was a really tough thing that's one thing that he'd learned to recognize and he had learned the importance of the principles that time out.

Lauren Seager-Smith:

But almost a bit, like you know, when you hear someone still talking about 12 steps around alcohol addiction, acknowledging that there's always a risk there. There's a risk, I know there's a risk there, I know that for me there's a, that's a tough thing and I quick to temper, quick to anger. How do I learn that? And acknowledgement that he hate becomes so much more aware of that, which is so important, because I think sometimes there's a danger, isn't there? I think um around and I know there's a fear sometimes with perpetrator programs that people do it for the wrong motivations, that they want to just show that they're making a change. But I mean, with our program it's two and a half years. That's a long time. So it's quite, that's quite apparent quite quickly. That's the reason you're doing it. But actually change is hard and you want people to be able to be really open and honest about that. That this isn't easy work for people and for me that was really powerful hearing someone show such self-knowledge.

Ruth Reymundo:

Well, you have to create that space where it's OK for people to give you their vulnerability. If they're going to have their vulnerability to bring their pain, to bring their deficits to a system that they feel is going to take their child or is going to punish them in ways, but not help them, not give them the skillset, not give them the tools or the strategies or those reflective points where they can come back and they can speak to a person about their challenges during really particularly difficult times. Let's just be honest Parenting is really hard. It brings out all of the things that are frustrating in life, that we feel out of control about, that we don't know what to do next, that we're terrified of Wait a second.

David Mandel:

I thought we weren't personally disclosing on this joke today. I totally disclosed it on the show.

Ruth Reymundo:

But if you're stepping into a paradigm or a system or a therapeutic model that makes it adversarial for you, to really show those vulnerabilities and talk about where they came from. Right, my, you know my, my parent modeled for me this behavior. They were a reactive abuser and they just smacked Right, they popped off and I, you know somebody saying, I've internalized that that's my, that's my way of being and I want to learn a different way is so. It's so valuable and being open to hearing that, as therapeutic systems, as care delivery systems, and having a strategy for working to skill up those people, to support them in an ongoing way, is critical to the parenting I.

David Mandel:

I think when I did men's behavior change work, I would always feel a little more comfortable with with somebody who said, um, this is the area where I, where I'm not, I don't feel as confident. They had that self-awareness so they were worried. So I appreciate that I want to push. You know we're off script our questions and it's such a fascinating conversation. I think it would be so interesting to our listeners.

David Mandel:

And one of the things I'm curious about as we continue to explore this of the work you do with these young fathers and with mothers in this way, that what we see throughout systems and this is globally and it's central to the model and it was central to my recent book Stop Blaming Mothers and Ignoring Fathers is that we have such wildly different expectations of men and women as parents culturally across so many cultures.

David Mandel:

You know and and we're seeing this you know books about to be translated to japanese and they're like this fits for us. It's being translated to dutch, it fits for you know. So I'm really kind of getting this feedback loop that this message of low expectations for men as parents, much higher expectations for women, drives a lot of these policy decisions, a lot of these approaches in social care where we get failure to protect against mothers, we get blamed, we get fathers being ignored, not supported, not held accountable. And so tell me how you know, for baby's sake, the program really tries to see how fathers contribute good and bad to families, not ignore their role obviously it's built in and not hold mothers to such a wildly higher standard around the care of their children than than we do fathers. How do you, how do you do things to kind of consciously break that professional practice is really what I'm talking about.

Lauren Seager-Smith:

Oh yeah, it's so interesting, dave, because I think it plays out in so many ways, and so one of the things that we're going to be doing some research on is around paternal mental health, around pregnancy and the perinatal period, because there's actually not that much available around really understanding that there's been rightly that much available around really understanding that there's been, rightly so, you know, a strong focus on maternal mental health. But what's going on for dads during that period of time? And we ignore that, our peril um, because you know, I saw a statistic the other day that one in five couples in the UK split by the time their baby's 12 months old. And so we're not even talking about domestic abuse there, we're just talking about relationship breakdown and and again, I think so much of that is related to the neglect of fathers during this absolutely critical point of transition within within a relationship and within family life. And so for us it's about.

Lauren Seager-Smith:

You know, there's a myth that fathers don't want to talk or you can't engage fathers.

Lauren Seager-Smith:

It's just not true, they're just, we just haven't really tried. And so one of the things that we're talking about is how do you really look to engage fathers right from the start during that pregnancy period, ask them, how are you doing, you know what do you need? Because they're not asked and then that begins. This kind of culture of it plays into what you were saying. You know reaffirming where you don't really matter. It's only the mum that really matters, and so you're kind of distant and isolated over there. And we know from research that that's not protective of babies, and so there's an amazing report called the myth of invisible men, um, which looks at again that risk around homicide of young infants and it and it recognizes that attachment and attunement to the baby is a huge protective factor. So the more that we can support fathers to engage with pregnancy right from the beginning, to engage with their baby and support the baby, that's massively protective for children. But we're not helping dads to do that.

David Mandel:

I think one of the classic examples you're reminding me of this mistake, the mistaken approach. So I really hear what you're doing, which is ask the questions, engage them, do it in a way that doesn't ignore the mom's role and the mom's centrality in the care and the birthing of the child. Obviously all those things, but really sort of kind of puts in the right place, was that in the, in the us at least, there was a whole period of literature and education around shaken baby and the death of children, but but it was directed to moms when the primary perpetrator at that point was was male caregivers, and it was kind of a classic example of well, let's educate the passenger of the car about how traffic lights work and how to drive safely and then expect cars to get into less accidents, when it was the driver of the car who needed the education, the attention and I don't mean to say men are in charge of families but this idea of direct the education, direct the intervention, to the person who's engaging the behavior, who has a choice and can make a difference, difference in that way, and I really appreciate. You know, um, uh, this I did, um, I developed and I've been writing more about it recently about the concept of male parental development and you know and and kind of coined a term that said you know that really kind of this idea that boys and men are on a developmental journey around fatherhood, from birth, their own birth.

David Mandel:

You know from that really kind of this idea that boys and men are on a developmental journey around fatherhood, from birth, their own birth. You know from whether we teach boys to play with dolls. You know how we train boys or girls and compare it to girls. Girls get taught about being a mom early on, whether they you know whether it's babysitting or it's dolls. Boys are introduced to the idea of becoming a dad by don't get anybody pregnant and don't get a disease, and that's maybe the total sum total of, besides, what they observe, of their education to be a dad.

David Mandel:

So I mean, male parental development really addresses all this concept, addresses all these kinds of things how they get introduced to the idea of being a dad, how they support it, what's their family planning experience, how are they engaged by pediatricians or obstetricians or health visitors, and then how they experienced the birth of their child. What are they afraid of, what matters to them, who do they turn to? I mean, I really developed this whole concept of fatherhood through the life cycle, like could be going to prison, could be him getting sick or getting sick, losing a job, but how men really experience fatherhood through their as a developmental influence on them, but also through the human adult developmental life cycle. And it sounds like you've really tackled this, you kind of put your foot forward to this idea of this is an active process for men and we can be part of shaping and supporting them through that process in a way that supports the baby and supports the other parent. I mean, do I have that right in that way?

Lauren Seager-Smith:

Yeah, yeah, and I just I feel like you know, for men there's so much internalised shame and hurt and anger and rage. That begins right from the beginning, when you tell boys not to cry.

Lauren Seager-Smith:

And then it goes on from there. It was interesting. You know, having worked for a long time in bullying prevention, I used to often get people say to me oh well, the boys just have a good punch up, don't they, and get over it, but it's the girls that you've really got to watch for. It's a complete myth. What bullying research showed? Certainly in the UK, equal levels of boys and girls were experiencing bullying behaviour and actually Childline in the UK would get more calls from boys about bullying than girls. But again, it was much harder for boys to disclose what they were living with within school. So that's looking at child on child abuse. So when I think about that and that's what led me to this work, because everything interconnects, doesn't it Around how difficult it is for boys to disclose what they're experiencing.

Lauren Seager-Smith:

And one of the things that I think is going to be really important to follow and be very mindful around is the impact of adolescence and some of the discussion around teenage domestic abuse that we're seeing more and more of in the UK. Now my concern is that it's not recognizing what many of those boys are living with, both in the home and have experience within school, within their relationships. Yeah, and again it's how do we take an approach that that looks at all of those things, david, and how boys are growing up and how they're being. You know the messages that they're internalizing. But alongside some of that pain and hurt that they're also experiencing and they're trying to work out, what do I do with that? Where do I go with that right? And then you get protective. Then it's like I have to be. I have to protect myself, which means I've got to be this kind of a boy or this kind of a man it's I would.

Ruth Reymundo:

I would love a media campaign like a just a straight up blokey bloke media campaign that says you're ruining your child's life and saddling them with horrible behaviors and that is terrible well, no, but they did that in western australia.

David Mandel:

Yeah, you've heard me talk about this. They did this in western australia years ago. They did a uh, classic kind of um market research, looking at messaging to men about what would stop them or engage them to call a helpline. They actually tied it to action. They test out your, your mates are not going to like you, you're going to go to jail your partner, you're going to lose your partner or you're going to hurt your kids. And the top messaging was your abuse to your partner is going to hurt your kids. And they got thousands of guys to call up, based on that media campaign alone, to do that. And that's sort of I think. I think you, you, it's been done and should be done more.

Ruth Reymundo:

Yeah, I mean, I'm I'm very mindful that you know, when we're speaking about your program at least, that we're speaking about support for both parents, regardless of gender right.

Ruth Reymundo:

That's really important and we we do have prevalence. You know statistics, we know which parent is the most prevalently violent uses, violent behaviors. And also I really want to go back to the place where you're. You know disclosing that you're working with a lot of parents who have been removed from their own families, that they were put in care, and I want to say very clearly that our willingness to remove children and put them in systems or institutions or with foster parents and is not necessarily, it's not trauma neutral.

Ruth Reymundo:

First of all, it's extremely traumatic. We know statistic wise that it increases vulnerabilities lifelong, for the rest of that child's life. We also know that those children are the most human trafficked. We also know that those children can be very vulnerable and highly abused and within those systems of care, the liability protection for foster parents and for foster organizations is much more concerned about saving money and liability for the institution and for their carers than it is for the long-term well-being of those children. So keeping children out of those situations by directly working with their parents to support them is not only more sustainable economically but it is also more sustainable from a health perspective, longitudinal health perspective for populations, for children with less injury, with less trauma, with more stability, with more safety and with fewer education gaps and fewer housing gaps. So why are we doing it the way we're doing it now? What the heck is going on?

David Mandel:

I love your program.

Ruth Reymundo:

I want this type of program everywhere. I love your brain. I listen to you.

David Mandel:

I love your program. I want this type of program everywhere. I love your brain I listen to you.

Ruth Reymundo:

I love your brain, I want to lauren.

David Mandel:

I want to ask this, I want to kind of ask piggyback off of ruth thing and then we're going to kind of move to some winding up, I think, because it's been a great conversation. But I want to give you a chance to talk about scaling and off the back of ruth's question and because you, you know you've served, I mean I can't imagine that for those 700 families you know that this program has been, for the majority of them, life-changing. Right, we can't help everybody, but I imagine that it's been life-changing for those parents and for those children. What is? It's a two-part question. What's the? What is your estimate of the social savings to government and the return on investment socially? Ruth was just talking about really, but she was also pointing to the economics Do you guys have any idea in the short term how much money your program saves government and therefore the taxpayers?

David Mandel:

And then, off of that, how do we scale something like this? Because we're talking about 50,000 kids, right, and I know you think about this, we haven't talked about this question before, but I know you think about this. If we talk about 50,000 kids, you know, and we're talking about 2,000 kids in out-of-home care a year, that age and we're talking about 200, we've said this number three or four times 281,000 pounds a year to keep that kid in care that I have to imagine. A program like yours is cheaper than that. What are the economics of this? Program like yours is cheaper than that. What are the economics of this? Let's talk to us about the economics of this for scaling and for cost savings for government.

Lauren Seager-Smith:

Yeah, I think one thing I would say just in context and off the back of what you said, ruth the challenge we have if we don't look to break intergenerational cycles of abuse and really provide parents with what they need, they go on to have other children, and so you may remove that child, but they will have other children. Very often they will have more children. So, with our families, quite often they've had multiple previous babies removed and this is the first baby they've been able to keep, and so that's really important to say that taking children into care is not a solution. It's not far from, for all the reasons that you said, because we know that for many of those children they have very difficult outcomes off the back of that. And so I think if we're, if we're going to scale that up, we've got to have quite a radical rethink around the difference between prevention and response, and we've got a real challenge in the UK at the moment where all the money is going on response. We've got to the point now where we're spending more money taking children into residential care than we're spending on preventative services. In the UK, for the first time there's a tipping point We've got more children in care than we've ever had in the UK. So something is really really broken.

Lauren Seager-Smith:

But the problem with the system is there's almost not enough money or enough, I don't even know what it is.

Lauren Seager-Smith:

They're so caught up now in with firefighting here that they haven't got the money to do both at the same time, and that's what's going to have to happen for a while. You're going to have to meet the needs, the immediate needs, but you're going to have to really look at what's going to bring in long-term change. And absolutely it saves money. So it costs around about £9,000 a year to work with a family for baby's sake. Now, if you compare that to the cost of taking a child into care, it's clearly much more cost effective to take this type of approach, and we are going to be working on a much bigger scale cost benefit analysis because, of course, we're working with the mother, we're working with the father, we're working with the baby. Other children in the home are also positively impacted, and so we're going to be doing some more work around really understanding that. So we know that this makes sense, but it's like our systems are just on I don't even know what it is overdrive at the moment they're're not able to pull.

David Mandel:

Well, they're in flight and fight.

David Mandel:

The system gets that. And the liability, unfortunately, and we all know this right, the liability, and I hate to put it this way, but the political pressure is on preventing that immediate death now, not on saving that child's future and their social and economic family life. You know, 18 years from now, the, the, the politics of the moment is are we keeping that kid alive? Today, you know, and and I hate to be so rude and blunt, but that's that's what it is. So, but just let me, just I want to take one more point and then we we're going to move. To wrap up, I think. So 9,000 pounds a year compared to 281,000 pounds a year. I'm not good at math, but it seems like that's a lot cheaper or less expensive. Maybe I should say and are you being engaged? This is a pointed question to the audience, really Are you being engaged by local authorities specifically for children that they identified high risk of going into care, and are you being brought in specifically as a prevention program to stop that out-of-home placement?

Lauren Seager-Smith:

I think there's probably elements of that. So the majority of our referrals come from children's social care, right, so if there's a pregnancy and there's domestic abuse, you will be under children's social care. If you self-refer to us, then we will bring in the involvement of statutory agencies because we've got to keep that baby safe and so we're really clear with parents about that. But the majority of referrals come from children's social care. So they are looking at what's an alternative, what's going to be an alternative for this family, and you know we've got quotes from social workers saying this is the best, this is the best opportunity this family's going to get. Right, this is um to be able to to keep their baby, because otherwise it's going to be a different outcome. And so largely it's children, it's workers on the front line going this is, this is your best chance and and and are there?

David Mandel:

I I'm totally on to this. Are there the bean counters behind the scenes saying 9 000 pounds, 281 000 pounds, 9 000 pounds, 200? If I buy five more slots with, for the baby's sake, I save maybe a million pounds. This year, If I buy, you know, 10 more slots, I save 2 million pounds. Is there somebody who's having that conversation with the folks who are selling the budget? I hear the workers are and I know you're doing this and I'm really. This is more Socratic and more for the audience really to understand what the stakes are here and this is you know.

Lauren Seager-Smith:

Yeah, this is definitely a conversation that we're having with government at a policy level, but I think one of our challenges and I don't know if it's the same in the US is that only quite recently has domestic abuse recognised children as victims in their own right, and so domestic abuse has always been looked at quite separately to what's happening in children's social care, and so what we need is a shift in the system. So that we're looking at it together.

Lauren Seager-Smith:

And so there's a bit of a challenge that there's kind of money for domestic abuse programs over here but there's not money in the same way for programs that look like who's coming into care.

Ruth Reymundo:

It kind of reminds me when I went to the optometrist the other day and and I I, they looked in my eyes and and I I said is everything okay? And he said I don't know, I just do lids and I was like isn't this a? Whole thing here on my face.

Ruth Reymundo:

It's an eyeball in a lid, and so you know part of the problem is that we have created these specialty tracks where we sort of sever the reality of people's lives. We are families, we have units, we have children and we have parents and the well-being of that whole unit depends upon the well-being of the parents involved and we need to support that. And I am going to directly challenge any policymakers or government officials who are listening that all of our governments are talking about austerity right now. All of our governments are talking about the costs to taxpayers for these programs and yet, at the same time that they're talking about cutting programs, they're not talking about prevention, which will actually be more efficient, more effective and will lead to a greater impact to children being safe in the care of stable families that are caring for them and who have less trauma and cost the government less money. Because if we were to do projections about these 50K kids right and then the kids that are pulled out and put in care 6K the kids that are pulled out and put in care 6K and we were to say we know that for every child that is taken into care, that they have an average of two children removed from them in the future, we can extrapolate the costs forward and this is a really bad plan, but I don't understand why that's not happening widely in our governments as we're complaining about the lack of resources to support people.

Ruth Reymundo:

So I'm really going to challenge people to look at this in a longitudinal way and to really focus ourselves on saying we've been reacting to a problem. We want to stay in an endlessly reactive state where there's very expensive. We actually have to be very intentional about how we approach the problem, and I really think that your program is a great example of how being intentional looks, how intentionally working with a family unit that may not stay together but who will always have contact with that child, how that looks. So I'm just going to give you the kudos. That's where we had you on. We love, we love what you guys are doing.

David Mandel:

So yeah, and I I do, you know, want to wrap up and make a comment and then kind of ask you a couple of closing questions. We ask every guest. I think you know the point you're making about the seeing domestic abuse in kids separately is changing, you know, and you can see that from the other side, where a lot of the risk assessment frameworks that are used around adult survivors don't really integrate risks around kids in the way kids, kids being kidnapped or kids being sexually abused, or risk from family court involvement. I mean there are a lot of things where we're the adult system is and I talk a lot of this in other settings is not in alignment with adult survivors as parents. They treat them to the individual gender-based violence risk, but they don't really. They don't even on the adult survivor side don't treat them like parents, which you'll hear from most survivors is well, they don't want to be defined as a mother. Survivors is, while they don't want to be defined as a mother, is central to their identity and their priorities. And so our adult system in many ways is not aligned with the lived experience of survivors and their needs and the children's system is not seeing. And what I would say is, and I know that the domestic abuse commissioner's report just came out, so I'm sure that you know around children as victims in their own right and that's got to be really supportive to your work. And they talk about Safer Together. We're about to put out a little bit of thing. They highlight Safer Together's work in that which we're really proud of.

David Mandel:

I think there's an interesting whole other conversation about the concept of children as victims in their own rights as compared to seeing children as victims in context or in relationship, because the danger starts becoming and this is historic we start dislocating and disconnecting kids from the victim parents and we know that they're both often victims of the same person and they're in relationship with that same person and their relationship with each other, so that victims and individualizing of kids as victims in their quote unquote own right has its place. But there's an interesting sort of additional conversation from my perspective which your program sort of you're really seeing kids in context, you're seeing whole of family, the victims in their own rights language, can open up a doorway that I have some concerns about. I don't want people to hear that I'm not supportive of seeing kids as victims of domestic abuse, but but I think there's. We try to capture the safety of the model, this greater complexity and and and this multi-faceted nature of kids experience and how their well-being is really tied to the well-being of the adult survivor.

David Mandel:

So think there's just that's for another podcast. So, um, I just wanted to get that in for our audience. But I wonder, um you know, lauren, if, if you have, we end with these, um, two questions, what do you want, um, uh, professionals to take away from this episode, from the information you're sharing, what's the big takeaway you have for professionals working with families?

Lauren Seager-Smith:

I think the big takeaway would be don't neglect the impact of domestic abuse in pregnancy and on the early years. Very often the baby's forgotten, and you know babies need us to be their voices, and so that's one thing I would really ask um listeners to think about. And then, from our perspective, it really would be to look at what's gonna work to break those intergenerational cycles of abuse, and sometimes that's not what's easy, that's not what's cheap. In the first instance, for us, that takes deep work, um, and what does that look like for you where you are?

David Mandel:

that's great and then and then for any family members. We have a lot of survivors listening. I think we have some people using violence to listen. We have some people who listen to this podcast with their kids. Um, do you have any messages for, for, for families?

Lauren Seager-Smith:

god. I just firstly, I, you're not alone. I think that's so important that there can be so much shame and stigma around domestic abuse, whether you're a survivor, whether you've used abusive behaviors, whether you grew up with it in the home and and you know, in the UK, one in five people grew up with it. That's a huge number of people, and so the biggest message is you're not on your own with this, but that it's so important that you do talk to somebody that you trust. That's really vital someone that you trust that you can share what you've experienced, but that there is there is no, there is no shame here, but you need to talk to someone. That's what I would say.

Ruth Reymundo:

I love that and I love that the motivation behind that is to open up the space for conversation and engagement so that parents who are struggling, parents who were handed a horrible set of behaviors that don't allow for them to truly engage with themselves or their partner or their children in ways that are safe and connective and support and nurture relationship. They deserve assistance, they deserve help, they deserve skills and we should be assisting them. So I'm really appreciative for what you're doing, um, and I hope that you guys are just colossally successful, thank you.

Lauren Seager-Smith:

Yeah, oh, thank you so much.

David Mandel:

Thank you, lauren, and uh, you've been listening to Partner with a Survivor, and if you're interested in more about the Safe and Together Institute, you can go to safetogetherinstitutecom. We have a very new website. We do. It's very exciting.

Ruth Reymundo:

It's very pretty.

David Mandel:

Very special. You can always take e-learning courses, including ones on male parental development, at academysafetogetherinstitutecom. Yep, and who are you still?

Ruth Reymundo:

here, I'm still Ruth Romundo. I haven't changed. How about you? I'm still David Van Dahl.

David Mandel:

And that's, you know, Safety Other Institute and we really enjoyed this time in this conversation.

Ruth Reymundo:

We're out, thank you.