social work &
domestic violence
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social work & domestic violence
Lesley Laing & Cathy Humphreys
with Kate Cavanagh
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Lesley Laing and Cathy Humphreys with Kate Cavanagh 2013
First published 2013
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form, or by any means, only with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2012943950
British Library Cataloguing in Publication data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9781-412919927
ISBN 9781-412919234 (pbk)
This book is dedicated to our late colleague and friend Kate Cavanagh who envisioned and initiated the project. It is also dedicated by Cathy to Ray and Nicky for their encouragement and support and by Lesley to Chris for her patience and enduring support.
Contents
About the Authors
Lesley Laing is a Senior Lecturer in Social Work and Policy Studies at the University of Sydney, where her teaching and research focus on violence against women and children. Her social work practice has encompassed direct practice, policy, training, professional development and research. A core passion has been educating human service professionals about the ways in which the effects of violence against women and children are often present and influential in the lives of clients of diverse health and welfare services. This was pursued both in her role as Director of the Education Centre Against Violence (NSW Health) and later as the founding Director of the Australian Domestic and Family Violence Clearinghouse. Lesleys child sexual assault research has evaluated treatment programmes for intrafamilial offenders, victims and mothers and for young people exhibiting sexually harmful behaviours. Her domestic violence research, conducted in collaboration with specialist domestic violence services, focuses on interagency responses to domestic violence and on womens experiences of navigating complex service systems: the family law system, mental health services and the civil protection order process. With a team of colleagues and in collaboration with the NSW Police Force, she is currently researching the incidence and contexts in which women are arrested or are protection order respondents. Lesley is a member of the NSW Domestic Violence Death Review Team.
Cathy Humphreys holds the Alfred Felton Chair of Child and Family Social Work at the University of Melbourne. The Chair was established by the Alfred Felton Trust to work with community sector organizations to capacity build research in the vulnerable youth and families sector. She has a strong background in practice, research and publication in the domestic violence and child abuse areas. Her research has explored the major social problem of domestic violence through a range of different lenses: substance use; mental health; child abuse; multiagency working and reform. A three year action research project, Talking To My Mum, developed activity books to strengthen the mother-child relationship and provide support for workers engaged in intervention which crossed the silos between adult womens services and childrens services in the domestic violence sector. More recently research projects have focused on the domestic violence policy reform in Victoria, Australia; the development of good practice guidelines and standards for women with disabilities living with domestic violence; and a policy critique of mandatory reporting for children living with domestic violence. Her research is international with a specific focus on the UK where she worked for 12 years at University of Warwick before returning to Australia and the professorship at University of Melbourne.
Kate Cavanagh was born in Glasgow, Scotland in 1951. She studied sociology at the University of Stirling, graduating in 1975, and then completing an MSc thesis, Battered Women and Social Control (1978) whilst working as a research assistant. In 1978, she began a career in social work, obtaining a second masters degree from the University of Warwick, becoming a guardian ad litem for Derbyshire, helping establish a voluntary hostel for women with housing needs, and becoming Leicestershires first research social worker. In 1990, after the birth of her second child, she moved into social work education, spending the next eighteen years at the Universities of Stirling and Glasgow where she taught and researched on domestic violence, drug taking, disability, mental health, child abuse, and social work education. From 1991 to 1994 she worked with Rebecca and Russell Dobash and Ruth Lewis on the evaluation of newly established programmes for perpetrators of domestic violence for the U.K. Government, co-writing Changing Violent Men (Sage, 2000) and completing a PhD thesis for the University of Manchester: Do You Live Here Too? A Study of the Intimate Relationships of Violent Men and the Women They Abuse (1998). With the same team, she undertook an ESRC funded study of homicide in Britain. She also co-edited Working with Men: Feminism and Social Work (Routledge, 1996) with Vivienne Cree, and published in a number of journals including Homicide Studies and Journal of Social Policy. Kate Cavanagh was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2006, and died in 2008.
Preface
This book would not have been written without the vision and passion of our late friend and colleague, Kate Cavanagh. Kate identified the pressing need for a critically reflective and research-minded approach to social work practice with domestic violence. Her vision was for a book which would offer this to social workers, whatever their field of practice, since domestic violence is encountered in all fields of social work. We trust that we have honoured this vision in the book.
