Third National Domestic Violence Strategy

Barnardos has been delivering quality, evidenced based services, providing practical and emotional supports to children, parents and families for almost 60 years. In 2020 we worked with more than 18,000 children and families across our 41 centres. Approximately 40% of the families we work with have experience of domestic violence and abuse. Often it is not mentioned when a family is referred to Barnardos for support, but emerges during the course of our work when a child, young person or parent is comfortable enough to tell us what is happening in their family. We see first-hand the harmful impact domestic violence and abuse can have on all domains of a child’s life. However, through our work, children and families are supported to keep safe and to heal from their experiences and we see the positive outcomes that can be achieved.. Barnardos works across prevention, early intervention, crisis and recovery through our work in family support, targeted early intervention services and the TLC Kidz domestic violence and abuse recovery programmes. Additionally, Barnardos hosts the Childhood Domestic Violence and Abuse project in partnership with Tusla DSGBV. It aims to increase the visiblity of childhood domestic violence and abuse and supports a collective and collaborative approach to identifying the needs of children and deliver effective services in response. Central to this is clearly naming children and young people’s experience, and developing a common understanding of this. Our submission is structured around the four pillars of the Council of Europe Istanbul Convention, setting out what we believe has been missing from previous strategies and what we recommend be included in the governments third strategy. Many of our points cross all strands of the pillars, in particular children seen as victims of domestic violence and abuse in their own right.

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Call to Action