The police represent the front line in the service response to children experiencing domestic violence. This paper examines police intervention in domestic violence incidents involving children, drawing on quantitative and qualitative data from police records and interviews with young people and police officers. The quality of police communication with children and young people emerged as key, and police officers evinced reluctance to engage with children at domestic violence incidents. Providing the police with training and information designed to improve their skills and confidence might promote communication with children in this context. Policy that conceptualised children as victims of domestic violence in policy could focus police attention on the needs of children and young people at such incidents.

This paper reports research undertaken in two sites in England which captured the views of parents and young people who had experienced domestic violence. Survivors, perpetrators and young people described feelings of guilt and shame that acted as barriers to the disclosure of domestic violence. They identified a range of effects on children, which continued beyond separation. All three groups of participants valued professionals who listened to them and validated their accounts. Professionals who appeared ineffective in the face of domestic violence could reinforce children's and victims' own sense of powerlessness. Mothers wanted support with managing the effects of separation and assistance with contact arrangements. The research identifies the need for practitioners to engage with the emotional content of disclosure of domestic violence and to undertake this work in separate sessions with parents and with children so that differing accounts can be heard safely. Interventions that enable parents to engage with children's experiences of domestic violence appear valuable. Rather than taking separation as the end‐point of intervention, social work needs to take account of the dynamics of separation and contact in parents' relationships and consider how they interact with violence and abuse to impact on children and young people.

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This study provides new knowledge about telephone interactions between first-time mothers and midwives around labour onset. This is important in a changing healthcare context in which face-to-face interactions are likely to become less routine. Being made to feel welcome to attend the maternity unit might appear counter to the Pathway philosophy, but appeared to reduce women's anxieties about 'being allowed in' or getting to hospital in time, and gave them confidence to remain at home longer.

Police notifications of incidents of domestic violence to child protection services constitute an acknowledgement of the harm that domestic violence inflicts on children. However, these notifications represent a substantial demand on child welfare services and the outcomes for children and victims of domestic violence have been questioned. This paper presents findings from the first UK study to examine these notifications in depth and examines the interface between the police and child protection services in responding to domestic violence incidents. The research reports on police interventions in 251 incidents of domestic violence involving children; the communication of information to child protection services and the subsequent filtering and service response. Social workers found that notifications conveyed little information on children's experiences of domestic violence. Forty per cent of families notified had had no previous contact with child protection services in that area, but those cases most likely to receive social work assessment or intervention were those where the case was already open. Notifications triggered a new social work intervention in only 5% of cases. The study also identified a range of innovative approaches for improving the co-ordination of police and child protective services in relation to children's exposure to domestic violence. Arrangements that maximized opportunities for police and social workers to share agency information appeared to offer the best option for achieving informed decisions about the appropriate level of service response to children and families experiencing domestic violence.

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This paper reports on a feasibility study for an evaluation of a UK primary school-based prevention programme that addresses multiple forms of abuse and neglect, identifying research design and ethical issues and exploring research practice. For this feasibility study, 194 children aged 6-11 years completed a baseline survey and 113 did so following the intervention. Eight focus groups were undertaken with 52 children and nine interviews with school staff. We highlight key considerations for conducting large-scale mixed-method research on sensitive topics with younger children, a focus that is largely absent from the extant research methods literature.