Government strategy on troubled families risks causing more harm than good

The government’s policy on troubled families has something of a neat ring to it. Take 120,000 ‘troubled’ families – the families whose lives are blighted by multiple problems such as adults being out of work, having no educational qualifications and mental health issues, and who, according to the government, cost the state huge sums of money in terms of the services that work with them. Pay local authorities £4,000 for each of these families that they manage to move out of the danger zone – for example, by moving parents back into work, or reducing truancy or anti-social behaviour.

But as soon as you dig below the details, problems emerge. First, as Jonathan Portes, chief economist at the Cabinet Office when the 120,000 statistic was first produced, has highlighted, this figure has pretty much been pulled out of thin air; there’s no clear definition of what a troubled family is, let alone any evidence that there are 120,000 of them across the country.

Second, it’s never really been clear what the policy is trying to tackle. Louise Casey, the government’s troubled families tsar, published a report this week that highlights issues around child abuse and domestic violence. Tackling these would certainly be an excellent objective for a troubled families programme. But the government’s conflation of multiple disadvantage and social exclusion with poor parenting and child abuse is a serious error that risks stigmatising those families already saddled with great disadvantage.

So what would an effective approach to tackling child abuse and domestic violence look like? First, we need to get much more accurate about the risk factors for violence in the home so that we can ensure families who need effective support get it rather than waiting for problems to escalate into child abuse. We shouldn’t be using false proxies for poor parenting and child abuse, like experience of multiple disadvantage. Instead we should focus on how we can equip professionals like health visitors and social workers with screening tools that flag risk factors for significant aggression and child abuse within the home at an early stage. For example, family relationships characterised by low warmth and high aggression are associated with a greater risk of violence and abuse. That would make it much easier to divert these families to the family therapies like Functional Family Therapy, that are known to reduce conflict and aggression in families and prevent violence from escalating.

Second, we should consider taking a ‘public health’ approach to child protection and domestic violence. Studies have shown that for most people, it is within our natural instincts to resolve conflict through verbal, and sometimes physical, aggression rather than reasoning and negotiating tactics. The majority of families use aggression to resolve conflict. Of course, this rarely escalates into more serious violence or abuse. But, in the same way we seek to reduce the impacts of obesity and smoking in society through initiatives aimed at changing everyone’s behaviour, not just the most serious cases, can we reduce incidence of child abuse in society by reducing the amount of aggression we all tend to use in resolving conflict? This is the principle that sits behind school-based conflict-resolution programmes like PATHS (Promoting Alternative Thinking Strategies). It would be similarly possible to include parenting advice based on effective conflict resolution strategies in universal services like health-visiting or ante-natal classes. This is an area that the Social Research Unit will be undertaking work on over the next year; if you’re interested in finding out more, please get in touch.