Agenda item

The theme for this Board will be on victims and will be in the form of a workshop where facilitators will be leading table discussions about the work your service does around supporting and reducing victims. 

Mr Joe Benmore, Mr Sandeep Broca and Ms Heather Hutchings introduced the report.

The meeting heard that:

·      The Government had talked about extreme misogyny as part of their extremism review. The Council did a training session regarding misogyny. Concerns had been expressed from schools that talked about hate crime, but did not meet the threshold for prevent intervention. Some of the concerning attitudes expressed in class from students appeared to be happening at an earlier age.

·      The Council had a VAWG team that crossed directorates such as Public Health and Housing Related Support. The Council commissioned a range of specialist services in Haringey and had a ten-year strategy recognising VAWG as an issue. The Council had a VAWG strategic board and a new domestic abuse policy for residents. For International Women's Day, the Council did 16 days of activism and had done events summer including for Euro 2024. A training programme would be commissioned.

·      Domestic abuse was treated as a top priority amongst the Police. Any domestic incident was reported and this would go to the Public Protection Team who would investigate it. Any outstanding named suspects were also a priority.  

·      The Council commissioned a whole host of organisations to support victims. Access was available to local and regional services. These were well promoted by the Council.  Part of the initial interaction with victims included the Police referring victims to those services. It would be helpful for those referring the services to be aware in more detail of the services they were offering. Safer Neighbourhoods Training or a talk session may be helpful.

·      The Police had a high turnover of officers at the Community Safety Unit as they moved into other areas after being in the unit.  

·      The Council had an online directory where one could download posters, flyers and referral forms.  

·      More men-led interventions were necessary in relation to VAWG.

·      Previously, IDVA, Probation and Substance Misuse services were all located in the same place. This could be re-examined as data showed this was useful. This could be an action taken forward and reported to the Board at a future meeting.

·      A summit could be held with housing associations regarding criminality on housing estates. Victim Support could be given an invite to open a stall at the event.

·      Support for (straight) male victims of domestic abuse at Haringey was not present. Some VAWG organisations would not work with male victims.

·      Rates of abuse in same sex relationships were equivalent to the rates in heterosexual relationships.

·      Referral forms for local authorities appeared to all be different. The same was true with safeguarding forms.

·      The Council had perpetrator interventions which were MOPAC funded. There were interventions for men from ethnically ‘minoritised’ backgrounds, women using abusive behaviours and also LGBT perpetrated interventions and Child and Adolescent to Parent violence and abuse interventions as well.

·      MOPAC had gone out to tender for an intervention capacity after a first-time domestic abuse offence.

·      The Council dealt with issues relating to gang members. The Council worked with gang members and as a general rule, most of the individuals the Council worked with were over the over the age of 18, but there were a small cohort under the age of 18 and they were worked with through social services. The Council’s referral pathway was directly into other services. The work that the Council did was intensive one-to-one work with the gang member normally one advocating that they wanted out of the lifestyle. Sometimes the person may have been through other services. The person would be taken through DWP, Housing, NHS and support them through any processes of any rehabilitation until they were out of the gang. This usually meant that they would have to be moved off the borough. The Council met with exploitation and gang teams from the Police every morning and would have a conversation about occurrences in the last 24 hours. Some contact was usually made with Victim Support and Project Future.   

·      It was important for all teams to work together and be aware of what each section was doing. There were three different sections of ASB – ASB, ASB Noise, and ASB Housing.

·      New ideas were needed on develop a community dialogue, possibly by expanding days and weeks of action.

·      Victims and suspects or victims and perpetration needed to be considered. It was important to be able to disaggregate the victim and the perpetrator. A good example of this would be the exploitation of victims who were coerced into criminality.

·      Feedback would be taken on the new format of CSP and it would be useful to have feedback to be sent back to Joe Benmore.

The Co-Chairs read out a statement submitted by the Probation team who had stated they were unable to attend due to a Probation Managers meeting, but wanted to provide an update regarding the second wave of prison releases earlier in the week. The service had eight releases to Haringey, all of which reported successfully to the Probation office. All appropriate cases were offered substance misuse support at the office and there were no accommodation issues. The service wished to extend its gratitude to all partner agencies in supporting with the releases.

RESOLVED:

That the report be noted.