Child-Centred Perpetrator Work

Ensure you keep ALL victims safe

Learn how to

  • Apply comprehensive methods and tools to protect children and youth in your organisation
  • Reposition your clients as parents and support them in sensitive parenting
  • Ensure that your work and its impact contribute to child safety and well-being

Training Agenda

Session 1:  Parenting under pressure - A risk for child abuse 

  • Understand how domestic violence and domestic violence interventions impact parenting
  • Learn about connections between intimate partner violence and child abuse
  • Discover the needs of children in families with violence

Session 2Parent-child interactions 

  • Discover how to identify high-risk interactions between parents and children
  • Learn about healthy parent-child interactions and how to foster these in your work 

Session 3: Moving from parenting under pressure to sensitive parenting

  • Improve your skills in supporting perpetrators toward sensitive parenting
  • Learn how to confront parents that are self-centred, overwhelmed and high-risk
  • Discover new and practice-focused methods for fostering sensitive parenting

Session 4:  Common pitfalls for professionals and how to handle them 

  • Explore the complexity of working with high conflict parenting after separation
  • Learn about ways of partnering with "difficult" parents (parents who have been in jail, parents accused of abuse, etc.)
  • Discover how to position yourself as a professional while never losing sight of children's well-being 

Session 5: Child safety in perpetrator work

  • Learn why child safety needs to be a priority, even if your activities only impact them indirectly
  • Discover your organisation's risk profile
  • Understand how to implement child safeguarding in your organisation effectively

Session 6: Understanding and preventing risks

  • Examine the effect of your work on children
  • Learn how to develop and implement a comprehensive child protection policy

Session 7: Procedures and tools for risk assessment and mitigation of harm to minors

  • Learn about good practices in ensuring that our interventions are safe for children
  • Explore practical tools for child safety risk assessment and management that can guide your work in all stages 

Session 8: Integrating a child-centred perspective in all aspects of the work.  

  • Define practical steps forward in ensuring child safety in your organisation

The Course

Even for organisations working exclusively with adult perpetrators and survivors, an impact on their children is inevitable. While we all want our clients' children to be safe and well, ensuring that our interventions don't put them at risk is a highly demanding task that requires more than good intentions.
During this two-day training, you will discover and understand key elements that need to be in place in your organisation to ensure that your work is not harming minors directly or indirectly. Additionally, your will learn to work in a child-centred way with your clients and support their repositioning as parents. After this training you will be able to implement practical steps that ensure your work is safe for all survivors.

The Trainers

Kris Decraemer works at the interactie-academie in Antwerp, an institute for systemic theory and practice. As a therapist, family mediator, trainer, and supervisor in the field of domestic violence, Kris develops methods and best practices for families, perpetrators and victims, adults and children in the grips of violence. The team at Interactie-academie supports parents in considering the effects of their violence on their children and helps them become constructive, relevant elements of their children's lives.  

Sandra Jovanović Belotić is the WWP EN Training and Capacity Building Manager. One of her core tasks is to develop WWP EN child-protection practices and align them with international standards. Sandra is a psychologist with over a decade of experience in the field of domestic violence. She has provided psychological support for women and children exposed to violence, ran the first Serbian perpetrator group and founded the National Network for the Work with Perpetrators of Violence Serbia (OPNA).

Last changed: 22.03.2024