A necessary but not sufficient intervention: Implementing safe and together across Scottish and English sites

Background
Child welfare responses to domestic violence and abuse often blame mothers for “failing to protect” while ignoring perpetrators. The Safe & Together model promises transformation through perpetrator pattern-focused assessment.

Objective
To examine how S&T implementation translates into practice across diverse UK child welfare contexts.

Methods
Focus groups with 55 professionals across five Scottish and English sites were analyzed using Two-Stage Reflexive Implementation Analysis, integrating reflexive thematic analysis with Proctor's implementation framework.

Results
Safe & Together achieved high practitioner acceptability, with professionals reporting it resolved conflicts between their values and bureaucratic demands. Implementation successfully transformed professional language from mother-blaming to perpetrator pattern analysis and improved assessment quality. However, critical gaps were identified between assessment capabilities and intervention availability. Insufficient perpetrator programmes or children's therapeutic services existed to address identified needs. There was also no evidence of involvement of adult or child survivors in implementation of the intervention, despite “partnering” rhetoric.

Conclusions
Safe & Together is necessary but insufficient for comprehensive transformation. While successfully shifting professional consciousness away from victim-blaming, the model cannot improve family outcomes without parallel investments in intervention infrastructure. The absence of family voices in both model development and implementation perpetuates professional-centric approaches even within anti-oppressive innovations. This “necessary but not sufficient” framework advances implementation science beyond binary success/failure assessments. Findings indicate that genuine transformation requires not only assessment innovation but also service infrastructure development and authentic co-production with families experiencing domestic violence and abuse.