Safe Home | NSPCC Learning

What is Safe Home

Supporting parents and carers of children who have displayed harmful sexual behaviours (HSB)

Safe Home is a programme to support the parents and carers of children who have displayed harmful sexual behaviour (HSB). It is designed to work alongside a therapeutic programme for children and young people such as our Change for Good HSB service.

We deliver training and support organisations to adopt, implement and deliver the Safe Home programme.

How Safe Home works

Safe Home is a manualised intervention for parents and carers that is both psychoeducational and psychotherapeutic. It encourages practitioners to work alongside the parent or carer in an open, curious, collaborative, non-judgemental and gently challenging way.

Across 13 sessions the programme provides an opportunity for parents and carers to:

reflect upon and process what has happened
develop their understanding of appropriate, problematic and harmful sexual behaviour
consider the emotional impact on themselves and the family
learn the signs of sexual abuse
balance meeting the needs of all the children in their care
create a personalised safety plan with practical steps to prevent or minimise risk of sexual harm to and from their child in the future.

“It's enabled me to move on and process it a little bit more. So I'm able to prevent and hopefully not be as on edge as I was. I've got a little bit more of an understanding of why it happens. So I'm not struggling thinking of what might happen again…I know what to look out for”

(Caregiver)

Background and evaluation

Background

Safe Home was developed through our National Clinical Assessment and Treatment Service (NCATS) in 2019 in response to a clear identified need to work with the parents and carers of children and young people who are receiving therapeutic support after displaying harmful sexual behaviour.

England’s NICE guidelines¹ for HSB highlights the importance of working with families to help:

engage parents and carers
encourage positive relationships between parents and carers and their child or children
create a safe and secure home environment.

Our 2021 summary of the learning from case reviews where HSB was a factor² highlighted:

care agreements with parents and carers should be tailored to the needs of the family and consider how HSB might affect the whole family.
where one sibling displayed HSB towards another (intra-familial HSB), practitioners sometimes over-relied on parents and carers to protect all their children. This extra pressure could overload parents and carers and make them less able to care for the whole family safely
some practitioners also prioritised providing support to parents, taking an adult focussed approach and overlooking the needs of the children in the family
practitioners need support and supervision to enable them to balance working with parents and carers and challenging them where necessary
the importance of practitioners keeping parents and carers informed about and on board with the support being provided to their family.

> See the latest version of our learning from case reviews briefing where HSB was a factor

From this evidence, Safe Home was developed to provide space for practitioners to work with parents and carers to reflect, understand and focus on supporting their family to move forward in a positive way.

Evaluation

We commissioned the Public Health Institute at Liverpool John Moores University to evaluate Safe Home in 2024.

> Read the full evaluation summary

What we learnt

The evaluation showed:

significant increases in parent and carer knowledge, understanding and confidence after attending the Safe Home programme
improved communication and relationships
improvements in home life and overall wellbeing for families and children
the programme provided a non-judgemental and trusted safe space for parents and carers
the relationships between practitioners and parents and carers were key to engagement and success
the length, structure and programme content was accessible, adaptable to the needs of the families and supportive.

A number of recommendations were made to maximise the reach and impact of Safe Home. These have been incorporated into our comprehensive training and implementation package to support organisations wanting to set up and deliver the Safe Home programme in their local area.

Training and implementation support

We provide training and support to organisations wanting to adopt, implement and deliver the Safe Home programme in their local area alongside their therapeutic support for children and young people.

Our training and implementation support package includes:

a licence to deliver the service in accordance with the model but with the flexibility to meet local needs and practice
expert guidance and practical support to organisations to guide them through setting up a successful service
a pre-training workshop for senior managers to identify how to make the most of the service and establish methods for ongoing evaluation and outcomes
expert training programme for all practitioners
ongoing implementation support to embed and sustain the service.

Email safehome@nspcc.org.uk for more information about delivering this service. Please refrain from sharing personal, confidential or sensitive information to this general email address.

> Find out more about the implementation support we offer

Therapeutic support for children and young people

Safe Home has been designed to work alongside therapeutic support for the children and young people who have displayed harmful sexual behaviour.

If you don’t offer this already we can also help you to implement a therapeutic programme for young people who have displayed HSB with our Change for Good service.

> Find out more about Change for Good