Support for children in the Child Protection process (FOI)

Request

During 2019, 2020 and 2021 to date, how many referrals were made to Barnardo's / outside charities / agencies to support children in the Child Protection process as a result of domestic abuse?

Of the total number of referrals for each year, please provide a breakdown of which agencies the referrals were made to, for example Barnardo's.

Response

The Department does not record the number of children on Child Protection Plans where domestic abuse is a factor. Child Protection Plans are recorded under the following categories of concern:

• emotional abuse

• physical abuse

• sexual abuse

• neglect

All families with children over the age of five on Child Protection Plans are offered advocacy with Barnardo's.

Families may also be offered the support of an Independent Domestic Violence Advisor (IDVA). In some cases, they might already be working with an IDVA.

As part of the Child Protection planning process, perpetrators might be asked to complete the ADAPT (Adapt Domestic Abuse Prevention Training) programme.

The Department does not capture the number of referrals to other agencies for the support described above, and to gather the data we would need to research individual records. This would take more than the prescribed 12.5 hours to complete and therefore Article 16 of the Freedom of Information (Jersey) Law 2011 has been applied.

Article applied

Article 16 - A scheduled public authority may refuse to supply information if cost excessive

(1) A scheduled public authority that has been requested to supply information may refuse to supply the information if it estimates that the cost of doing so would exceed an amount determined in the manner prescribed by Regulations.

Regulation 2 (1) of the Freedom of Information (Costs) (Jersey) Regulations 2014 allows an authority to refuse a request for information where the estimated cost of dealing with the request would exceed the specified amount of the cost limit of £500. This is the estimated cost of one person spending 12.5 working hours in determining whether the department holds the information, locating, retrieving and extracting the information.