Supervised Contact
Is Supervised Contact right for your situation?
Sometimes, relationships break down due to actual, assessed or imminent risk of harm to a child or partner. In these circumstances, the relationship between the child and the non-resident parent becomes immediately strained and contact alone is unsafe. When this happens, long periods of time can go by where the child and non-resident parent do not see or speak with one another.
Supervised contact exists to overcome these issues, helping to foster healthy ongoing relationships, but in a heavily supervised way that ensures the physical and emotional safety of the child at all times.
How does supervised contact work?
With supervised contact being necessary for cases where there is a risk of harm, our focus goes into ensuring the welfare of the child and the resident carer, by preventing them from any unsupervised encounters with the non-resident family member. Both the resident parent/carer and non-resident parent/carer are provided staggered arrival and departure times. Both resident and non-resident parents/carers (or other family members) must adhere to the same rules.
Supervised contact ordinarily takes place in one of our secure private Family Time rooms, with at least one member of the team present at all times. The member of the team will oversee all interactions and conversations, intervening if deemed necessary, and making notes on the child’s response and non-resident’s behaviour. All of this is then used to create a full report and given to those paying for family time.
We recognise that for the resident carer, even fully supervised contact may cause anxiety. That’s why we have protocols in place to fully protect all involved and allow for consistent monitoring throughout.
Team member present at all times.
CCTV in all areas (only used for training and safeguarding purposes).
All conversations and interactions are heavily monitored.
Full report provided (not verbatim) to be sent to the person(s) paying for family time.
Staggered arrivals and departures.
Interventions if inappropriate behaviour observed.
Emergency support protocol in place.
Each visit can bring you a step closer to re-building your family connections
The main remit of any Family Time contact is to move on as soon as it is safe to do so and all parties agree. The next natural stage to supervised contact is called Supported Contact, which can then lead to Community Family Time once fully agreed upon by all parties and where it is safe to do so.
