SwitchUP - Using Music To Tackle Abuse

Thanks to funding from Youth Music and The Big Lottery, SATEDA has just completed a year long project called SwitchUP, which is an innovative adolescent to parent violence (APV) intervention for families where the young person has become abusive to their parent/s in order to get control over them. 

APV is an emerging issue which SATEDA became aware of through our work with victims of domestic abuse. Our clients and partner agencies were telling us about teenagers who for a variety of reasons such as the trauma of growing up in a house with domestic abuse, learnt behaviour from witnessing one parent control the other through abuse, and an increased sense of entitlement among adolescents, had become abusive to their parent/s in order to try and gain control over them.

There were no targeted interventions in place for this issue despite the obvious need, so SATEDA created the SwitchUP programme. The model we used was several weeks of group work, with one group for the parents happening at the same time and location but separately from a group for the young people. The parents gained peer support from other people in the same situation, as well as emotional and practical support from our facilitators, and were able to explore the reasons for their child’s abuse, and learn parenting strategies to manage their behaviour more effectively. The first half of the young people’s group followed a similar structure to the parent’s being both therapeutic and educational, helping the young people identify what are and aren’t abusive behaviours, why they behaved abusively, and how they could behave more positively. We also used a restorative justice technique with a video dialogue between each young person and their parent, to help rebuild their damaged relationships and reopen the lines of communication.

In the second half of the young people’s group we had creative sessions. Funding from Youth Music paid for professional grime and drum & base artists Harry Shotta and Erb n Dub to work with the young people, and over the course of the programme each group wrote, recorded and produced their own track. Working on this together helped group cohesion and team work, improved the young people’s self-esteem through giving them a sense of achievement, helped their confidence through encouraging them to step out in trying new skills, and since the lyrics of the songs were based on the material covered in the therapeutic sessions, it helped them reflect on what they’d learnt and cement new principles in their minds.  

Although for various reasons we weren’t able to work with as many families as we’d like, we’re immensely happy with the programme and what it achieved for the families who did attend. We had a very high completion rate, with 87.5% of families who attended the first or second session completing the whole programme. 59% of physical abuse stopped altogether, and 66.5% of all abusive behaviours either stopped or reduced in frequency and severity by the end of the programme. 73% of the parents felt an increase in their parenting confidence and ability, and we saw improvement in 68% of the young people’s emotional stability, and 60% of the young people’s relationships with their parents.

We feel that none of these outcomes would have been possible without the creative element of the programme, as without something to help the group come together, they wouldn’t have felt as able to open up in front of each other, without creating something together they wouldn’t have believed they could see any change in their behaviour, without something fun the young people probably wouldn’t have attended, and without a way to reflect and an outlet to express themselves the positive changes would have been short-lived. Because of this we are immensely grateful to Youth Music for their support, and think that SwitchUP is a testament to the power of music and creativity in effecting positive change in the lives of young people.