CCChat April 2025.pdf - Flipbook - Page 11
Interviewing
Sue Penna
I’m really interested in finding out why you
wrote the Domestic Abuse Recovery Toolkit.
My background and training is in occupational
therapy. I specialised in adult mental health and
also trained as a counsellor. Most of the clinical
work I did, when I was in the NHS, was working with
adults that had experienced some sort of trauma as
children, mostly child sexual abuse. I left the NHS
back in 2004 and became a domestic violence
coordinator in the third sector before it was
mainstreamed into the local authorities, back in the
day when it was all voluntary sector. I did that for a
couple of years. I didn’t want to go back to a
mainstream local authority and so started working
on my own.
The world of domestic violence, bizarrely, started for
me, when I moved house and started volunteering. I
didn’t know anybody where I moved and saw an
advert in the local art centre asking for women
interested in sitting on a management committee of
a refuge and that’s where it all started. I went along
and became a member, I did that for a while and
that was even before I became a DV coordinator
and it sparked my interest and frustration around
what happens to women really.
I was also volunteering in a refuge, another refuge,
and they wanted to run a programme for the
women in the refuge.They knew that my background
was in writing groups. That’s what I did as a
therapist. I ran lots of group work for sexual abuse
and people with eating disorders which is probably
as a result of trauma, so this trauma work I did, is
where the Recovery Toolkit started. The first
Recovery Toolkit for domestic abuse was written
and piloted in a local refuge and then we piloted it
with Victim Support in Cornwall. They ran it for two
years. 77 women over two years. We looked at the
results of it, to make sure it was useful and it had
been useful. And then out of that came the
children’s programme and then the other toolkits.
M: Are the recovery toolkits for survivors or
facilitators? Who can access them?
What we do is train. Rock Pool came about
because I realised that I couldn’t keep travelling
around the country delivering on my own, so we set
up Rock Pool because, at some point I’d quite like
to retire. What we do is train agencies to deliver
the training to their clients so they are all for
individuals that have experienced abuse and are
separated from their perpetrator except our
Inspiring Families programme which is for families
where there is domestic abuse and they want to
stay together, which is a huge number of people
11 dip
who don’t get services because they often
under the radar.
