Dating Detox - Practitioners

Dating Detox

This manual is intended to be used as a series of sessions which can be run as either individual or group work sessions without a limiting structure.

How this manual works

Part 1 of the manual - Pre-Work

Session 1 focuses on safety and ensures that the practitioner has the correct foundations for working with someone who poses a risk of harm to others. This session and its inherent sections should be completed on an individual basis only. You should familiarise yourself with this section before beginning to use the subsequent resource as it has a section on worker safety and details some of the safeguarding responsibilities you have when working with YP in this context.

Session 2 is also intended as an individual session of pre-work to prepare a YP for groupwork (if that is your intended mode of delivery). The intention is to help the YP prepare for further work and allows the practitioner to explore with the YP their thoughts and opinions about relationships and abuse. It can be used as part of an assessment process for determining which sessions of the programme are most needed to effect positive change with an individual. The manual is intended to be used flexibly as both an educational resource and as a resource for achieving behaviour change in YP who have used violence or controlling behaviours with people they are close to.

Part 2 of the manual - Healthy Relationships

Sessions 3 - 8 can be used as a preventative resource to help YP explore what is healthy. A note on language when discussing healthy relationships – we use the term dating in the manual but YP will have a range of other terms, for instance “talking to” was current when writing this. The terminology used by young people around this area is constantly evolving and with significant regional, social, cultural differences please consider and adjust some of the language to improve relevance/fit with the young people you are working with.

These sessions can also be used with YP who have already been abusive, as a foundation for the later sessions on behaviour change. You can build and arrange the sessions as you see fit, based on the individual needs of the YP if working on a 1-2-1 basis or to fit the needs of the group. Some sessions naturally follow on from others, for example, Session 3 on Boundaries is a nice building block for Session 7 on Sexual Respect and Consent.

Part 3 of the manual - Behaviour Change

Sessions 9 - 12 work best with those who have already started using abusive behaviour and so are not intended to be used as an educational/preventative resource. The exercises within this second part of the manual focus on changing behaviour through methods like cognitive behavioural therapy or narrative therapy. As such they require self-reflection by the YP of their thoughts and feelings leading up to abusive incidents and are not as useful for YP who don’t generally behave abusively in their relationships.

You should feel free to run the sessions in a different order, spend longer on some aspects and leave out others as you feel appropriate. The resource is not intended to be prescriptive.