I first got involved with family A when they came to our services after fleeing Domestic Violence from their home. Client A has two children one boy aged 10 and four years old girl. In our initial risk assessment client A stated that she had moved to a different area after her splitting from her partner, who she had been living with for 6 years. In three months her ex-partner somehow happened to relocate her whereabouts and turned up at her door, threatening to take his daughter away. Client A then rang the police but on their arrival he had left the property, she felt very scared, unsafe and self referred into our refuge.
I adopted the strength perspective in my work with client A, as I indentified self referring as strength to start with. The strengths-base perspective is an approach to the process of practice rather than a theory and its goal is minimizing the weaknesses and maximizing the strengths of the client, whether the client is an individual, group or community. Client empowerment is seen as a major concept in strength-base perspective as one cannot empower a client by berating shortcomings or failures. Saleeby (2009) suggests that in order to work from a strength based perspective we should see one in the light of her/his talents, vision, values, capabilities and knowledge. The work I was carrying out with client A was to minimise risk and promote this family to live safe and free from abuse of any kind. In refuge setting strength base perspective has to be co operated with other approaches and in this case task centred approach in order to achieve best outcomes. Client A had previously done Freedom programme which increased her understanding and knowledge around