The overall aim of presenting these activities is to give reader insights on European practices which have helped a child suffering from parental alcohol abuse and violent behaviour.

These practices can serve as sources of inspiration and models of activity to all decision makers, professionals and practitioners working with or coming into contact with children. Good practices can serve as:

• Sources of inspiration: Good practices, which are proven as successful solutions, can and should be stimulating, giving new ideas to a professional or community of professionals who are looking for ways to develop their work. It is especially important to explain the logic of the activity: What makes it work?
• Models of activity: Good practices can, under certain circumstances, be embedded into a new context. This, however, requires going through a learning process in the new community of practice, preferably guided by someone from the original community.

Too often, cultural barriers, language being the most obvious, present obstacles to learning across boarders. Even though, the context in which practices are being developed, can be very different from country to country e.g. laws, norms and traditions, the problems are very much similar.

It is not only interesting to read what kind of activities are set up elsewhere but presenting good practices together also offers possibility to compare, find similarities and come up with new innovative ways of setting up services for children in need.

The aim of each of the good practice example is to introduce an efficient intervention, the aim of which is to improve the well-being of the children in families with alcohol problems and domestic violence. The interventions may, for example;

• increase the sense of security and self-esteem, 
• support positive coping strategies (and discourage negative ones), 
• reinforce external social support,
• improve the situation within the family etc.
• A good practice can also affect a child’s well-being indirectly through improving a professional’s skills, confidence, inter-agency working etc.

Premises

Defining the Problem

This Good Practices Report (GPR) deals with risky family environments where both substance misuse and violence cause harm to a child. However, all good practice examples will not be limited to situations where both phenomena exist simultaneously. The project was also looking for good practice examples which deal with either substance misuse or violence.

Definitions of Terms 

Violence
Violence can mean witnessing it, or physical, psychological, verbal, neglect or sexual abuse.
It can be perceived both as a social function with physical (medical), psychological and social consequences, and a criminal act with juridical consequences. 

Substances
The project looked for good practices dealing with parental alcohol problems. However, if a partner came across a good practice dealing with misuse of other substances, it could be included, too. 

Child Perspective
One of the premises of this project was to include a child perspective in all its activities. Children are often, both in research and in everyday life, seen as "humans becoming", i.e. being in a process of becoming adults. This view often interprets children's experiences, emotions and reactions as immature, irrational or even harmful, and thus underestimates children's creativity and activity in coping with negative life events.

Child perspective includes:  giving childhood a legitimate, independent ontological status of its own ("human being") and not seeing it as only a temporary phase on the way to adulthood; and consequently taking seriously children's experience and his/her reactions, respecting the child's own interpretation and not seeing him/her as an object but as a subject of his/her own life. 

Target Audiences 

The beneficiaries of the project are children between 0 and 18 of age. The project aims at delivering the help to the children through professionals' activities. The professionals are also referred to as intermediaries, describing their role in between the project and the beneficiary. 

The target audiences of the project as well as the Good Practices Report are divided into two categories of professionals: 

• Generalist professionals:  teachers, kindergarten teachers, guidance centres, police, youth workers (incl. religious organisations), general practitioners, paeditricians 
• Specialist professionals: social workers, therapists, child psychiatrists/ psychologists/ psychotherapists 

Transferability

Transferring a good practice means that a practice is realised and taken into use outside its original environment. Good practices in this document are meant to serve merely as offering inspirational elements rather than models for practices as such. Good practice can also be one element of the work practice described e.g. theory on the background or core idea. 

Format

The format used in collecting these good practices was developed to get the necessary elements of the good practices described in a unified manner. The structure of the good practice presentations:

• Introduction; a short description of who is in charge of this activity, what is the aim, why is it being done and for whom?
• Background; this section aims to opening up the political and institutional context of the activity to the reader.
• Core idea; to give reader a brief description of what is the underlying assumption which makes this activity work and to what demand this activity is replying to.
• Child perspective; how the children’s views were incorporated into the activity? Please note that this can imply many different forms of how children can be taken into account. e.g. ranging from offering direct help to children to getting the situation stabilised at home by children’s welfare being the  primary concern.
• Description of the practice; gives basic information on target audiences, process, activities, actors, outputs, structures and other necessary elements i.e. resources to the reader.
• Effectiveness; measuring effectiveness can often be quite challenging. What was expected here were descriptions on the impact on the target audiences and child’s situation and how supporting data was collected.
• Lessons learned / recommendations; this is to give the reader ideas and advice on how the activity could be improved.
• Further information and contact details giving the reader a possibility to find out about this activity in more detail.

Evaluation

Criteria to evaluate the “goodness” or “usability” of the practice for one’s organisation or work can be defined from many perspectives. To evaluate usefulness can be categorised in two approaches. One is to put more emphasis on the development of the implementation. How it has been organised and what resources it has required? Or one can look at the practices from the point of view of the outputs and impact. How the intervention has reached its targets?

Given the scope of the issue and the limitations of the project (see collecting process below), much of the responsibility is put on the reader to evaluate the good practices collected in this document. The overall aim has been to make the process and the criteria used as transparent as possible to the reader.

Collection process and screening criteria

The screening criteria arose from the goals of the project:

• The core idea of the activity is clear and makes sense
• The activity has a clearly defined goal and purpose
• The target audiences/beneficiaries of the activities are clearly defined
• The necessary elements of the activity have been identified and described clearly. Necessary elements include:
• process: How the activity is done in practice?
• actors: Who were involved in the process and how were they qualified (education,work experience etc.)? What kind of organisation was needed?
• structures: What concrete things were needed in order to make it work (i.e. buildings, equipment, computer systems etc.)
• other necessary elements, e.g. atmosphere, important contacts etc.
• The outputs of the project were identified.
• The impact was proved to be beneficial for the child (evidence or practice based).
• The activity described takes into account the child's perspective.