Who can use this website?

The website is for people working at any level with children and adolescents affected by parental problems (particularly parental alcohol misuse and/or parental domestic abuse). This includes:

• Anyone who comes into contact with children and adolescents affected by parental problems. You may be a teacher, primary care worker (family doctor, health visitor, nurse, district nurse, dietician etc.), health services worker, hospital worker (nurse, doctor, occupational therapist, physiotherapist, speech therapist, paediatrician etc.), social worker, youth worker, police officer, probation officer, member of the clergy etc.
• Anyone who works more closely with children and adolescents affected by parental problems. You may be a specialist practitioner or researcher or you may be planning or training to be a specialist practitioner or researcher.

This website is NOT specifically for children (or their families) who are living with parental alcohol misuse, parental domestic abuse (or both issues together). This website does also not provide information on alcohol use and misuse and its associated problems, nor on domestic abuse itself. However, you may find some of the information of interest to you. If you are accessing this site because you are a child or young person (or other family member) affected by either or both problems, then please click here for information on how you could get further information.

What kind of information will I find?

Children and adolescents who live in risky family environments are at risk of a range of problems, and hence may have a lot of needs. Some of the things that you could do are very straightforward and based on common sense, and are the types of things that you would do to try to support a child living with any kind of problem, whilst other things are more specialised. Generally, therefore, what this website will cover is:

1. What it is like for children living with parental alcohol misuse or parental domestic abuse, or situations where both issues exist together.

2. Ideas of how you can talk to or work with children to try and help them. If this is not possible or appropriate to you, then we will try to direct you to finding other ways of helping the children.

3. Details of further resources, including literature, websites and national agencies that may help you further, this includes information specifically from some of the projects that we have been involved with.

We will attempt to provide as much information as possible, but because we are trying to meet the needs of a range of people across many countries, and because there is so much information on these topics that it would be impossible for us to cover it all within this website, most of the information will be at a general level.

However, we will provide more specific information where appropriate, or direct you to other resources. Your country may have its own pages within this website, or its own separate website, where more detailed information can be found. Further, there is a lot of overlap in some of the detail that could be included in various sections of the website; we have tried to avoid repetition so it may be useful for you to look at the information given in different sections of the website.

We are only able to produce the website in one language at this stage; hence the website is in English to ensure that the information is accessible to the largest number of people. In fact, the majority of written work and information on these topics has been published in English. A lot of the literature on the topics that we are covering is American; it would be impossible to include all of this literature so we have been selective in what we have read and in what we reference on this website.

Some ENCARE partner countries have developed, or are developing, their own websites to provide more detailed information specific to that country. Some or all of the information in these websites will be language specific.

Note on terminology and definition

There is a range of terms used to define the issues that this website is trying to respond to, for example: alcohol misuse, problem drinking, alcoholism, alcohol-dependence syndrome, hazardous drinking, domestic violence, domestic abuse, intimate partner violence etc.

Similarly, there is a range of theories that have been developed to try and understand the problems. ENCARE member countries use different terms to describe the problems; they therefore have different ways of thinking about and responding to them.

We have decided, therefore, not to adopt or endorse any one term or theoretical position. However, in order to be consistent, the general terms that will be used throughout this website are parental alcohol misuse and parental domestic abuse [unless reference to a particular study or use of verbatim quotes dictates use of the language they used]. Where appropriate, we will suggest some further reading or resources that debate these issues and theories further.