AVA’s Stella Project has been working to improve services for adult women affected by overlapping Domestic Violence (DV) and Problematic Substance Use (PSU) for over ten years. Through provision of training and development work with practitioners, the organisation received frequent requests to advise agencies about how these matters affected younger women. Although this was an issue that was increasingly identified by practitioners, the UK evidence base on how to effectively support such young women was weak. In 2010, AVA successfully sought funding from the John Paul Getty Jnr Charitable Trust for a research and development project to address this gap in the evidence base.
Following an open invitation to tender, AVA commissioned Forensic Psychological Services at Middlesex University to conduct the research phase of the project and to evaluate the Stella Project’s intervention with agencies working with young women affected by DV and Sexual Violence (SV) and PSU. The project’s scope allowed the Stella Project to support two London boroughs in developing their responses to these young women. AVA invited all London boroughs to submit an Expression of Interest to be involved. From 14 interested boroughs, AVA selected the London Borough of Enfield (LBE) and the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (RBKC), primarily because they are different demographically but also based on their strategic commitment to the project and the existence of relevant agencies to participate in the project. In both boroughs, the Domestic Violence Co-ordinator and the Drug and Alcohol Action Team Manager nominated four relevant agencies to participate in the project. Within each borough, agencies were selected to represent both the Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG) and substance misuse sectors, and to cover the full age range of young women whose needs the project would address (14 to 25 years). In both boroughs, this resulted in representation from the Independent Domestic Violence Advocacy services, the young people’s substance misuse services and the Drug Intervention Programmes (DIPs), and in Enfield, the Youth Offending Service
