Produced by the School of Continuing Education at North Carolina State University. 1998.

Widening the Circle: The Family Group Decision Making Experience was produced as a training tool for professionals interested in the use of family group decision making in response to domestic violence cases. It was designed to be used with the training manual Family Group Decision Making: Communities Stopping Family Violence. The video follows the fictional story of one family dealing with family violence from one incident through the process of reporting the incident, deciding to go to conference, preparation, actual conference, and follow-up.

The video opens with a mother and daughter talking about going to the store to buy a dress. They are both anxious for the father to get home, but become frightened when they realize he has been drinking. After an argument and off-scene violence, the film moves to the oldest daughter sharing the situation with a friend and then a school guidance counsellor. From there, Canadian child protective services and law enforcement become involved in the case.

The video follows the referral to Family Group Conferencing from the social worker through the preparation of each individual concerned. The dramatization shows the questions, concerns and fears experienced by each family member as he or she debates participation in the conference. This includes questions of why extended family members need to be included to feelings of hopelessness that things can change.

The actual conference is broken into three distinct phases. First, government experts –police, parole, and Child protective services – present information to the family on why domestic violence is a problem, resources available in the community to help them address the underlying causes of the violence, and what a family plan needs to include for the official agencies to feel comfortable that everything is being done to keep family members safe.

Second, the family is seen discussing the issues without the presence of the experts. The discussions are intense with confessions by some family members to having ignored the signs of problems and others extremely angry that they did not know about the problems. Finally, the family develops a plan to make sure that everyone is safe and that there is a gradual reunification of the family. The video does not cover the third phase of the conference in which the experts are brought back in to the room to discuss the plan created by the family.

The video ends with follow-up interviews between the conference coordinator and different family members. The discussions cover different elements of the family plan and how this is working for the individual members.

Widening the Circle: The Family Group Decision Making Experience depicts a specific legal environment and any use of the video would have take into account the legal requirements in their localities. Yet the video shows how families can be brought into the process of deciding how to handle their own problems and build ownership with the solutions.  The video is available from the American Humane Association, www.americanhumane.org.


Lynette Parker
April 2007