A place of safety

Jesmond is an attractive and self-contained area only three stops on the Metro from Newcastle’s central railway station. It is a place of handsome, mainly red-brick, mid-Victorian and Edwardian terraced houses, where even a modest two-bedroom flat can fetch £270,000 and a substantial, three-storey family home £750,000. A collection of small streets, lined with mainly local shops, not far from one of the area’s two Metro stations, gives it the distinct feel of a selfsufficient urban village. To walk its long main street, which runs roughly between the two stations, is to run a gauntlet of small hotels, bars, cafes and restaurants. This is an area populated by professionals but where numerous “To Let” signs also betray its popularity with students. All that prevents it being the Left Bank of Newcastle is the lack of a cinema: the white-brick former Jesmond Cinema is now in sad decay, with weeds sprouting from its upper reaches. Situated unobtrusively amid this very typical example of late twentieth-century/

early twenty-first-century revitalised, fashionable urban living is the headquarters of Barnardo’s Mosaic project, a tall house, once a spacious family home. It sits slightly set back from the road, with only a plaque by the door to distinguish it from its neighbours. This modesty belies its work. In fact, it is one of probably only three projects in the UK working specifically with women whose families have been affected by abuse and maybe the only one catering for the female partners of child sex offenders. Formed in 1994 as the Family Resource Service (it took its present name in 1996), Mosaic also works with women in other situations. The Family Resource Service was initially a specialist part of Barnardo’s fostering and adoption service, which found placements for children who had been abused. It began working with the probation service and the Sexual Offenders Treatment Group, working with offenders to develop empathy with their victims. Its present work came about through the realisation that there was no therapeutic service for partners of the men in the groups. The assumption had been that that was the role of the social services departments. At this time the Sexual Behaviour Unit – created by the Newcastle, North Tyneside and Northumberland Mental Health NHS Trust and the National Probation Service Northumbria – was starting to work with men who had abused children but who were not in the criminal justice system.