This can be seen in the way childhood harms can foreshadow problems in adulthood, in the way some harms experienced by parents affect their children, and in the way some people face multiple disadvantages at the same time.
These important patterns are often obscured by data gathered by services and systems divided between individual presenting needs and between life stages. When we can’t see these patterns, we are doomed to repeat them.
Hard Edges Scotland was commissioned by Lankelly Chase and supported by The Robertson Trust to bring separate datasets together to reveal how some harms inter- connect in the lives of people in Scotland. It follows a similar study based on English data, published in 2015.
This report doesn’t merely repeat the English study. It includes much more qualitative evidence from people with lived or frontline experience of severe and multiple disadvantage, as well as case studies from local areas. Additional data about people’s experiences of mental health problems and domestic abuse also helps shine more of a light on the experiences of some women. This latter development is particularly welcome, as the definition of severe and multiple disadvantage used in the English study generated a largely male profile.
Perhaps the most serious finding is described as “the pervasive role that violence continues to play throughout
