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Crafting a domestic violence-informed response to the unique experience of Black domestic violence survivors in the United States  requires  listening to the voices and lived experience of those survivors.  Like other marginalized survivors in systems impacted by racism and colonization across the globe,  Black women have to navigate systems that often have penalized and punished them instead of being a support.  For example, due to systemic racism and stereotyping, Black survivors are more quickly labeled as 'difficult' victims.  Distrust of formal systems, based on historic racism, can make it harder for Black survivors to reach out for the help they need.  When survivors do not feel like their experience will be seen and understood,  they will not avail themselves of those interventions.  Harms  become compounded, including the unnecessary removal of children by children protection,  when Black survivors are penalized for not using those formal systems.

In this episode of Partnered with a Survivor, Ruth & David interview Courageous Fire, the Executive Director of Courageous Fire LLC , who is a domestic violence survivor and a leader in the movement to create culturally-specific  responses to domestic violence in the Black community.  Courageous Fire which works exclusively with Black victims & survivors of domestic violence in Iowa. Her model of community assistance is self sustaining,  and community driven. She takes cues from the grass roots experiences  of Black survivors  within her community to bring holistic assistance which isn't 'cookie cutter' but that deeply meets those survivors on multiple levels.  In an innovative adaptation of the concept of reparations, Courageous Fire believes that domestic violence survivors deserve to  be compensated for their pain and suffering.  She wants the abuse (not just the abusers) to "pay survivors back" in practical and financial terms. 

Additional themes in this episode include: 

• Why the Black community has typically resisted contact & reliance on formal services as a way to protect themselves & children 
• Why calling the police is not safe for Black women 
• How systems, which are supposed to keep us safe,  have harmed Black women with impunity because of their bias,  judgements,  assumptions about victim behaviors through a culturally ignorant/arrogant lens
• How Courageous Fire LLC helps to bring bring holistic healing & a pathway to financial independence  for Black survivors of domestic abuse
• How to recognize & see the dynamic resistance of Black survivors as a strength not a deficit. 

If you want to know more about Courageous Fire & the work please go to:  https://www.cfirellc.co

Now available! Mapping the Perpetrator’s Pattern: A Practitioner’s Tool for Improving Assessment, Intervention, and Outcomes The web-based Perpetrator Pattern Mapping Tool is a virtual practice tool for improving assessment, intervention, and outcomes through a perpetrator pattern-based approach. The tool allows practitioners to apply the Model’s critical concepts and principles to their current case load in real

Check out David Mandel's new book "Stop Blaming Mothers and Ignoring Fathers: How to transform the way we keep children safe from domestic violence."

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For 15 years, the Safe & Together Model has trained professionals in the importance of centering coercive controlling patterns of behaviors if you want to understand the harm domestic abuse perpetrators create for their children & how that is parenting choice.  Failures to link coercive control to child abuse & neglect make it easier to blame adult survivors, who are being protective, with failure-to-protect & parental alienation. 

The Safe & Together Model's perpetrator pattern-based approach links coercive control in a number of different ways, creating a foundation for a domestic violence-informed practice that helps professionals to partner with survivors and intervene with perpetrators as parents while also mapping the adult survivors attempts to protect children which may not have access to formal services such as police, child protection or counseling because these interventions may not be safe & can create more danger for adult & child survivors. 

New research is backing up this approach by exploring how coercive control impacts children directly via multiple pathways to harm. In this episode, Ruth and David talk with Dr Emma Katz,  a leading research specialist in the harms caused by perpetrators to mothers and children in the context of domestic abuse. The topics of conversation include:

• How perpetrators of coercive control create danger & harm for their children within relationships &  post-separation
• How professionals & systems are failing to assess the parenting of the perpetrator & how that increases the danger for child & adult survivors 
• How the language of "child exposed to domestic violence" obscures the multiple ways perpetrators harm children & hides the choices of the perpetrator as a parent
• How coercive control impacts child safety, wellbeing & family functioning  in the absence of physical violence 

Access Dr. Katz's Research

Dr. Emma Katz Bio
She is a Senior Lecturer in Childhood and Youth at Liverpool Hope University and has won multiple awards for her research, including the Corinna Seith Prize, awarded by Women Against Violence Europe in 2016.  Emma has also written for the academic journal Child Abuse Review. Her most recent article, ‘When Coercive Control Continues to Harm Children: Post‐Separation Fathering, Stalking and Domestic Violence’, is now available to read and download, as is her 2016 article ‘Beyond the Physical Incident Model: How Children Living with Domestic Violence are Harmed by and Resist Regimes of Coercive Control’, which is one of the journal’s most viewed articles to date. Alongside these, Emma is releasin

Now available! Mapping the Perpetrator’s Pattern: A Practitioner’s Tool for Improving Assessment, Intervention, and Outcomes The web-based Perpetrator Pattern Mapping Tool is a virtual practice tool for improving assessment, intervention, and outcomes through a perpetrator pattern-based approach. The tool allows practitioners to apply the Model’s critical concepts and principles to their current case load in real

Check out David Mandel's new book "Stop Blaming Mothers and Ignoring Fathers: How to transform the way we keep children safe from domestic violence."

Visit the Safe & Together Institute website

Start taking Safe & Together Institute courses

Check out Safe & Together Institute upcoming events

Send us a text

The discussion of relationship between histories of trauma and the perpetration of abuse is often fraught.   Many people are worried, as has happened over and over again, that any consideration of the trauma histories of perpetrators will become an excuse for violence. Others advocate for the need for a more holistic approach, especially for those perpetrators who are also survivors of intergenerational traumas related to colonisation  and racism. 

Following  on from this season's  Episode 10 "Trauma-informed is not the same as domestic violence-informed: A conversation about the intersection of domestic violence perpetration, mental health & addiction", David & Ruth turn their attention to the relationship between trauma histories and the choice to act in abusive, violent and controlling ways.   They anchor the conversation to following three main points:

• Adult and child survivors' realities and stated needs should be reflected in our conversations about perpetrators' trauma & behavioral accountability. 
• Trauma histories do not cause someone to engage in violence, and violent and abusive behaviors do not heal trauma (in fact impede healing). 
• A perpetrator pattern-based approach to measuring behavior change can help make trauma and addiction work more domestic violence-informed. 

David & Ruth also highlight how the work of the "She's Not Your Rehab" (Matt & Sarah Brown) is an example of how to bridge the conversations around behavior change and healing. (And Ruth does a shout out to Jess Hill, author of "See What You Made Me Do." )

Now available! Mapping the Perpetrator’s Pattern: A Practitioner’s Tool for Improving Assessment, Intervention, and Outcomes The web-based Perpetrator Pattern Mapping Tool is a virtual practice tool for improving assessment, intervention, and outcomes through a perpetrator pattern-based approach. The tool allows practitioners to apply the Model’s critical concepts and principles to their current case load in real

Check out David Mandel's new book "Stop Blaming Mothers and Ignoring Fathers: How to transform the way we keep children safe from domestic violence."

Visit the Safe & Together Institute website

Start taking Safe & Together Institute courses

Check out Safe & Together Institute upcoming events

Send us a text

In this episode of Partnered with a Survivor, David & Ruth tackle one of the most pressing issues in the domestic violence field: how to make mental health and addiction services more domestic violence-informed when it comes to interacting with survivors.   While awareness of trauma and its impact continues to increase, it often is decontextualized from the dynamics of coercive control.  Mental health and addiction professionals are often ill-prepared by their education and training  to integrate coercive control into their assessments.  Organizations that are striving to trauma-informed are not always committing to be domestic violence-informed.  Domestic violence survivors are often harmed by these gaps.

In  this episode Ruth & David, discuss

• How perpetrators' can cause and exacerbate existing mental health or addiction issues for adult and child survivors
• How perpetrators' can interfere with other family members' treatment and use their involvement with treatment against them
• How systems, like family court and child welfare, may more negatively perceive a survivors' mental health and addiction issues than  perpetrators' coercive control 
• How practitioners and organizations may have blindspots regarding how current coercive control dynamics may be impacting survivors' mental health and addiction treatment 

David & Ruth also tackle how structural sexism, racism and colonisation dynamics  are often ignored in mainstream mental health and addiction paradigms to the detriment of clients from oppressed communities.    Ruth  also shares about how she's been impacted by reading Judy Atkinson's book, Trauma Trails, Recreating Song Lines: The Transgenerational Effects of Trauma in Indigenous Australia

If you like this episode you may want to also listen to the following other episodes of Partnered with a Survivor:

Season 2, Episode 5: How professionals can avoid being manipulated by perpetrators

Season 2, Episode 1: 6 Steps to Partnering with Survivors

Episode 30: 4 Ways the Concept of Trauma Bonding Works Against Survivors

Episo

Now available! Mapping the Perpetrator’s Pattern: A Practitioner’s Tool for Improving Assessment, Intervention, and Outcomes The web-based Perpetrator Pattern Mapping Tool is a virtual practice tool for improving assessment, intervention, and outcomes through a perpetrator pattern-based approach. The tool allows practitioners to apply the Model’s critical concepts and principles to their current case load in real

Check out David Mandel's new book "Stop Blaming Mothers and Ignoring Fathers: How to transform the way we keep children safe from domestic violence."

Visit the Safe & Together Institute website

Start taking Safe & Together Institute courses

Check out Safe & Together Institute upcoming events

Send us a text

Domestic violence has been depicted in feature movies before.  "Enough," "The Burning Bed" and "Sleeping with the Enemy" depended on star power to draw in their audiences.   "Once We Were Warriors," the dark, award-wining New Zealand classic, explored violence in an urban Maori family. Now the multi-award winning feature film "No Ordinary Love"  (NOL) joins this  pantheon of movies that  glues viewers to their seats with view of intimate violence and abuse that is far too familiar to  many of us.    In this movie,  coercive control, the topic of a current global conversation about how best to respond to domestic violence, is center stage.

Join  Ruth & David as they interview Chyna Robinson  (writer, director, producer) and Tracy Rector (executive producer), the powerhouse pair behind   "No Ordinary Love,'' a movie about two families where status and power intertwine with coercive control.   In one family the  a pastor uses religion as tool of control. In the other family, a survivor struggles with a partner, whose job as a police officer, increases danger instead of safety and protection.

Watch the trailer

From the  "No Ordinary Love" website:

"Lines between romantic ideals and control become blurred when Tanya's husband can no longer handle the stress of his career as a police officer. His warm kisses turn cold, and she is left fighting for her life. At the same time, Elizabeth's idyllic life is marred when her charming husband manipulates her into believing that she is going insane. As Elizabeth counsels Tanya, she realizes the signs of abuse in her own marriage. When both women decide to leave, they realize it isn't going to go as smoothly as they'd planned. The escape they seek, turns deadly."

David & Ruth talk to Chyna and Tracy about the mission behind the movie, the artistic choices associated with depicting coercive control, and the strong positive response the movie has already received.

Chyna Robinson, is the award winning writer producer, director, behind the short film, "Greenwood," about the struggle of WWI vet to protect his family during the 1921 racist massacre in Tulsa Oklahoma.  Tracy Rector,  a domestic violence survivor and  veteran of the domestic violence movement in the United States.   Chyna & Tracy brought their own personal experiences & cultural perspectives to speak to intersectionalities such as race, religion, the impact

Now available! Mapping the Perpetrator’s Pattern: A Practitioner’s Tool for Improving Assessment, Intervention, and Outcomes The web-based Perpetrator Pattern Mapping Tool is a virtual practice tool for improving assessment, intervention, and outcomes through a perpetrator pattern-based approach. The tool allows practitioners to apply the Model’s critical concepts and principles to their current case load in real

Check out David Mandel's new book "Stop Blaming Mothers and Ignoring Fathers: How to transform the way we keep children safe from domestic violence."

Visit the Safe & Together Institute website

Start taking Safe & Together Institute courses

Check out Safe & Together Institute upcoming events

Send us a text

The voices of children  impacted by domestic violence perpetrators  are being ignored by professionals.

In this ground-breaking interview, a fourteen year old survivor of officer-involved domestic violence, and his mother speak openly about their experience with systems.  Liam, and  his mother Michelle (pseudonyms) share  how the police colluded with  their perpetrator, who was Liam's stepfather.  They speak about how Liam and his sister were treated as after thoughts, and not victims in their own right.   Alternately between sadness and anger Liam talks about the failures of the police, child welfare and other professionals.   

Links to other interviews and stories with Liam and Michelle
Liam’s Op-Ed in the Age
https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/child-survivors-of-family-violence-need-to-be-recognised-20201206-p56kzq.html

Our interview with the ABC (radio) which caused complaints because a child spoke
https://www.abc.net.au/radio/melbourne/programs/mornings/victoria-police,-minister-apologise-to-woman/12363274

Sixty minutes
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Clth5kpkiJc

An article about Liam  and his sister https://www.google.com.au/amp/s/amp.abc.net.au/article/12335894

Two articles about our story published in the Age https://www.theage.com.au/national/hidden-crisis-when-your-domestic-abuser-is-also-the-local-police-officer-20201203-p56k6r.html

https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/systemic-problems-ibac-uncovers-police failings-on-domestic-abuse-by-officers-20201206-p56l0d.html

Now available! Mapping the Perpetrator’s Pattern: A Practitioner’s Tool for Improving Assessment, Intervention, and Outcomes The web-based Perpetrator Pattern Mapping Tool is a virtual practice tool for improving assessment, intervention, and outcomes through a perpetrator pattern-based approach. The tool allows practitioners to apply the Model’s critical concepts and principles to their current case load in real

Check out David Mandel's new book "Stop Blaming Mothers and Ignoring Fathers: How to transform the way we keep children safe from domestic violence."

Visit the Safe & Together Institute website

Start taking Safe & Together Institute courses

Check out Safe & Together Institute upcoming events

Send us a text

Safety. Satisfaction. Self-Determination.  

For decades, domestic violence survivors have shared that these are the aspects of their life targeted by domestic violence perpetrators. Until recently, it was primarily the attacks on physical  safety that were reflected in the domestic violence laws across the world.   Slowly , with the passage of coercive control laws in a few countries,  survivors are seeing their wider reality reflected in legislation. Coercive control,  as definition of domestic violence, is now being considered from Australia to the United States.  Coercive control, which has been at the center of the Safe & Together Model's perpetrator pattern-based approach for 15 years,  stresses patterns of behavior that  lead to entrapment and  restrict the fundamental rights of the adult and child survivors. 

The laws that are being considered are far from uniform in their scope and sensitivity to the issues including preventing backlash against survivors, particularly survivors from poor and marginalized communities.  Because Scotland's coercive control law is considered one of the most progressive in the world,  David and Ruth interviewed  Dr. Marsha Scott , the executive for Scottish Woman's Aid .  The interview includes: 

• A discussion of the framing and development of the law
• How the law differs from other efforts
• The importance of the inclusion of children and pets in the defintion of patterns
• How a "reasonable person" standard helps keep the focus on the perpetrator's pattern 
• The importance of implementation planning  
• The importance of getting input from survivors as part of the process of developing coercive control laws and
• How to avoid coercive control laws rebounding against survivors from all backgrounds.

Read the Scottish Law
Check out  Scottish Women's Aid's website
Listen to our interview with Jess Hill on coercive control laws
Listen to our interview with Luke and Ryan Hart, major supporters of coercive control law
Listen our episode on coercive control and consent

Now available! Mapping the Perpetrator’s Pattern: A Practitioner’s Tool for Improving Assessment, Intervention, and Outcomes The web-based Perpetrator Pattern Mapping Tool is a virtual practice tool for improving assessment, intervention, and outcomes through a perpetrator pattern-based approach. The tool allows practitioners to apply the Model’s critical concepts and principles to their current case load in real

Check out David Mandel's new book "Stop Blaming Mothers and Ignoring Fathers: How to transform the way we keep children safe from domestic violence."

Visit the Safe & Together Institute website

Start taking Safe & Together Institute courses

Check out Safe & Together Institute upcoming events

Send us a text

Both men and women can be controlling. Both men and women can violent. Domestic abuse occurs in same sex and heterosexual relationship.   This means both men and women can be victims of domestic violence.  Yet domestic violence-informed practice requires a gender analysis  and an understanding of coercive control.  In this episode Ruth and David examine some of the controversies and challenges associated with identifying and providing assistance to male victims of domestic violence including:

• cultural understandings of masculinities & gender roles as barriers to disclosure and assistance
• perpetrators claiming the mantle of victimhood as means to manipulate partners, professionals and systems
• the need to recognize men's histories victimization and trauma without using it as excuse for abusive behavior 
• how mapping patterns of coercive control can help identify male victims, protect them and inoculate professionals against manipulations by perpetrators claiming victim status

Check out the Safe & Together Institute's white paper on "Unraveling the Gender Paradox at the center of the Safe & Together Model" 

Now available! Mapping the Perpetrator’s Pattern: A Practitioner’s Tool for Improving Assessment, Intervention, and Outcomes The web-based Perpetrator Pattern Mapping Tool is a virtual practice tool for improving assessment, intervention, and outcomes through a perpetrator pattern-based approach. The tool allows practitioners to apply the Model’s critical concepts and principles to their current case load in real

Check out David Mandel's new book "Stop Blaming Mothers and Ignoring Fathers: How to transform the way we keep children safe from domestic violence."

Visit the Safe & Together Institute website

Start taking Safe & Together Institute courses

Check out Safe & Together Institute upcoming events

Send us a text

Domestic violence perpetrators do not only target survivors.  They also target the professionals & systems who want to want to help them. Many perpetrators, often using money, privilege and power,  leverage systems to amplify their control.  False allegations of substance abuse, mental health issues or child abuse are lodged with  social services and family courts, often to devastating effect.  Other behaviors include:

• Continuous litigation to exhaust the financial ability of survivors to resist
• The use of police  wellness checks to intimidate a survivor 
• The weaponization of survivor's mental health and addiction diagnoses, to gain control over children, even when those problems are the result of the perpetrator's abuse.

Survivors can feel trapped between perpetrators and  systems that are not savvy to these behaviors. The effects of system manipulation on the safety & wellbeing of adult and child survivors of domestic violence is often long term, financially devastating, and  harmful to child wellbeing and development. In some instances these system failures can cause MORE trauma than the initial abuse itself. 

In this episode, David & Ruth discuss how domestic violence perpetrators target practitioners in different systems, and why those systems are so vulnerable to these tactics.  They highlight the vulnerabilities of family court, criminal justice and child welfare.  They discuss how to recognize when a perpetrator is manipulating your system to harm a victim, and how  to  resist these manipulations.    

Now available! Mapping the Perpetrator’s Pattern: A Practitioner’s Tool for Improving Assessment, Intervention, and Outcomes The web-based Perpetrator Pattern Mapping Tool is a virtual practice tool for improving assessment, intervention, and outcomes through a perpetrator pattern-based approach. The tool allows practitioners to apply the Model’s critical concepts and principles to their current case load in real

Check out David Mandel's new book "Stop Blaming Mothers and Ignoring Fathers: How to transform the way we keep children safe from domestic violence."

Visit the Safe & Together Institute website

Start taking Safe & Together Institute courses

Check out Safe & Together Institute upcoming events

Send us a text

What do practitioners need to pay most attention to in domestic violence cases involving children?  What kind of evidence do courts need to hear evidence if they want to make good decisions related to custody and access?  The Safe & Together's Model 5 Critical Components is the foundational guide to domestic violence-informed assessment and decision -making.   The Mapping Tool, Pivoting to the Perpetrator and other tools and techniques all derive from these Critical Components.
 
In this episode, David and Ruth dive into the each of those Critical Components including:

• the history behind their development
• how they can help drive systems change
• how their application can prevent victim blaming
• how they allow practitioners to consider important factors like cultural trauma without allowing it be an excuse for perpetration

Learn more about the Critical Components:

• Foundational Elearning: "Safe & Together: An Introduction to the Model" 
• Comprehensive Elearning: "Safe &  Together Model CORE Training" 

Purchase Safe & Together Model Cards which include the Principles and Critical Components

Now available! Mapping the Perpetrator’s Pattern: A Practitioner’s Tool for Improving Assessment, Intervention, and Outcomes The web-based Perpetrator Pattern Mapping Tool is a virtual practice tool for improving assessment, intervention, and outcomes through a perpetrator pattern-based approach. The tool allows practitioners to apply the Model’s critical concepts and principles to their current case load in real

Check out David Mandel's new book "Stop Blaming Mothers and Ignoring Fathers: How to transform the way we keep children safe from domestic violence."

Visit the Safe & Together Institute website

Start taking Safe & Together Institute courses

Check out Safe & Together Institute upcoming events