Discover the hard truths about the impact of domestic violence on children, as we, David and Ruth Reymundo Mandel, discuss the "Myth of the Child Witness" chapter from David's book "Stop Blaming Mothers and Ignoring Fathers: How to transform the way we keep children safe from domestic violence." We promise you'll come away with a deeper understanding and a sense of urgency to shift the way society responds to young survivors. Listen as we pull back the curtain on the often-invisible effects of witnessing abuse and how these experiences shape the lives of children far beyond what is visible to the eye.
Are children just passive bystanders in the face of domestic violence, or are they silent bearers of trauma? What happens when we do not name the perpetrator as the cause of the children's harm or highlight their responsibilities are carers? Our discussions traverse the landscape of this misconception, challenging the passive language that labels children merely as witnesses and advocating for a language that reflects their true experiences. We address the crucial need for systems to hold perpetrators accountable and prevent children from replicating harmful behaviors. Our conversation makes the case for recognizing the autonomy of children and the essential role of the non-abusive parent in fostering a child's emotional safety.
Wrapping up our insightful conversation, we underscore the critical role adults play in understanding and supporting children affected by domestic violence. Delving into the 'Safe Together' model, we stress the importance of an ecosystem that supports both the child and the non-abusive parent. Join us as we honor the resilience of children everywhere and strive to transform the dialogue around domestic violence, one listener at a time.
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."
Discover the hard truths about the impact of domestic violence on children, as we, David and Ruth Reymundo Mandel, discuss the "Myth of the Child Witness" chapter from David's book "Stop Blaming Mothers and Ignoring Fathers: How to transform the way we keep children safe from domestic violence." We promise you'll come away with a deeper understanding and a sense of urgency to shift the way society responds to young survivors. Listen as we pull back the curtain on the often-invisible effects of witnessing abuse and how these experiences shape the lives of children far beyond what is visible to the eye.
Are children just passive bystanders in the face of domestic violence, or are they silent bearers of trauma? What happens when we do not name the perpetrator as the cause of the children's harm or highlight their responsibilities are carers? Our discussions traverse the landscape of this misconception, challenging the passive language that labels children merely as witnesses and advocating for a language that reflects their true experiences. We address the crucial need for systems to hold perpetrators accountable and prevent children from replicating harmful behaviors. Our conversation makes the case for recognizing the autonomy of children and the essential role of the non-abusive parent in fostering a child's emotional safety.
Wrapping up our insightful conversation, we underscore the critical role adults play in understanding and supporting children affected by domestic violence. Delving into the 'Safe Together' model, we stress the importance of an ecosystem that supports both the child and the non-abusive parent. Join us as we honor the resilience of children everywhere and strive to transform the dialogue around domestic violence, one listener at a time.
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."
And we're back, we're back, yes.
Speaker 2:Good morning. Good morning.
Speaker 1:Good morrow.
Speaker 2:Good morrow. That's a new one for our listeners.
Speaker 1:Yes, good morrow, good morrow. That's a new one for our listeners. Yes, good morrow.
Speaker 2:This is Partnered with a Survivor.
Speaker 1:And we are David Mandel.
Speaker 2:And I'm Ruth Raimundo Mandel.
Speaker 1:And we're happy to have you join us here this morning for the second in our series of podcasts about my new book.
Speaker 2:And we actually are in the morning time.
Speaker 1:Yes, where we are.
Speaker 2:Where we are. Yes, the birds are twittering and the daffodils are daffodilling.
Speaker 1:Yes, all the things. The dog is snoring.
Speaker 2:The dog is snoring.
Speaker 1:So, before we go any further, I just want to acknowledge that we're joining you from Tunxis Masako land here in the northeast of the United States, where the traditional owners of the land have been the Tungstis and Masako people, and just acknowledge this land has been colonized. It's beautiful land. It's spring here, as Ruth just said, and things are starting to bud and come out. It's just a lovely, beautiful place to live and work.
Speaker 2:Unless, it's cold. Unless it's cold and you're not originally from the cold lands.
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 2:And then you're confused. But it's gorgeous, beautiful land.
Speaker 1:Yes, and we just want to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land, here and wherever you are joining us from.
Speaker 2:Alright. What is our topic today?
Speaker 1:So we're talking about the myth of the child witness chapter of my book. We're going to do a series of these. We did one episode that sort of entered the book, but we thought we'd do a series about the myth chapters which really form the heart of the book. And so the book is Stop Blaming Mothers and Ignoring Fathers how to Transform the Way we Keep Children Safe from Domestic Violence. Hopefully people have sought it out already. If you haven't, it's available on Amazon wherever you are in the world. Basically, amazon is everywhere.
Speaker 2:Amazon is everywhere.
Speaker 1:Everywhere you know. If you go to your Amazon site, it will take you to the book.
Speaker 2:Amazon is still not some places, I don't know.
Speaker 1:Antarctica.
Speaker 2:No, I find some comfort in the fact that there are still some places that we know that Amazon is not there. Is that silly? No, that's okay.
Speaker 1:But the drones are coming. The drones are coming to deliver things and eventually you won't even need to type into the computer, you'll just have to think it.
Speaker 2:Really Automatic.
Speaker 1:It'll come. Very scary so sorry, so stop blaming mothers and ignoring fathers. How to transform the way we keep children safe from domestic violence. And this is available, and we'll be talking about this chapter the Myth of the Child Witness.
Speaker 2:And I just want to give a shout-out because it's so funny. What's that? Ever since the conference and our little tour of New Zealand and Australia, I'm super aware, for some reason, that there's a lot of families listening to this podcast. So I just want to send a shout out to all the people who are listening to this podcast with their children In their cars often I don't know. I'm just imagining some people in my mind driving in their cars with their kids now and it's really adorable, so shout out to the car people.
Speaker 2:And the people walking every morning who are listening to this podcast.
Speaker 1:Who are listening to this podcast and it makes me think about what our kids are going to tell us about the conversations that they listen to in the car, when you and I talk at each other about these topics for hours and with the kids in the car or whatever we do um so and we and we're really self-entertaining, we really know how to entertain ourselves, so right and you wouldn't know that from the podcast
Speaker 1:I think you would actually so so I'll talk a little bit about the chapter and then we can have a discussion back and forth about it.
Speaker 2:Totally so. We're looking at page 41 on the book. Oh, look at you. Yes, it's called Follow Along.
Speaker 1:Follow Along. So if you have the book, you can look at it and we're going to touch on highlights, but really this doesn't replace, obviously, reading the book instead of diving into the whole thing.
Speaker 2:But it's a good kind of like study. This would be a good way to do some formal study of the book, Like I'd say. You know, hopefully what we can do is create these myths.
Speaker 1:Study guide.
Speaker 2:These myths, you know podcasts, and then we can just kind of take them and set them all together and it would be a nice little template for a study guide. So we're going to start off with chapter one.
Speaker 1:Well, it's not chapter one. It's not chapter one.
Speaker 2:Well, it's past the acknowledgements and all that, it's chapter three. Okay, Don't confuse the people Ruth.
Speaker 1:It's. Actually we're looking at chapter three, which is the chapter that has the chart for all the myths, and actually chapter four is the myth of the child witness. That's sort of a full guide to the book. So I just wanted to say something about the myth structure for those of you kind of this is the first time you're hearing.
Speaker 1:It is just, the myth structure is really based on this idea that there's these really dominant ideas in the field of responding to domestic violence in kids that have a lot of power, have a lot of weight, a lot of kind of gravity to them, and that as useful as they might be, and there's sort of a range of from my opinion, you know, sort of a usefulness in the book around some of these myths.
Speaker 1:I cover six myths in there that that as useful as they may be in some ways and as groundbreaking as they might have been at some point, and and and the you know so talk about different myths and their values from my perspective. But they're incomplete in significant ways and the incompleteness means they're out of alignment with the lived experience of survivors and also the needs of professionals in terms of working with families. So the myth of the child witness, like many of the other myths in the book, start with this idea that there's value in the way we've talked about children in domestic violence, that they're witnesses or they experience it. But there's certain ways that language, that framing is so significantly incomplete that it actually can become a hindrance or a barrier to actually good work with families.
Speaker 2:Right, it can actually hide and cover over some of the more long-term impacts of domestic violence, rather than just the witnessing, the trauma, the potential physical injury which have long-term impacts.
Speaker 1:Right, that's right.
Speaker 2:But there's other impacts that are less visible, that are really truly debilitating and cause a tremendous amount of vulnerability in kids.
Speaker 1:And each chapter in the book again if you haven't seen the book. Each chapter in the book really kind of goes through each of these myths, or each of the myth chapters, goes through this and then talks about how the safety of the model innovates to really shift practice, shift the paradigm and help people do a better job as professionals working with families and, as we know, survivors are reading the book and saying this is helping validate their experience as well, which is some of the best feedback I feel like I've gotten. But the myth of the child witness really speaks to this idea that the language we've used that predominates in the field and it's in legislation, it's in policy, it's in prevention campaigns, it's in clinical work.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's everywhere. It's everywhere. It's this idea that the nexus and I know I use this word, it's a word that is very commonly used in a legal context but the nexus, the point of connection between domestic violence and kids, is this concept of witnessing Kids as witnesses or as experiencers.
Speaker 2:I want to say and this is my perception based off of how people respond, and that is that the myth of the child witness is something that's very, very, very integrated into the way that we view working with kids when they may have endured or observed trauma. But the fact of the matter is is that even if children witness domestic violence, the impacts of that are often diminished. They're often people. They dismiss them, they say, oh well, children are bouncy, right, it's a term that we've said. Oh, it matters if the kids witness or experience domestic violence. But really and truly in practice, if you were to see how the system and professionals respond to children who actually have witnessed and experienced domestic violence it's very diminishing of their experience.
Speaker 1:This is one of the tricky bits about the book and the structure and I really want to acknowledge this which is I don't want anybody to walk away thinking that I'm diminishing the seeing and hearing right which is witnessing really is about. People say did the kids see or hear it? I mean the predominant definition of witnessing or even experiencing. So there's laws that have the word, you know, children experiencing domestic violence, all those really very kind of in the common usage really seem to reflect back did the kids see or hear it and what did they say when we interviewed them? That's the other corollary to this witnessing and also at the same, time.
Speaker 2:A lot of professionals will not believe children when they say that's right, that's right and that's what.
Speaker 1:And that's why I want to say that. So there's really, it's really a trap here. That's right, it's like, it's like here's the bar.
Speaker 2:But we're not going to believe you, even if you tell us what happened. That's right we're not going to believe that this has really harmed your ability to be connected to this parent, that it's really instilled a traumatic habit of repulsion to these situations. We're going to diminish that.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:If you were beaten around school in your grades, we're going to completely dismiss. Or if you watched your parent, your other parent, be harmed because they didn't facilitate good grades for you, right, we're going to dismiss the harm to your education and on a long-term basis for those behaviors. So you know, I feel like there's the myth of the child witness that that's really important for us to address. But in all reality, even when children admit that they've seen and heard and experienced those things, we're not responding appropriately to children.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, and I think this is again with many of the myths in the book. It's really important that people see this. That I'm not taking away, I'm adding. I'm saying we can be better at what you're talking about, I think, which is of listening to children and listening to them when we ask them about what do you see, what do you hear, paying more attention, but also, you know, saying, wait a second. How do we do that with our youngest and most vulnerable kids? And one of the things I point out in this chapter is the concept of witnessing, which often involves asking kids what do they see and they hear? I mean it includes things like whether the kid's in danger of being physically hurt or hurt, but often it involves asking them, talking to them, like you said.
Speaker 1:and believing them that our most vulnerable children are pre-verbal or non-verbal kids, children with difficulties, maybe on the spectrum other things those kids may not be able to or willing to share or talk about what they saw or heard or how they felt. So it's one is just one of the things I address is sort of that. The myth of the child witness doesn't help us with some of the most vulnerable children.
Speaker 2:We have, for instance, right that we have to be a little bit more observational in pre and post-abuse behaviors. For example, if a child who's nonverbal, who may be on the spectrum, has stopped eating because there was violence around dinner time, that's a very important piece of information. It can inform us on why a child is failing to thrive and that is a very life impactful reality.
Speaker 1:And this is why you know, again, you know we want to balance off the language of the voice of the child because, again, so all these things kind of hold these things in place and part of the thing about reading the book and why I deal with six myths and talk so much is these things hold each other in place.
Speaker 1:So, like, the emphasis on we need to listen to the voice of the child reinforces the myth of child witness, the myth of trauma-informed practice, reinforces the child's witness, because it's about trauma, is often about what we see and hear and what we directly experience. But when we look at domestic violence perpetrators, patterns, like you're saying, one is we're not going to necessarily see it in the utterances or hearing the utterance of kids. We're going to see it in changes in their behaviors. But beyond that, for instance, one of the things I talk about is how much do domestic violence perpetrators do outside the earshot or the direct witnessing of children? That's part of patterns of either violence or coercive control, and so one of the things that also is sort of the and how does that impact?
Speaker 2:their day-to-day functioning. How does that impact their ability to connect to their parent, their ability to get an education, their ability to thrive in that environment? How does that impact that child? You know, I've got to say this because, very deeply at the heart of this, what I feel is behind. You know, giving lip service to children's experience but ultimately ignoring the impact.
Speaker 2:And the reality is that there's just a lot of people who don't consider children human, with their own autonomy and their own rights, and that their experience doesn't actually matter. There's a tremendous amount of people who view children as simply extensions of the parent or a piece of property of the parent, and so to them it doesn't really actually matter if a child's well-being and safety and stability and self-determination is being destroyed by a parent, and in many instances there are people who believe that a parent has a right to do that to their child. So I'd really like to get to the heart of you. Know, we can use all these words about children's experience and embed them in laws, but if ultimately, at the end of the day, we believe that we can abuse and misuse children and they'll just bounce right back magically, because we've been told that children are bouncy and they're developing and they're going to forget what happened to them, then we fundamentally have a very twisted relationship with children in our society.
Speaker 1:Well, I think one of the things that for me is so important I think from the beginning of the model and it's very embedded in this chapter and the rest of the book is this idea how do we center kids' experiences in a way that puts them into context but doesn't ignore their experience or their reality?
Speaker 1:I think that when we narrow the connection between domestic violence, perpetrator's behavior and kids, Do the kids see and hear it? We are going to ignore a lot of the impacts that perpetrator's behavior has had on the child and therefore have a hard time articulating the child's experience. So, for instance, the language of the child witness is very passive. It doesn't name the perpetrator, who's doing it, it doesn't name their parental responsibility. Therefore it doesn't capture the betrayal, the confusion. That's get crazy. You know, if, if a stranger who's supposed to be a bad guy does bad things, that's bad, but it doesn't create confusion in a kid. But when anybody who's inside a kid's circle of oh, this person's supposed to be trusted, this person's my family, this person's my, my parent, they engage in these behaviors.
Speaker 2:Right that the psychological impact includes the kid sorting through the, their feelings for this person, their thoughts about this person, their thoughts about right and wrong, their thoughts about how this is about thoughts about family, even if the child is not reflective or their thought process doesn't include that, the fact of the matter is that a domestic violence perpetrator in the home, as a parent, who's modeling these behaviors to their child, is either impacting them in ways that are very traumatic and difficult for them or teaching them those behaviors as acceptable relational strategies, which means that that child is going to learn those strategies in relationship, consider them normal because nobody's said anything, the court hasn't said anything, maybe the other parent has said something, but they've been demeaned and diminished and punished for saying something, and that child is going to then adopt those behaviors and their life is going to be smaller and more limited and conflicted because of it.
Speaker 2:That perpetrator is teaching them a very suffering-based way of relating to other people that causes pain and suffering and trauma and distrust and destroys families. So they're being handed a set of behavioral strategies and they watch their parents deeply. If we believe that children learn and watch from their parents, then we should fundamentally understand how deeply parents' behaviors can impact children.
Speaker 1:You know, yesterday I was thinking about how radical it would be if part of our system was like simply saying you know, right now, don't want you to have contact with your kid right now, because you're teaching your kid to be violent and to be aggressive towards women and towards you know, to other people, and so we're going to sort of withhold your contact with your kid until you kind of get yourself fixed.
Speaker 2:Just that simple statement that it's not okay to teach your kids violence, it's not okay to expose your kids to violence, it's not okay to it's not okay to teach your kids relationship strategies that destroy trust, that cause trauma, that break our connection with each other, that make us fearful of our family, that cause long-term disabilities, that cause poverty. Those are not good parenting strategies.
Speaker 1:So the language of the so I think I talked about the chapter is the language of the child witness, or the myth of the child witness says to us don't look at the person doing the behavior.
Speaker 2:Look at the kid.
Speaker 1:Look at the kid, don't look at the person who's doing the behaviors emotional, legal, caring responsibilities to the kid. Don't hold them accountable.
Speaker 2:And please make up as many excuses as possible for them, based on their childhood trauma, for the childhood trauma they're handing their kids.
Speaker 1:But you know. So again, one of the key points about the myth is it makes that person and their responsibility harder to see and hold them accountable. So the myth of the child witness is as important as seeing kids trauma. The language makes it harder for us to hold perpetrators response.
Speaker 1:So that's one of the main points of the book. Right, because it's so passive. It's so passive and also it's really focused. I mean this language and this goes I cover this in the myth of trauma, for practice as well. This language has been very driven by really amazing clinicians who have looked at trauma and the importance of trauma, the impact of trauma and the treatment of trauma, but it hasn't fully integrated the idea that the source of the trauma, the source of the harm, matters. If it's an earthquake, it's an immigration story, if it's a car accident, it's a war.
Speaker 1:If it's a robbery, each one of these things has a different context and if the person who's traumatizing you is it's the person who's supposed to keep you safe. Supposed to keep you safe and may control your access to resources and insurance and the way you eat and what you do and education, all these things and your other family members.
Speaker 1:And they're betraying their trust, then that has a whole different context yeah in terms of accountability, in terms of interventions, and the language of the child witness makes it harder to see that and to do it. So that's one of the key points. The other one of the other key points is that the, the language of of child witnesses is focused on incidents of violence, primarily because of the language of trauma and the language of it's reinforced there, which is Well, the law is incident-based. Right.
Speaker 2:I think everybody pivots to incidents because the law itself is incidents-based. So we're all trying to fit ourselves into this legal framework that's not actually attached to human behavior.
Speaker 1:Well, but the legal framework is changing our coercive control, but I don't know if it's catching up here in this area, because I think that again, the language of the child witness is aligned with physical violence, like you said, which is aligned with the criminal code in a lot of ways, but that the kind of continuing emergent language and thinking about coercive control is a pattern-based behaviors. Many of them are not arrestable.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:Many of them don't fit the definition of incident as they're understood by the trauma field or the criminal justice field, the legal field, the legal field or the you know so. Therefore it's sort of how does that? The example I use all the time, the lock on the freezer or the traffic cones in the hallway. These are both real examples.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:How does that fit in with the child witness model?
Speaker 2:How does it fit in with a child witness model if you're creating anxiety in the house constantly?
Speaker 1:Constantly.
Speaker 2:Because of your emotional outbursts and your inability to parent.
Speaker 2:How does that affect the child? Now, this is where people start to feel a little uncomfortable inside, I think, because we're all parents right, and we think, oh, all of us have these behaviors that we've been taught right. But there's something very different to a person who is unconcerned with their impact in a household and a person who hasn't been given the behavioral tools and support to be a parent that's safe and effective. There's a very big difference between the two and this is where it's our responsibility to really assess the perpetrator, to know if they are unconcerned, really, at the end of the day, with their impact on their family and their children and other people, or if they need the skills, the behavioral skills, to be able to change those behaviors.
Speaker 1:You know, I think your point about sort of as a parent, you know we're all saying going, oh, is this me? And when. I think it's good to reflect on this stuff and the fundamental issue, domestic violence. I think there's some people out there who like think coercive controllers like it's a switch, like you're in a category or not. I don't think that way. I think it's a continuum of behavior, just like control, and control is a human issue.
Speaker 1:It doesn't discriminate based on anything right. We all have to struggle with sort of what do we have control over, what do we don't? Parents are supposed to exercise the appropriate amount of control over their kids.
Speaker 2:They're supposed to exercise the appropriate amount of control over their kids. They're supposed to exercise the appropriate amount of coercion where you're like, eat your vegetables, kid, and I will give you some candy later, okay.
Speaker 1:And so all these things are actually in my mind like a lot of problems they're actually not about. They're about the matter of degree and severity and chronicity and areas of functioning and impact. Like people argue about the tv remote and like one person may hold on to the tv remote all the time, that doesn't mean you're necessarily an abusive relationship. But if it's the tv remote, it means there's television inequity television, but if it's you should, you should protest protest.
Speaker 1:But if that person smashes the TV because they can't control, the remote and then they take.
Speaker 2:Or they scream and yell at their family and demean them.
Speaker 1:They demean them because of that, or they take all the I always think about this example but taking all the cabinet doors off or all the doors to people's rooms I've heard stories like this Taking the doors off, including bathroom doors, and you start moving into sort of fundamental violations of people's privacy, their control or putting locks on all the doors.
Speaker 1:Or the case where the guy would take his kids out into the woods and scream at them in no place where nobody could hear them.
Speaker 1:So the isolation and the terror those kids felt, so that's not normal boundary setting, that's not normal discipline. And we can make those distinctions. They're clear in some cases and not always clear in other ones. But I think one of the things when we talk about the myth of child witnesses, that with coercive control, it's about what's being taken away, what's not being allowed, what's being interfered with, and it's about a pattern and it doesn't go away, it's not being allowed, what's being interfered with, and it's about a pattern and it's about and it doesn't go away, it's not isolated to an incident of violence, it's about an impact and it's about impacts that, like you said, kind of roll through the family functioning. So how does the myth of child witness capture the impact on kids of being forced to move and change school districts and or change their homes? Right, those are ongoing effects, like you said a few minutes ago, that aren't just about seeing in the moment and being afraid?
Speaker 2:And how do you define the poverty-causing reality of the dislocation that domestic violence perpetrators can create, the multiple moves, the loss of apartments, the loss of security deposits, the evictions, the school changes? How do you really accommodate and look at that parent and say, hello, parent. All of these impacts are because of your behaviors and this is not good parenting. These impacts are because of your behaviors and this is not good parenting. And again I'm going to emphasize that it's our collective duty when we're working with families. It is a act of generosity to look another human being in the face and say do you love your children and your partner? And if you do, these behaviors, all of them are hurting your connection with them and we'll help you figure out different behaviors. But really addressing the perpetrator and their impact.
Speaker 1:So the method of dial witness impedes our ability to hold perpetrators accountable. That's part of what we're saying, what you just said. It impedes our ability to really truly understand the child's lived experience.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:And it also truly impedes our ability to understand.
Speaker 2:The full impact of the behaviors.
Speaker 1:And the survivor's protective efforts Right, because if we can't see what the perpetrator is doing, we can't see how the kid's impacted, we can't fully understand what the survivor's trying to protect. To Right.
Speaker 1:We can't fully understand what the survivor is trying to protect, to Right, and so all these myths are, you know, really we're going to try to tease out in the book, tease it out in these episodes, kind of tease out some of the ways this kind of impacts. So the last thing I really want to say, there's two more things. I want to kind of hit on things. I want to kind of hit on um that one it assumes um the witness language, the experience language also obscures. One is that kids aren't just witnesses, they're targets, they're tools, is what I say in the book they're weapons they're weapons, they're, they're, they're, they're weaponized by perpetrators.
Speaker 1:And again, every time we kind of use this passive language, we make it hard to hold perpetrators accountable for how they target kids as part of their pattern for abuse, how they leverage them.
Speaker 2:How they use kids to abuse the adult domestic violence victim as well.
Speaker 1:I'm getting a lot of posts from survivors on my Twitter feed and the stories they're telling me just the last couple of days about interfering with mom's ability to color with their kids. That's not being a passive witness, that's actually being a target. I'm interfering with your experience as a kid to enjoy your relationship with your mother, to enjoy a healthy activity.
Speaker 2:And I'm going to dictate the activity that you and the adult survivor can do, can do.
Speaker 1:Yeah, breaking a TV Somebody else, and this was really. I kind of could feel it. The woman said, well, well, he spanked me, so on, as he humiliated her, that the physically violated and she said without her clothes on, so sexually right. And then he made the kids do the same thing, right which a lot of people don't see in those spaces what that description is a very familiar environment for me, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:And in those spaces the adult perpetrator would not even, it wouldn't even cross his mind that having a child spank the naked, bare butt of their adult parent is a form of sexual abuse.
Speaker 1:Sex abuse to everybody to the mother to the kids.
Speaker 2:And this is a very common behavior I just want to say it in certain very conservative religious environments where they say that they're concerned about sexual impropriety. But these type of things will occur. These type of things will occur the harming of people's private parts and genitalia as them, as long as it's called discipline and the person thinks that they have authority over them. It's a very dangerous dynamic that is really teaching children a form of bodily and sexual abuse is acceptable, of bodily and sexual abuse is acceptable.
Speaker 1:And the language of child witness sanitizes it.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Makes us, pulls us away from the reality, and I want to say the horrific nature of those kind of assaultive behaviors, because it doesn't give us the language to say that that I'm targeting the child, I'm involving the child, I'm using the child, I mean all these things and I'm teaching the child right I'm teaching the child to do these things, to physically cross boundaries, to usurp other people's bodily autonomy and well-being, because there's some entitlement to do so.
Speaker 2:That's baked in there. I'm feeling this one all the way down this example, is very difficult for me I know and it's and it but it.
Speaker 1:It's so important to for me to help people really understand the limits of our language, the limits of the way we talk about this, because every time, as professionals, we limit our conception of this, our ability to talk about it, we make it harder for survivors to disclose, we make it harder to document, we make it hard to articulate to decision makers why somebody who's done this thing is a bad parent and shouldn't have custody or contact with their kids. I mean, it really is just to me facing. It is the important thing professionals can do to honor their responsibility to help and support survivors.
Speaker 2:Right, yeah. Well, there's one more. I think that you have going on.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean it's related to that, which is that you know two things. One is that kids aren't passive.
Speaker 2:There was Tiberius the dog.
Speaker 1:There was Tiberius the dog.
Speaker 2:He just got up and he drank a ton of water and now, like the large infant that he is, he needs us to help him get on the couch. Give us one second. Well, we're back from our Tiberius the dog break.
Speaker 1:There we go. We got him settled down. So what I was saying is that kids are not passive and, again, one of the main points around the child witness stuff is it leaves out all those things. And one of the things it leaves out is it really kind of directs us to assuming passivity. Witnessing is passive. You're receptacle for what's happening. Kids strategize, they think they, they intervene, they resist, they plan they, they, they, they react they, they do all sorts of things and it's so important for us in our understanding impact on kids to think about what they did yes what they did do as actors.
Speaker 2:Like you said, they're not, and I and I and I want to kind of push back on you a little bit, because there's a lot of people who believe that children lie about their experience and that's not addressed in the myth of the child witness, because I know that, that you don't believe that children lie about their experience. But I kind of want to to bring it into the space, because there's a lot of people who will say children misrepresent, they won't tell you.
Speaker 2:Now just think about what happens when an adult domestic violence victim doesn't tell a professional about the abuse. And a child is even more hesitant or doesn't have the language for their experience and sometimes it takes them time to be able to admit or understand or articulate what they experience. So I just want to say that not everybody is as generous in their understanding of how children process trauma, right, generous in their understanding of how children process trauma, right. And some people really do believe that children misrepresent the truth, that they lie, that they over-exaggerate, harm, all of those things.
Speaker 1:I think that you know and I'm not going to present myself as an expert on children in this way it's down to the level of sort of all the bits and pieces of things that might be in there, and that simplistic conversation about do kids lie or not is not useful, and what I mean by that is, of course, some kids choose to lie because it's safer for them.
Speaker 2:Or for whatever reason, it doesn't matter, or their partner, or the partner their parent.
Speaker 1:You you know, so I'm not going to tell you. So there's difference between keeping things private. I mean telling, not talking about it.
Speaker 2:I think there's understanding how kids process information at different ages there's also I just want to put this back on the adult. Yeah, it's actually up to the adult professional right to learn strategies, to try to understand the experience of the child. That's actually up to us as adults. So I just want to put that responsibility back on us, pivot the focus back to professionals. That's right and I think it's again.
Speaker 1:You're right, because I think it's again asking kids and this is true for adult survivors, to be perfectly clear always know exactly what's going on.
Speaker 2:Know how to articulate it.
Speaker 1:Know how to articulate it and we as professionals need to understand that when kids tell us, well, and this was a case that I worked on Daddy punishes takes Mommy into the bedroom and punishes Mommy, okay, that's their language at that age, right, and they may even say Daddy punishes the bedroom and punishes mommy, right, okay.
Speaker 2:That's their language at that age Right. And they may even say daddy punishes me or mommy punishes me, Right. And it's really up to the adult professionals to be like what does punishment mean?
Speaker 1:That's right. What does it feel like? What does punishment mean?
Speaker 2:You know all of those questions.
Speaker 1:Or kids may be taught, like you said, said earlier by perpetrators to marginalize, to disrespect the other parent, for instance. Um, you know, kids may not know about the abuse because the survivor may have done a really good job protecting them and actually keeping out of ear and eye shot. You know, there's this sort of this idea that kids as witnesses, or kids are telling the truth, they're not telling the truth is a complicated kind of equation and, like you said, we have to factor out how people disbelieve kids and don't take them seriously. But we also have to really understand. You know, for instance, if a kid doesn't report something happened, it may not be because it didn't happen. I remember working with survivors where the kids were really angry at them that they'd separated from the abusive partner and the kids loved that person and because the perpetrator chose to do the abuse mostly out of the kid's view.
Speaker 1:They had no awareness and because the survivor was so good at helping protect the kids from moving into the bedroom or wherever else or getting in. They couldn't stop the abuse, but they could delay it or maybe kind of shape when it was as bad. The kids didn't know. And so is that kid lying when they say there was no abuse in my household? No, they're not lying.
Speaker 2:And then, societally, we would expect the adult survivor to never talk about their experience with their children, so never to talk about the details of the violence towards them, to never even mention it. And so the kids are kind of left in this space where they're not understanding why the relationship broke down.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So I think this idea of children lie like it's a binary they lie, they don't lie. You believe them all the time. You don't believe them all the time. I think the problem is that the conversation is much more complex, and this is where I've written about around the voice of the child, which is so if you listen to the child and they're totally aligned with the perpetrator because the perpetrator has made it unsafe for them not to be, we have to have the discernment to say wait a second. This kid is just parroting back what they've heard from the abusive parent and we need to be able to see the whole picture. So I think kids are complex, like human beings are. I think kids have strategies. Kids pretend that they're okay when they're not kids. Kids act normal because they want to fit in and be normal. So they show up to school and they act like nothing's going on at home. Is that lying? No, that's not lying.
Speaker 2:That's called coping. That's called coping.
Speaker 1:That's called getting what you can out of school and being in a safe environment and not wanting to be single, I mean, I think so again. This idea that kids lie is a convenient thing for some people. When I hear it, it's really often people who don't want to dive into the nuances of abuse and control and really try to understand it and kind of they're often being dismissive.
Speaker 2:I think in my experience.
Speaker 1:And the last thing I want to say, and it's kind of related, is that the child witness language is very focused on kids and their psychology, how they experience it. Were they afraid, their internal world, and I think we need to be a little more concerned with kids' behavioral world, their actions, with kids' behavioral world, their actions, how they cope, what they do after incidences of abuse or violence or control, how they strategize and move through the world. I think we really need to be. You know, I always would tell people.
Speaker 1:You know, if people say, well, were the kids afraid? And like that was the end of the discussion, you know one way or the other and you need to go further. Like what did they do? How did their life change Is one of the things I actually ask people how has the perpetrator's behavior changed the children's life? And that's about so many things, because they may have to live in a new area, they may not see their grandparents. The same way, they may not be able to play their favorite sport. You know this idea that we have to the child witness language is very much an internal psychological language.
Speaker 2:It doesn't talk about what the children have lost or the disadvantage that's entered into the system. That's right or the disadvantage that's entered into the system that's right.
Speaker 1:And so you know the Save it Together model, just to kind of get to that. We talk about multiple pathways to harm, you know, which encompasses the trauma and the child witness lens, but goes further to say how has the perpetrator impacted the kid's ecosystem and housing and education and family relationships? And you know, and, and you know financial situations, you know anything that's kind of related to the connections, the family, and then we talk about the impact on the other parents partnering, and so I'm sorry, the other, the other parents parenting not partnering, and I think that begins to create a picture of sort of a much more holistic way that the domestic violence perpetrator's behavior has impacted the child's development, their ability to function, their internal and their exterior worlds, all those things.
Speaker 2:So do we have any more bits to this myth that you want to flesh out?
Speaker 1:I don't think so. It's just, you know, whenever I talk about this, you know, I hope I'm communicating the value into, like in this case, the trauma framework that you know I don't want to take away from the seeing and hearing.
Speaker 2:Well, people may feel very confused right now if they don't practice the safe and together?
Speaker 1:model.
Speaker 2:They may be like whoa. There's so many considerations to think about. What do?
Speaker 1:I do next.
Speaker 2:So, if you are a professional working with families, what is it that you do to assist you in helping you to map out all of these different impacts and behaviors?
Speaker 1:I mean part of what's mentioned in the book and what you're talking about is really the model is the safety of the model is designed and its tools are designed and its educational material is designed to transform people's practice right. So, whether it's our multiple pathways to harm framework, which we teach in our core training, or online in a freestanding course, in multiple pathways to harm, you know, or our mapping tool, you know that all those things are specifically designed to help practitioners do things differently.
Speaker 2:To ask the right questions.
Speaker 1:Right To be more in alignment with the lived experience. For me, there's two guiding things, which is how do we do a better job by families and, at the same time, how do we help professionals do better, feel better about their work? Feel like they're being more impactful.
Speaker 2:And the end user, the family Right the family is better off. Must also report that they are better off. Must also report that they are better off. Well, that's what I'm saying, that they're better off.
Speaker 1:But you know, we know that when people come in and they start articulating harm through this multiple pathways to harm approach versus the child witness approach, it's producing different results. In family court, for instance, it's producing different reports. They're written differently.
Speaker 2:Because it's a different type of evidence. It's a different type of evidence.
Speaker 1:You know, it helps explain and connect the dots between the kids' behavioral issues that are still going on post-separation to the perpetrator's prior violence, and maybe post-separation coercive control. It's helping us understand that it's not just the violence but it's the interfering with the kid going to therapy. That's part of the control. The violence but it's the interfering with the kid going to therapy that's part of the control. That's not. You know so. So we're being more in alignment with the family's lived experience and we're being more effective as professionals. So for me those are the two guiding, guiding lights.
Speaker 2:So All right. Well, this has been the podcast about the myth of the child witness myth, the myth of the child witness from David's book. Stop Blaming Mothers and Ignoring Fathers. How to Transform the Way we Keep Children Safe from Domestic Violence. And is there anything else that you want to add?
Speaker 1:No, I think if you want to check out the book you know, go to our website, safetyadventurecom, or just go directly to amazoncom.
Speaker 2:We'll post a link to all that in the in the show notes, um and just to ground ourselves in a in a couple of realities is that children are free and autonomous little beings who are learning about the world through observing the world around them and how their parents and their community respond and interrelate to each other, and I really just want to give a shout out to all the kids who are listening.
Speaker 1:Right, all right. So check out academysafetylearninginstitutecom for our e-learning. Go to safetylearninginstitutecom for everything else. Um check out our social media and our linkedin and all the other things at safe and together, and you can follow me at david g mandel and we are out, thank you.