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:
Learn more about the Critical Components:
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."
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:
Learn more about the Critical Components:
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."
[00:00:15] And we're back and we're back. [00:00:17][1.2]
Speaker 1: [00:00:17] We are up in the Sugar Shack office, which is our home office away from the children and the animals. [00:00:25][7.6]
Speaker 2: [00:00:26] And this is partnered with a survivor. And I'm David Mandel, executive director of the Take Me Together into June. [00:00:30][4.1]
Speaker 1: [00:00:30] And I was James Mandel, and I'm the e-learning and communications manager. [00:00:34][3.7]
Speaker 2: [00:00:35] And you are listening to a show that's about, I think, all things domestic violence, but it's really about the safe and together model and conversations between you and I and sometimes interviews with other people. Yeah. And today's show is going to be about the safety, other models, critical components, [00:00:51][16.7]
Speaker 1: [00:00:52] all about the model, all about the basics. [00:00:54][1.4]
Speaker 2: [00:00:55] That's right. But going back to basics, going back to basics and before against that, just in case you want to learn more about the safety other institute, you can go to safe and together and sitcom [00:01:04][9.9]
Speaker 1: [00:01:06] and you can go to Academy Dot Safe and Together Institute dot com to look at our trainings. There are many free and trainings that you can purchase on our virtual academy. [00:01:15][9.5]
Speaker 2: [00:01:16] All right. All right. So we're committed this year to to do some back to basics episodes as the season two, and we're [00:01:23][6.4]
Speaker 1: [00:01:23] not going to give the numbers anymore. No, we're not. [00:01:25][1.8]
Speaker 2: [00:01:25] Keep up, we don't keep up. But this year, we're going to talk about things like the principles which we've spoken about already. And and now today we're going to talk about the critical components of the model. [00:01:35][9.7]
Speaker 1: [00:01:35] So anybody who's come into contact with the Safe and Together Institute, particularly in training, has received these little cards. On one side, you have the safe and together critical components. And on the other side, you have the three. Those aren't the critical components, do you want to explain what those are? [00:01:55][19.5]
Speaker 2: [00:01:55] Well, those are the principles, and that's what we talked about when the previous episodes. And so we give those to people because it's a foundational piece of the model. [00:02:03][8.3]
Speaker 1: [00:02:04] And by the way, we've only done two of those foundational principles. That's right. We still have one. [00:02:08][4.1]
Speaker 2: [00:02:08] We have one way to do. [00:02:09][0.7]
Speaker 1: [00:02:09] Just in case you were confused by that. So my understanding of this is that in working with behavior change and then also working with child protection, you one day wrote these down on a napkin. [00:02:24][14.8]
Speaker 2: [00:02:24] I did write them down. Now that sounds like me, but I start on a napkin. It sounds made up, but it really it really was. After doing work in the field for a while, I was thinking about what I was doing and the conversations I was having with child welfare workers and what what I kept coming back to over and over again. And the critical components came out of that and they did get written down napkin and they really haven't been that modified. I think we have evolved our thinking some around them, but they still remain the center of the model and they really represent these things that if you don't look for them, if you don't assess for them and you don't organize your thinking around them as it relates to domestic violence and kids, then you're more likely to make bad decisions. You're more likely to fail at partnering. You're more likely to fail and intervening with perpetrators. You're more likely to to approach this from a failure to protect a purge. You're more likely to take kids that don't need to be taken from their families, and you're not going to have a framework for crush systems collaboration and communication, which is which is a growing part of our conversation, which is, you know, how do you help people talk to one another? [00:03:33][68.7]
Speaker 1: [00:03:34] How do you help child protection talk to Family Court? Right? How do you help law enforcement talk to child protection? Right. All of these things are very critical in creating an ecosystem of safety around children and around adult victims of domestic violence. [00:03:50][16.1]
Speaker 2: [00:03:51] So when you listen as we go through the five critical components, think about both how this impacts direct practice that a practitioner might do, but also how it improves. And we'll talk about this how improved communication across systems because you can get people together in a room, right? But that doesn't guarantee good outcomes. You can get people together from different sectors, but that doesn't guarantee that they will actually make better decisions. You actually have to give them a framework and these critical components as it comes alive in the mapping tool or other things really does that. [00:04:23][31.9]
Speaker 1: [00:04:23] OK, so let's talk about the first critical component and start rolling forward and talking about how these frame good practice. [00:04:36][13.1]
Speaker 2: [00:04:37] OK, I can do that. So the first one is about the perpetrator's pattern of coercive control. And you know, there's a lot in that. I mean, one is just everything's behavioral. You know, so much of this about the critical components in the model is behavioral. And so where you get in this first critical component is is the idea that it's the focus is on the perpetrator, you know, which is so fundamental to the model [00:05:02][25.0]
Speaker 1: [00:05:03] instead of being on the impact of the victim. [00:05:04][1.5]
Speaker 2: [00:05:05] You know, yeah. Right. And I think that's confusing to some people because so much of good work that's been done has been focused on how domestic violence has affected victims. Adult and child victims, [00:05:14][8.6]
Speaker 1: [00:05:14] fortunately, has put a lot of focus and pressure of large systems on victims. That's right. Rather than putting the focus, the pressure on perpetrators, [00:05:21][6.8]
Speaker 2: [00:05:22] right, I think the intent of that always has been to to serve, to serve the victims and understand that, you know, this is how they've been hurt and the harm that they've experienced. [00:05:30][8.6]
Speaker 1: [00:05:31] And we tend to think through the lens of services, right as we think through it. [00:05:35][4.4]
Speaker 2: [00:05:36] So, yeah, and and I remember one time a leading domestic violence advocate, the US said to me, you know, it's a really funny thing. The women's movement in the US has kind of made perpetrators invisible. And this is somebody coming from the advocacy perspective, she said that. And that always struck me because what we're trying to do in the model is make the perpetrator behaviors really visible to everybody as they're working with the entire family, right? And so in this component, you hear the word pattern and you hear the word perpetrator. You hear the word words coercive control, right? And all three of those are really important because we're naming who's doing it. We're moving away from history of domestic violence to naming the perpetrators the person doing it. We're talking about patterns of behavior over time, across relationships. You know, even within an instant, sometimes I'll say to people, what was his pattern during this incident? Right? Because usually it comes to the attention of systems because of an act of physical violence. [00:06:36][60.0]
Speaker 1: [00:06:37] Right. [00:06:37][0.0]
Speaker 2: [00:06:38] But you can have verbal lead up. You could have control lead up. You can have expectations set right prior to incident physical violence. Well, a lot of [00:06:48][9.9]
Speaker 1: [00:06:48] it's missed in the incidents baseball. Because this is the the ramp up, he broke her phone. He disabled the car. He took the keys. Right? You know, whatever it was, where he stopped her ability to leave or to intervene for herself, right or impeded her ability to get help from a family member is never really included in that. Incidents of violence, the years that were spent with him in trapping her in that situation, which led up to that incidents as well. [00:07:18][29.6]
Speaker 2: [00:07:18] And it doesn't include what came after. I often tell people, Look, you know, you need to think just not only about that incident of physical violence, but anything about what was said during the incident. Right? Because it's very rarely silent. Right? You know, so there are threats and abuse and involvement of kids. And like you said, there's a lead up. But then afterwards, you can have the manipulation. You can have the manipulation of kids, right? You know, I always tell the story of a perpetrator who is having post arrest, contact with his kids and says things that I'm saying. As soon as mommy lets me come home, I'll come home, right? And that's supercharging the kid's anger at mom and blame and and it. And so this is so different than, I think, the the cycle of violence. You know where that was labeled the honeymoon period? Mm hmm. And we're labeling it a pattern, of course, to control whoever [00:08:10][52.3]
Speaker 1: [00:08:11] whoever designated that honeymoon period had never experienced course. [00:08:15][4.0]
Speaker 2: [00:08:16] Are you offended? Are you offended by that? [00:08:17][1.8]
Speaker 1: [00:08:18] I am absolutely offended. In fact, if you listen to a lot of the language, even in the trauma bonding stuff and the honeymoon period, it's very sexualized. There's a there's sort of like a sexual nature to it. And to me, I just think who in the world created this? Right? Seriously. Right. I hate to say it. It had to have been a man. [00:08:39][21.7]
Speaker 2: [00:08:40] I seriously it actually, I don't think it was. But this is sort of this is where my my memory breaks down. But I actually don't think it was. No, but but but I think it's I think it was it was one view of the experience of some survivors. And I think it really fails at really labeling the entrapment and the manipulation because because a honeymoon implies this idea of something sweet and nice and it makes it look like, Oh, the survivors enjoying this or something's OK here now, very sick. And it's in. It's really it again, is another way that emphasizes the the perpetrator's manipulation lack of responsibility. Yeah. You know, you can have no peace without justice, basically the old saying. [00:09:26][45.9]
Speaker 1: [00:09:26] Also, the intentionality is right. The intentionality of a person who says, I'm going to torture and abuse you, treat you like garbage. And then when it gets to be too much and I, I really push you past what I know to be your comfort zone because I've habituated you to that comfort zone. I'm going to be really nice to you, right? And I'm going to try to keep you locked in this position. And everybody around you, including your counselor, your family and your friends, is going to see what a great guy I am and how hard I try. And they're going to say, but he's trying right now. And that's that's the intentional manipulation of it is is really missed. [00:10:07][41.0]
Speaker 2: [00:10:08] It really was interesting to me. I did this years ago. I did some training with a rabbi and and he taught me that in the Jewish faith that you don't need to forgive anybody until they've demonstrated they won't do the harmful behavior again. Right. I thought that was so spot on and brilliant, you know, because we don't we don't have that level of clarity. I think it's so simple. [00:10:34][26.3]
Speaker 1: [00:10:35] Somehow, we landed in believing words. Words are the thing, right? They're not words. Actions are the thing. [00:10:43][8.0]
Speaker 2: [00:10:44] Actions on the thing. So. So this was, you know, this model and the critical components being sent there to that was, I want to say, up in opposition to things like the cycle of violence, right? But done with an awareness that there were real gaps in that and that we needed something better because I because I worked with perpetrators, I would see that the honeymoon period was just a continuation of a so-called honeymoon period was just a continuation of their perpetrator, their perpetrators. So, right. So we've got pattern. We've got perpetrator. We've got coercive control, right? [00:11:16][32.3]
Speaker 1: [00:11:16] Because it's not just centered around physical incidents of violence. This is all about the the pressures and the freedoms and the ecosystem of perpetration that's set up around a victim to lock them into that perpetrators control. And that is not just about the perpetrator. That's about how the perpetrator manipulates things around him [00:11:37][20.9]
Speaker 2: [00:11:38] or other people, systems, all those things. Absolutely. And one of the ways they can do that is because people don't understand coercive control and they just look for physical violence and right, a lot of. Domestic violence, homicides from what we believe are not even proceeded with any physical violence or very minor physical violence. But there they are, preceded by extensive and very pervasive coercive control. You know, whether it's it's controlling movement to other people or contact or things around the house, I still remember. Early cases I worked on where people describe doors being taken off hinges, hinges, cabinet doors being taken off hinges. You know, you don't close them enough, you don't. You don't do that. You don't, you don't have the right to do it. So I'm going to take these things away from you right now. If you think about just the violation of boundaries to take all the doors off of off of the rooms or the bathroom even right. And I think people need to start hearing that that if we don't use the lens of coercive control now, not every person arrested for domestic violence is is engaging in a pattern, of course, control. [00:12:50][72.1]
Speaker 1: [00:12:51] Here's what's what's interesting to me about this is that, you know, growing up, I heard mental. Some mental health professionals and parenting professionals say yes. If your children are being bad, take away all their clothes and leave the room empty, right? They actually are. Are. Promoting a form of coercive control, which people believe is normal parenting behaviors. Right? How do you fight against actions of coercive control where the perpetrator truly believes that what they're doing is parenting? [00:13:26][35.3]
Speaker 2: [00:13:27] Well, I think you even have that extended to what they'll do to their partner. Right? You know, the case where the survivor told the worker, well, there's a lock on the freezer because he thinks we're eating too much meat, right? You know, I think there's sort of this this idea of I have the right to control basic needs the way you function, you know who you see, what you do. And I think the tricky part is, I think with children, parents do have a responsibility right to engage in a level of control over them. [00:14:00][32.3]
Speaker 1: [00:14:00] Right? [00:14:00][0.0]
Speaker 2: [00:14:02] But but one is what we see with some domestic violence perpetrators as they extend that to everybody in the family, including the other, the other adult. Mm-Hmm. But with kids or with adult partners, they take it beyond what's normal. [00:14:14][12.1]
Speaker 1: [00:14:15] I think there's another piece of that. Yeah, is that that that in doing an action which you feel justified to do, right? You feel like, Oh, I'm parenting, I'm disciplining. You feel like you have the permission to cross a line and harm and create fear and alarm in your family. You feel permission to do that in order to achieve an end goal. Right, right. And I think that what what, what we all have to land in is that even if a perpetrator believes that the actions they're doing, they have a legitimate right to. If their family members, if their children and their partner say, we're harmed, we're scared. This is causing trauma in us, then that's the important thing that we have to we have to listen to and focus on. I think some workers have a really hard time distinguishing between coercive control. Right, because we've all been habituated to think that it's normal relational behaviors that the male head of household has a right to control their family this way or has a right to treat their children this way. [00:15:24][69.7]
Speaker 2: [00:15:25] And I think this is where we've made some progress in in terms of these conversations because you can look at the United Nations rights of children. You know, you look at that and see how these things are clearly identified is not acceptable from a from a global perspective. The same thing about rights of women. And so I think the human rights perspective actually and some domestic violence advocates talk to that. Lancet, I think, is a really powerful lens. And Evan Stark, I know, talks about coercive control as being a liberty crime like our human rights crime. And I think we don't. All this language around domestic family violence sometimes smooths the edges out. Yeah. And I think there's this real place to talk about these as human rights violations, deprivation of basic needs. You know, really landing it in and sort of foundational things that people believe in in terms of democracy and human rights. And and just because it's being perpetrated by an individual versus a regime, right? It shouldn't. It should be less meaningful. [00:16:26][60.9]
Speaker 1: [00:16:26] And it has to be contextual because, for example, if you were to take a neurodivergent child who has specific needs and you were to impose upon them rules that you would impose upon a neural typical child, right? And it causes extreme alarm and agitation and disruption to that child. You know, you're not comparing apples to apples. That's right. So you take you take a child who needs a certain amount of continuity, right? Who needs, as you know? And so its context, [00:16:56][29.5]
Speaker 2: [00:16:56] it is contextual because I think interesting thing is cruelty is contextual a lot of ways, right? I think there's some generalized forms of cruelty, but I think in intimate settings, in family settings and cruelty is often very personal because a person knows you. [00:17:12][15.9]
Speaker 1: [00:17:13] Yes, they know what will [00:17:14][0.9]
Speaker 2: [00:17:14] impact, they know impact you. And it may not impact the next person. And I remember this working through an exercise with people in a training where they are talking about a child being abused by my stepfather. And they say, well, he's emotionally abusive, and this is the power of the model in terms of its behavioral approach. Well, what does that look like, right? What is that? And well, he he he calls the kids names. What kind of names as he call them. And I forgot what the exact issues were. But but the terms of use terms like retarded or other things with this, this child had a learning disability. So when you put those two things together, [00:17:52][38.2]
Speaker 1: [00:17:53] you realize how harmful the behaviors [00:17:55][2.0]
Speaker 2: [00:17:55] are. That's right. And a lot of our our child maltreatment statutes will look for things like cruelty or emotional cruelty. Right. You don't get to cruelty or they understand cruelty until you. You get to the behaviors in the specific statements, right? And then you touch them, like you said, to the context, you just don't get there, right? And I think it's so much about about using coercive control as a starting point. Or what do you say to people is they say, well, every arrest or every situation we're going to run across the domestic violence coercive control said no, but you can find and actually weed out the ones or at least identify the ones that are situational couple violence that's limited, that doesn't have coercive control connected to it by starting with coercive control is your assessment lens. But you can't find coercive control if you start from an incident based approach. Right? And that's that's just factually true. Like, if you go on looking for only incidences, that's all you're going to find. You can't [00:18:51][56.4]
Speaker 1: [00:18:52] find. So this is kind of rolled into the second critical component, which is actions taken by the perpetrator to harm the child. [00:18:58][5.9]
Speaker 2: [00:18:59] So this was for me an attempt to. Ridge, what have what has been two separate fields, oddly enough, which is the child abuse and neglect field and the domestic violence field, right, which when I say it now just feels crazy, but they really have been two separate fields, right? [00:19:18][19.0]
Speaker 1: [00:19:18] And this is where we see, you know, the big news stories coming out of DCF in Florida about removals of children from protective parents because of domestic violence, perpetration by a partner, which is fairly common in child welfare? [00:19:34][15.3]
Speaker 2: [00:19:35] And what? This was an attempt to do, too, to give people language that say when you're assessing. Around domestic violence, you have to assess for specific actions taken to harm the children by that domestic violence perpetrator, so you actively have to look to connect the dots. And it is part of the pattern. That's why you're pointing in that direction. And so what is the perpetrator doing to directly, sexually, physically, emotionally abuse the child? OK. You know, we know that I've worked in cases where he's using the control against the adult parent to groom the child, to create space, to groom the child around sexual abuse. I mean, so you have those kind of scenarios, right? He also may be physically abusing the kids directly. Hmm. But there's also things like undermining the person's parenting. Right? You know, using the kids as a weapon against the other parent. I mean, I always I always use this example because people find it so common if you leave me and I'm going to give you a penny for those children. [00:20:33][57.8]
Speaker 1: [00:20:33] Right? Or if you leave me, I'm going to take those children, which is also a very common threat by perpetrators. [00:20:39][5.2]
Speaker 2: [00:20:39] And we need to slow that down to say, what does that mean about this person's parenting? Willingness, ability, capacity, intent. You know, how do we fold that into assessment of them as a parent? Because divorce separation is a legal right now, people have the ability to leave relationships. And what somebody is saying is if you exercise your legal right to end this marriage. I will weaponize the children against you [00:21:09][29.2]
Speaker 1: [00:21:09] and harm them [00:21:10][0.4]
Speaker 2: [00:21:10] and harm them. And we have to slow it down, so that's super obvious to everybody. [00:21:15][4.8]
Speaker 1: [00:21:16] But but people don't land in the willingness of the perpetrator to harm children in order to to assert control over their ex-partner or partner. You know, it's it's it's unfortunate that within the understanding of what has been used as parental alienation has not been an equal look at both parents and their patterns of behaviors to ascertain who is weaponizing children against the other parent. Because coercive controllers and domestic abusers really do live up to their threats, [00:21:52][36.7]
Speaker 2: [00:21:54] even even to the extreme of murdering and murdering murdering their children, you know, to harm the other person. And and this was really. [00:22:01][7.0]
Speaker 1: [00:22:03] And this is Hannah Hannah case. And, you know, so many different cases that we have the Kira case here in the United States, where coercive control and domestic abuse were a factor in the relationship. They were known and there was a lot of patterns of behavior that were known of harm to these children. But these children remained in the custody of their abusive parent and eventually died because of it. That's right. [00:22:31][27.1]
Speaker 2: [00:22:31] And I think that. For me, I really wanted to name how perpetrators harmed children, what they did to harm children and to tell this wider story eventually about how that impacts the kids was really an attempt to move away from this idea that domestic violence is just an adult to an adult issue. And so even the language intimate partner violence, I think I'm not fully satisfied actually even now with the language, but I think. When you think about just that, that very common term IPV or intimate partner violence is, it sets you up to think about what's happening between the adults. Right. And we need to become much more holistic and much more whole family and certainly [00:23:13][41.8]
Speaker 1: [00:23:14] family violence, family abuse. Right. [00:23:16][2.5]
Speaker 2: [00:23:16] But that doesn't even kind of, I know, does. Right, exactly. I think we still struggle with it, and I still struggle with at least. But those two things together, the perpetrator's power and of course, control and action take to harm the kids form the foundation of our mapping tool, right? They form the foundation of everything we do because if you can't describe those behaviors, then so much else goes wrong. I can't. I tell people if there's one thing they're going to do differently after our trainings and after we engage with them is is become more behavioral focused and more holistic about talking about perpetrators patterns of behavior. [00:23:50][33.7]
Speaker 1: [00:23:51] Right now, the other piece of of of that is is is in making the perpetrator visible and all of their actions taken to harm the adult survivor and also to harm their children as their perpetration is a parenting choice which limits the freedom of their children, limits their children's ability to access education, causes trauma, causes injury right, and sometimes causes death. The next part of that is the full spectrum of the non offending parents efforts to promote safety and well-being of the child because we have to know both because in these incidents based systems that are not looking at the perpetrator and are focused all on the survivor and all in the victim, they expect that survivor victim to be the one to do all the things right and they discount all of the things that the perpetrator is doing and to interfere. [00:24:46][55.8]
Speaker 2: [00:24:48] Yeah, this, you know, if you were looking at this, you'd see five critical components in a circle and they somewhat act as as a clock and they were moving clockwise around the circle. And and what I can say is that. You start with the perpetrators behaviors, you've got to start there, and then before you talk about the harm to kids, which is the fourth critical component, you have to talk about the survivors protective efforts because that's so important understanding how the kids are doing right. And so many systems have been deficit based well [00:25:19][31.6]
Speaker 1: [00:25:20] in these systems. The protective efforts have been measured in a narrow scope. So you can go ahead and you can. [00:25:26][5.8]
Speaker 2: [00:25:26] You want me to list how well it was always this this idea that that people would go on looking. Did you call the police? Did she get a court order against this person, right? Was there a going to services going to refuge, right? And were they going to leave her separate? And that was the very narrow. We call it a yardstick the narrow, narrow box, the, you know, sort of if you fit in those boxes or you did one of those three or four things, you're a good little survivor, you're a good little survivor. And this was very focused on people who were that those things worked for those populations. You know, if you're right, if you're a black woman in the US, if you're an Aboriginal women, Australia, if you're somebody outside the, you know, [00:26:10][43.0]
Speaker 1: [00:26:10] partnered with a police [00:26:11][0.7]
Speaker 2: [00:26:11] officer, if your partner with a police officer, that's right. If if if you had a bad experience with refuge services, the [00:26:17][5.8]
Speaker 1: [00:26:17] refuge services won't take you. That's right. So your partner is a police officer. There's so many [00:26:22][4.7]
Speaker 2: [00:26:22] if you don't speak English, if you, you know, racial status. That's right. There's some whatever reasons people don't want to engage those services. In fact, I think the majority of survivors don't engage those services. [00:26:31][9.4]
Speaker 1: [00:26:32] I'm going to add one little piece to that because I think that I think that it's really important, you know, services have never really been customer service oriented as governmental agencies and not a lot of accountability. But what I'm going to say is a communications director is that our services need to get better at being customer service related and communicate their missions to survivors because because survivors are afraid to engage them in many, many ways, because the the that we know that once we enter into these systems, our freedom and liberties are really taken away from us, right? And we already have our freedoms and liberties taken away from us, and we would rather not engage another big entity that's going to overwhelm and harm us. [00:27:20][47.7]
Speaker 2: [00:27:20] That's right. And thinking about the broader system, you know, I think people who desire and I think most of our systems are filled mostly with [00:27:28][8.1]
Speaker 1: [00:27:28] good intended [00:27:29][0.4]
Speaker 2: [00:27:29] people. Yeah, I think that's true that we all need to step, step back and reflect on not our intent, but how our intent could shape the systems we're in and how that's perceived or seen by by survivors. Yes. And and I think it's really important to understand that and how we communicate is one one piece of it. I did work, you know, in association with the what was called the Green Book project in the United States, where I did work with domestic violence advocates about their expertize. And we explored, you know, how they communicate, like you were saying with child protection, particularly around what they could offer children and you'd normally get women sector workers who lost all these services for for the adult survivor, you know, legal services and housing and all these things. And then we said, Well, what are your services for kids? They say, we run kids groups. I say, OK, now map how your housing services. Help kids well, provide them stable, safe housing, you know, those things. Well, now map how your legal services for the survivor helps case. Well, we provide our support around criminal cases because of the access and and so that helps make sure that the custody arrangements can be saved for the kids. Right. But they weren't used to speaking the language of kids, right? They were used to speaking the language of adults. So what child serving systems saw when they looked at them and looked at their website of their communications material was. We help adults. [00:28:59][89.9]
Speaker 1: [00:29:00] Right? This is what I'm saying. We need to get better as services that communicating our mission and our values, as well as being more outcome focused spend and reflecting upon the experience of our population and and integrating their experiences of our services into how we do services right. [00:29:21][21.2]
Speaker 2: [00:29:21] And I think I think women sector, you know, they provide so much. Help to women as parents, but they don't articulate it. And when we've done training, when we did our advocacy institute and as we do, we're going to ramp up more training for women sector workers in the coming year. That's what we've heard from those women sector workers in the U.S. as I'm trained to identify needs. I'm a trained to safety plan in case manager with her, but nobody's really trained me to identify her parenting strengths and and very few agencies actively look to say, how can we take this on so that we're communicating her parenting strengths in the context of domestic violence to agencies like statutory child welfare [00:30:07][45.2]
Speaker 1: [00:30:07] right, and to Family Court as well creating evidence? [00:30:09][2.2]
Speaker 2: [00:30:10] That's right and really saying this is the perpetrator's parenting behavior and this is the protective efforts of the survivor. This is just an argument or dysfunction between the adults, which is the way it often gets framed. And we've seen people take this and run like we had Dr. Louise Cepeda on one of our earlier podcasts. And what she was doing was safe and together was using it to train her advocates to do very targeted releases with survivors around their strengths, so they would get permission to share those strengths with these other systems with the court or child welfare. And I thought that was a really creative way to do this. So. So for me, this this full spectrum of the offending parents efforts language where tied to promoting safety and well-being. So all those things matter. I mean, I want people to hear the full spectrum matters in the safety and well-being matters, because what often happens is, to be honest, this is with the gender double standard kicks in again. So much of the work that women do to keep their kids safe or to help them heal from the trauma or promote their stability in the face of the violence is made invisible by systems [00:31:19][68.5]
Speaker 1: [00:31:20] because of those gender double standards that assume that the mom is going to be the one that does all of this right and that the father is not impactful to the female well-being, including his good parental behaviors and his harmful behaviors. That's right. So basically, we've handed men a big pass card and said nothing that you do seems to matter. We will give you some some benefit for you being a good dad and not dropping the kid on their head when they walk across the road, which is the example that you give about people finding. [00:31:55][35.1]
Speaker 2: [00:31:56] I do, though all of a sudden I just remembered my dad dropping me. I can wash my head. Dad, don't listen to this. He's still he's 92 years old. And it was an accident. He's still upset by. Sorry, you said, dropping a kid on their head. And and I just that's really where my mind went steady, where, you know, he still gets agitated about that anyway. So 55 years ago, he still gets upset by it anyway. Sorry, I didn't mean to distract you. [00:32:19][23.7]
Speaker 1: [00:32:20] You know, so I I I think that it's important to to talk about those gender double standards and give a couple examples of what protective parenting looks like that's missed by system. [00:32:33][13.4]
Speaker 2: [00:32:34] But can I? Well, I'm going to ask you, actually, yes. Yes. Where you feel like. Your efforts to be protective have been invisible to people or even to yourself, because I think sometimes survivors don't even go. How hard? Don't even fully appreciate how hard they're working, right? You know, and I'm just, you know, just thinking about that, [00:32:54][20.1]
Speaker 1: [00:32:54] well, I'm actually going to step back to a more complex situation and that is is in reflecting on my upbringing and and knowing that I was existing in an environment where my mother was both a victim. She was highly coercively controlled and mind controlled and held in place by very, very, very violent forces and threats. And she also participated in perpetration and so on and so forth. So this is a really complex case. And if we're honest with ourselves, we're going to run into those cases we are. That's going to be real. That's real. And so I think about the things that I wasn't aware of until I was older, where I realized that there were there were protective efforts happening, you know? For example, she did get the the the cult leader kicked out of the cult, which was a huge and long campaign to remove him from, you know, being in charge and being in that environment, which was a multiyear campaign which involved a lot of violence and harm that he did because there was pressure on him. And so I recognized that you can be protective and you can still fail to protect. [00:34:16][81.9]
Speaker 2: [00:34:16] That's right. That's right. [00:34:17][1.1]
Speaker 1: [00:34:18] Both of those things can be true. That's right. Hopefully, what we see is that within those really tough because this is my case is a really complex case, right? Hopefully, what you can see is in those complex cases, you'll be able to look at the full spectrum of actions taken and say this person, the preponderance of their actions were to be protective, right? Even in the most horrific occurrence of, you know, perpetration. And so that's what I kind of focus on. [00:34:50][31.6]
Speaker 2: [00:34:50] And you can't do that without knowing the perpetrators pattern. You can't. I mean, and things that don't make sense or make the survivor look crazy, start making a lot more sense when you connect it up to the perpetrators pattern. You know, the Family Court case where he's destroying their lives in a house together and he's destroying all the kids resources, sports equipment, whatever else for school? And and then what she starts doing is is bringing all that stuff into her bedroom and locking it in with her right at night so he can't destroy it. And then he goes to court and says, she's crazy. She's sleeping with the kid stuff, right? Because she's protecting, you know, and so you really I always tell people that if a survivor is doing things that don't make sense to you, the first thing you need to do is go back to the perpetrator's pattern of behavior. Because I find over and over again, it's actually sometimes super quick to make sense of those behaviors. Oh, that makes perfect sense because he's done this, this and this, and this is a logical. Now, all of a sudden, what seems crazy seemed like a reasonable or logical or natural response to those behaviors and the failure often of systems to actually hold that person accountable. [00:35:56][65.8]
Speaker 1: [00:35:57] And you know, there's there's some really complex instances where, for example, if if a survivor feels like their presence within the family is agitating that perpetrator, then you're going to you're going to see this person start to pull away from the children and the ends to try to create safety. And what it's going to look like is it's going to look like a certain level of abandonment. Right. When really it's I'm the target, and if I leave, maybe everybody will be safer because that's actually what the perpetrator has said, right? That's what they've said. Right. You know, so I think that missing all of that context, if you're not asking if you're not partnering with survivors, if you're not getting the full, the full understanding of the coercive control, you're going to blame victims [00:36:44][47.4]
Speaker 2: [00:36:45] for so much. [00:36:46][0.6]
Speaker 1: [00:36:46] They're not what they're doing won't make sense [00:36:48][1.8]
Speaker 2: [00:36:48] that won't make sense in. And it's so much about also giving credit for things like. Looking at the day to day things and seeing how the perpetrators made those things harder. And if they're still being done by getting the kids to the doctor, we're still beating the kid again in the school, doing their homework, you know, which is sort of I remember a case where this woman was assaulted the night before and then got the kids off to school the next day. And the response of the professors is what's wrong with her? She's acting like nothing happened. [00:37:18][29.8]
Speaker 1: [00:37:19] Well, that's what you have to do it. Where did it take care of children? That's right. I'm stable. That's right. So don't want to expose them to that trauma? [00:37:26][7.4]
Speaker 2: [00:37:26] That's right. The quick move to the deficit kind of judgment of survivors is so ingrained in us, and I think it's part of larger misogyny, to be honest. I think it's part of larger sexism and that we need to slow down and reflect where we're really misinterpreting over and over again things that are protective, that are forms of resistance, because we'll say, why doesn't she fight back? But then when she fights back, we say, Well, she's just as real as he is. So still, the box for survivors of a quote unquote appropriate action is so tiny. The last thing I want to say is this is where it's so important to drop any neutralizing language and stop lumping together perpetrators and survivors and talking about will the parents engage in domestic violence, which we always talk about? But I think it's it's so important because the data again shows us how different their roles are frequently with with kids. And you know, I think about the research that talked about kids who are injured, physically injured and needing medical attention when a perpetrator gets violent in the home. And this one study said 100 percent of the time it was the survivor who brought the kid to medical attention. But sometimes that that bringing the kid to medical attention is delayed because the perpetrator interferes or the risk is way too they leave or it's too dangerous, you've got to lie and manipulate. And and what happens is child surfing systems often say they both delayed in getting the kid some medical attention. [00:38:50][83.2]
Speaker 1: [00:38:51] The crazy thing is, is that if you've ever experienced any of this, you know that that delay immediately has to do with safety, that you are trying to bypass the shame that that perpetrators now feeling because he knows that he hurt a child [00:39:08][17.1]
Speaker 2: [00:39:09] or the fear of the job, they're in trouble. [00:39:11][2.1]
Speaker 1: [00:39:11] Yeah. And you're navigating that while you're trying to get a kid safety right? To to be to be accused of of of not protecting your child in those circumstances is incredible. It just it's offensive. [00:39:27][15.6]
Speaker 2: [00:39:28] I that's right. I think that the offensive ness of of when professionals don't really capture this and then blame survivors for things. Judge protective actions as being very to protect. I think it's something we all need to grapple with because then we wonder why survivors in are angry at us and then we get mad at them for being angry at us. [00:39:48][19.9]
Speaker 1: [00:39:49] If that was a soldier out on the field and they were being shot at by enemy fire and one of their one of their, you know, fellow soldiers was hit by a bullet in the shoulder and we had to lay low and wait to the enemy fire to stop and drag their body to a hospital. We would be heroes. OK, all right. But this is where victims are blamed for the perpetration choices of their perpetrator. [00:40:12][23.7]
Speaker 2: [00:40:13] Yeah, I think that's a great image. I think it's a great analogy. I think it's it's useful to look at where we don't judge people in a similar circumstance, right? And and we valorize them even, you know, this is amazing. And I've seen that played out where survivors have done amazing things under fire, literally, whether it's it's weapons or threats or physical violence, and then figured out a strategy to minimize the harm to get themselves out. Yeah. And and then are judged for not doing it, quote unquote the right way or not responding quickly enough or not taking over their kids enough and and remembering that just because they're physically out of that moment, even they're not safe, necessarily. They're not out of danger. They're not a danger. They're not out of the sphere of coercion and the power of this person. And so they're constantly strategizing. And I think I just did some work work on this wonderful project with with Professor Kathy Humphreys in Australia, the project and we were working with a great group of mental health practitioners. I said to them, an addiction specialist, I said, You can't just think about what's inside the four walls of your clinical setting you to do domestic violence informed mental health or addiction work you need to think about. Safety threats, coercive control, threats, how you can advocate for somebody outside [00:41:32][79.2]
Speaker 1: [00:41:33] perpetrators are going to manipulate your your diagnosis to harm the survivor. [00:41:37][4.0]
Speaker 2: [00:41:37] That's right. How that diagnosis as well-intentioned and maybe clinically accurate as it is right, could be used against her. [00:41:43][6.0]
Speaker 1: [00:41:43] You could say, Oh, she has PTSD, but unless you tie the PTSD back to the perpetrators actions and behaviors and choices, then when Family Court looks at that diagnosis of PTSD, they're going to say she's an unfit parent. Let's give the kids to this person to this perpetrator, even though is the [00:42:01][17.9]
Speaker 2: [00:42:01] person, even though it's the person who actually committed the violence that we see this over and over again. I see this already, which is her diagnosis, which is the result of his violence, gets used against her as a parent in that that because he doesn't have a mental health diagnosis and because they're separated and because the linkages haven't made to the been made to his his parenting right, that he's seen as as as a good parent or acceptable parent. Right. And that could extend to a child going to his relatives where he gets full access and she gets very controlled access. So. [00:42:33][31.3]
Speaker 1: [00:42:33] So let's talk about the adverse impact of the perpetrators behavior on the child, which is the next [00:42:38][4.8]
Speaker 2: [00:42:39] right, which is the fourth critical component. So this is where we say how we connect the dots and when I when I do it in training, I often draw a line from the first two critical components of the perpetrator to this fourth one and say, OK, now once you've identified those behaviors, you need to tell the story of how they've harmed the child in child swerving systems. And this model grew up in child solving systems. It's actually not an import, right? It's actually for those. People are like, Oh, well, we have domestic violence indication for us, and this is very different in the sense that really it really was developed out of the soil of child welfare and the mission of child safety, well-being and permanency. And and so to make domestic violence work meaningful in that setting, you actually have to describe the specific impact. And what I found early in my career was people were not doing that. People were just saying, Oh, there's a history of domestic violence as family, and that's enough, right? And systems were act like they knew what was going on or knew what they meant for the kids. Right. And and it was it was. It was. It's amazing sometimes to see. How willing we are to take action on such small information or wrong information very is what it is. Yeah. And so what we ask people to do is they describe the impact of the perpetrators behavior and now that what we use in the kind of expanded version is on child partner and family functioning. Right. And so this is where we've evolved. We evolved in a couple of different ways and this one in the in the next component is an evolutionary thing. [00:44:19][100.7]
Speaker 1: [00:44:20] And these things are not immaterial. You know, a perpetrator is domestic violence. Perpetration can render children homeless, right? A perpetrator is, you know, coercive control can can make schooling incredibly difficult for them and can cause learning abilities. Right? You know, resources, lack of resources. Lack of safety. Let's rock of stability. That's right. [00:44:46][26.5]
Speaker 2: [00:44:46] All these things and what you're saying and listing a lot of these things are non clinical diagnosis things. And I think part of it is is with the model we're trying to I think a lot of the language around domestic violence, particularly talking about kids and adult survivors is is clinical language. Language of trauma. And that's that's super important. We need to be able to talk about trauma symptoms. We need to talk about things like anxiety or depression or behavioral [00:45:12][25.7]
Speaker 1: [00:45:13] issues without implicating the [00:45:14][1.5]
Speaker 2: [00:45:14] survivor, without implicating the survivor. Right, locating the perpetrator right. The cause. Right. [00:45:18][4.1]
Speaker 1: [00:45:19] We can provide help to those survivors to help them manage those symptoms. Are the result of that perpetration, right? But blaming them for that is absolutely unacceptable. [00:45:31][11.5]
Speaker 2: [00:45:32] It doesn't further the agenda that we all have, really, which is to stop the violence and to make things better for the family. The the language of family functioning that we've adopted the last few years around adverse impact to the kids is really trying to capture the biggest slice of how the kids lives have changed because of the choices of the perpetrator. Right? You know, how is their day to day functioning different, how are their relationships different, how what have they lost? Because the perpetrators behavior and sometimes the loss is really practical. Oh, they can't live in their own home, they can't see their grandmother as much. They can't, you know, if they're Aboriginal, they're no longer live on country. They they live in a different environment without their community. Will we need to build a name those impacts that they're often not clinical [00:46:17][45.1]
Speaker 1: [00:46:18] or mental health, some of these things will be will be a little bit more subtle, you know, in situations of coercive control where there is a perpetrator within the home. A lot of friends won't want to come over, right? They won't want to. They won't want to be in the home of that child. It's to charge to situation. It's it's true. Pressurized children won't want to have contact with friends on their home environment because they're embarrassed or ashamed or afraid of how the perpetrator will behave, or because the perpetrator has created a situation where nobody wants to come over because everybody's miserable when they do well. [00:46:54][35.9]
Speaker 2: [00:46:54] And this is where, you know, Luke and Ryan Hart talk about this where you sort of you don't want to internalize, but you start strategizing and reaction and so you stop inviting people over. And so it stops looking like. External coercive control, [00:47:08][14.2]
Speaker 1: [00:47:09] why this would be a great intake question, what's that? Does a family feel safe or comfortable having people over to their home? You know, do children have playdates in their home, right? Is it safe? Is it? Are they free and able to do so? You know, these are these are qualitative things for children, which are developmental and and their needs. Families need to be able to have and children need to be able to have the freedom and stability to be able to engage in, you know, behaviors with other children where they're playing together in their own environment. And really, when a perpetrator does, is they destroy the safety of that invite. That's right for learning, for stability and for access to resources. [00:47:55][45.8]
Speaker 2: [00:47:56] I think it's so important to really understand that asking questions like how has the perpetrator's behavior changed? The kids lives day to day? Right? You know, how has it changed the adults, partners or survivors day to day functioning? What's different about the family? How is the perpetrators behaviors just weakened the function of the family because sometimes it's he lost his job when they became homeless because he kept getting arrested. All those things are so important. And again, if you if you really just look for kids behavioral health issues or mental health issues as the measure of impact, you're going to miss things that are super obvious. There was a case where mother and child the mother was breastfeeding normally and that assaults her around the time of her breastfeeding when she was right time of day. And the next day, the baby stopped breastfeeding because the trauma caused by the violence. So it's not enough to say and people often say, Well, what about pre-verbal kids? Because you can't interview them and you go, Oh, here we put side by side in front of a judge, actually, and the judge got it right. Normal breastfeeding, violence or breastfeeding, breastfeeding stops. It's super obvious for most people to look and see. That's the impact of that person's violence. And I think it's it's it's super important to take those steps and understanding. [00:49:11][75.1]
Speaker 1: [00:49:12] And it's very important to also remember that judges make judgments on the evidence that they're given. And so if you're giving evidence that says family has a history of domestic violence, instead of mapping out the patterns of coercive control violence, the actions taken to harm the child, the full spectrum of behaviors of the non offending parent to fact, and the adverse impact on children. Right, then you're not getting. [00:49:36][23.5]
Speaker 2: [00:49:36] That's right. You're not getting the whole picture. And that's where these things are critical components. So this is not saying that other things aren't important. But but from a DV child perspective, you can't talk about these things reasonably. If you're not used to saying to kids, OK, so daddy did this to Mommy, what did you do next? Or hearing a kid was scared? Mm hmm. Again, we're a of looking on people's internal worlds, which I'm not saying is unimportant, but often overlooking behaviors. And so to ask the question, how did the kid start acting differently because they were scared? Right? Begins to give us an idea. Well, they don't do this and they don't do that and they don't leave the home and they don't want to be separate from from mom's side. You know, it's really [00:50:20][44.1]
Speaker 1: [00:50:21] which in that case then in Family Court is that said that the children are too attached to mom? [00:50:27][5.6]
Speaker 2: [00:50:27] That's right. Exactly. You know, it exactly is those things. So I think it's sorry. [00:50:31][4.4]
Speaker 1: [00:50:32] No, you just have to laugh because survivors just can't frickin win. But, you know, it's really, really important. Again, the contextual nature of all of this is incredible, right? [00:50:43][10.5]
Speaker 2: [00:50:43] And I want people to be thinking about, you know, if you're sitting on a multi display team or you're seeing whether people, how language like this or this framework would change the way things are working. And we know that in in Victoria, they used. These five critical components help guide a multi-agency triage team program or collaboration. And again, this was under the stewardship of Cathy Humphreys and her team and Deb Nicholson, who is a friend of ours now at this point, and they did some really amazing work. And and by using the critical components, they one helped the team work better together. But two is that they were able to take almost 90 percent of referrals, from law enforcement to child welfare. So this was a kind of a triage meeting designed and they were able to refer out 90 percent of them to the community providers instead of sending them to statutory child welfare. Right, right. And that's huge. That's huge. And they really label the safety of the framework as being critical to to their effectiveness as a team. And that outcome, and I think when we we imagine this language over and over again, we hear that when people implement it, it changes the way they do business with families or with each other. Mm hmm. And so you start thinking about what does it mean to run a meeting or supervise like this? Or if you're a team leader going through these very critical components and just asking your worker about each one? Right? It becomes an easy way to organize your conversations. [00:52:19][95.8]
Speaker 1: [00:52:20] OK, so we're going to go to the last one. [00:52:22][1.6]
Speaker 2: [00:52:22] You're keeping us moving today, are you? [00:52:24][1.6]
Speaker 1: [00:52:25] So it's the role of substance abuse, mental health, culture and other socioeconomic factors. [00:52:30][5.1]
Speaker 2: [00:52:30] Huge, huge area. Big Pot, that big pot there. So what links them all together? And sometimes people, when it's not explained well to them, kind of doesn't don't understand this, but this is the bucket for all the things that are not causal. But may be present, and if they're present, they're super important. Let me say that again, these are all linked together because they're not causal. People's economic status doesn't cause domestic violence. People's culture does not cause domestic violence. Mental health issues or addiction issues don't cause domestic violence. Right. But when they're present as factors in a family, they may increase vulnerabilities. They may increase complexity. [00:53:11][40.9]
Speaker 1: [00:53:12] They may lock the victim into perpetration. [00:53:14][1.8]
Speaker 2: [00:53:15] That's right. All these different things. And so it to me, it felt like we had to have a place in the critical components for things that were causal but were were super important and couldn't be ignored if they were present. [00:53:27][12.3]
Speaker 1: [00:53:28] You know, it's interesting because I think that as as we're talking more and more about systems that that systems manipulation and systems failure is actually part of this critical component in my mind. I don't know how that lands for you as the as the the maker of this have this wheel. But but I think about socioeconomic factors and culture also being the failure of failure to protect systems to protect domestic violence victims against their perpetrator, their ability, their willingness or their, let's say, their vulnerability right to being manipulated by a perpetrator because they're existing in this world of really bad information and existing in that world of really bad information, you create really real and true dangers right for the victim and their children. They're not. They're not ancillary dangers. [00:54:25][56.4]
Speaker 2: [00:54:26] No, no. I don't think I. And I think you've done a really amazing job helping draw this out in our work. And you came to me a few months ago and said, can you describe things perpetrators do to manipulate systems? And I think so. I think I'm not quite sure because I put all those those behaviors around the perpetrator in that first group, the first critical. I really am very kind of, you know, religious in some ways to use that term around those that first practices around perpetrators behaviors. And I want to name the things that I want that person who actively chooses to do those things. So if I'm making an active call to child welfare to make false allegations against my partner, I want that named in his pattern of behavior. Right? OK. At the same time, you know, so we're doing more and we're going to come out with some more material around this area. Again, thanks to your kind of [00:55:16][50.7]
Speaker 1: [00:55:17] Hey, my poke. [00:55:18][0.8]
Speaker 2: [00:55:19] Yeah, you're poking in the system. But but I think when I heard it, I said, OK, I can describe what perpetrators are doing, but I also can. I want to talk about vulnerabilities that are built into the system that they're exploiting. [00:55:32][13.0]
Speaker 1: [00:55:33] So let's let's talk about the mental health and substance abuse piece, because that's probably the most common. That's probably the most common intersection that we have with domestic [00:55:44][11.7]
Speaker 2: [00:55:45] violence, right? And I think you're speaking to the language. People are more familiar with the model. More recently, we talked more about intersections and then intersectionality to talk about culture and privilege and oppression. Right? So start with intersections. You know, it's it's a lot of the cases that people are dealing with. They'll say, well, it's just not domestic violence alone. There's mental health or there's substance abuse issues. That's true. [00:56:06][21.2]
Speaker 1: [00:56:09] So this is both on the part of the perpetrator and well as [00:56:11][2.4]
Speaker 2: [00:56:11] soon as, but as soon as you say that, you have to slow it down because you have to say because my what I've trained myself now and think is OK, whose substance abuse is it? That's right, because the questions are different rates for each person. So for one, if it's the perpetrator has addiction issues and and domestic violence issues, then ask the question, What's the relationship between those two things? [00:56:32][20.9]
Speaker 1: [00:56:32] Right? When when does the perpetration occur and how does it correlate to the substance abuse? [00:56:37][4.3]
Speaker 2: [00:56:37] That's right. And do I? Does this person, you [00:56:39][2.0]
Speaker 1: [00:56:39] know, this is a critical safety plan. [00:56:40][1.2]
Speaker 2: [00:56:41] That's right. That's right. [00:56:42][0.9]
Speaker 1: [00:56:42] Really shouldn't be missing this. [00:56:43][0.9]
Speaker 2: [00:56:43] That's right. You know, and so is this person more violent when they're using? Do they use coercive control to get money for drugs? You know, those are just some of the basic questions you want to ask. And the same thing is true for [00:56:56][12.7]
Speaker 1: [00:56:57] for mental mental health. Right, right. Because it's very common to have a perpetrator who may have some type of of diagnoses, such as bipolar disorder. Right. [00:57:06][9.4]
Speaker 2: [00:57:07] Well, this is right, but this is where it starts getting tricky and then the vulnerabilities of the system getting exploited by the. That's right. Because and it's cultural because I have a friend, for instance, who said that when her husband, who was abusive to her, got diagnosed with bipolar disorder, all of a sudden it became he had a disease. [00:57:25][17.9]
Speaker 1: [00:57:26] Now you have to take [00:57:26][0.5]
Speaker 2: [00:57:27] care of the you have to take care of this poor disease person. So the violence was not centered anymore. It was never centered. The disease the disease was, which [00:57:34][7.7]
Speaker 1: [00:57:35] is the mistake I find in a lot of mental health books that are about domestic violence center domestic violence as a result of anxiety, right? Rather than than saying these behaviors of domestic violence are not the diagnoses itself, right, but are our choice by the person in a way that they're treating family members. And even if they have that diagnosis, it doesn't absolve the perpetration if they're trying to be held accountable. [00:58:02][27.7]
Speaker 2: [00:58:03] That's right. And legally, it doesn't. [00:58:04][0.9]
Speaker 1: [00:58:04] Survivor doesn't have any responsibility to forgive that person to remain in relationship with them or to endure their illegal behavior. [00:58:14][10.2]
Speaker 2: [00:58:15] That's right, and I think this is where why the behavioral focus becomes so important because clarifying the behavior patterns lets you treat a true mental health issue and keeps sight on the behavior change. So if you're treating somebody truly with anxiety, you're treating somebody truly with a history of childhood trauma or treating somebody or somebody who's got intergenerational trauma or trauma from racism or colonization, which are real things and want to be super clear that we're not minimizing or somebody is of that right who has trauma. This is PTSD that all you need to do, and I don't mean to simplify, is you need to think about that. Course of treatment around the mental health and with a big underline, in big, bold letters and look at how the behavior patterns are being addressed and how they're changing in relationship to the mental health treatment and and and that's and they have to be together. [00:59:12][57.5]
Speaker 1: [00:59:13] I think there's something even more foundational and fundamental and that is is learning how to operate as professionals where we honor that there's a diagnoses that may or may not be accurate, by the way. [00:59:25][11.6]
Speaker 2: [00:59:25] Well, it's a hard thing, right? [00:59:27][1.8]
Speaker 1: [00:59:27] But but but there's a diagnosis, and we can also hold behaviors accountable, almost like a two year old child and say, Honey, I know you're anxious. I know you have PTSD. Honey, I know you have this diagnosis, but you are not allowed to [00:59:44][17.2]
Speaker 2: [00:59:46] hate your brother, right? If you're talking to a kid, right? Exactly. [00:59:49][2.6]
Speaker 1: [00:59:50] Yeah, we deal with children, right? [00:59:51][1.3]
Speaker 2: [00:59:51] That's right. That's right. We know you're unhappy. That's normal. And I would always talk actually with the men who guided men's behavior change programs about saying, Look. Feelings of powerlessness or anxiety. Fear are normal. They're human. The issue is when you use that as an excuse to get beyond their control, and that's right. And so I think we have I think we're good enough. If we sort of drop some of our silos in our kind of I [01:00:18][26.2]
Speaker 1: [01:00:18] just want people structures saying, honey, honey, you may have best, but you are not allowed to. [01:00:24][6.1]
Speaker 2: [01:00:25] That's right. And I think it's I don't think I don't think I think that a lot of the times that the conversation around mental health and perpetration or addiction and and and perpetration has been polarized. And I know I've been in this camp where you'll say, Well. Men's violence against women is all about entitlement, and that's all it's about, and it's about sexism and it's about misogyny, and it's about permission from culture to do that. And I think that's true to a point. Right? [01:00:55][30.5]
Speaker 1: [01:00:56] Well, there's fear. [01:00:56][0.4]
Speaker 2: [01:00:57] And then there's other and there's fear and then there's other things, and that is how we put those things together. And I think to to ignore. People's history of childhood trauma or to ignore their history of cultural trauma doesn't work period and doesn't work for those communities where those things need to be acknowledged. They've been ignored and not validated by the water, by the wider community. So we need to have a way to talk about those things. [01:01:24][27.1]
Speaker 1: [01:01:24] A lot of fear in the industry of acknowledging perpetrators trauma because people have been used to the system absolving perpetrators of their actions of perpetration based off of that childhood trauma. And so what I've noticed is there's a tremendous amount of pushback from people who are professionals or who are in this field. When we mention perpetrators trauma or even the trauma of colonization and we can be complex thinkers, that's right. You know, we can do, we could do it. We don't need to think of one thing at the same time. We can acknowledge people have trauma and mental health diagnoses and draw a line in a boundary between their behavior and what is acceptable, and they're accountable for it. [01:02:12][48.2]
Speaker 2: [01:02:12] And I think it's really simple to say acting out violently doesn't help you heal your trauma. [01:02:18][5.4]
Speaker 1: [01:02:18] No, absolutely not. [01:02:19][0.9]
Speaker 2: [01:02:20] And in fact, you know, in my it compounds it because it may increase your shame. It may disrupt potentially healing relationships. You know, it does lots of things that don't help. You may put you in a better, I'm sorry, worse financial situation or something else, which then you may you may medicate with addiction or other other things that get compounded. [01:02:39][19.5]
Speaker 1: [01:02:40] And I think fundamentally, it's that it makes other people responsible for your behavior, right? Whenever we get to that place right, we have we've we've lost our integrity in behavioral analysis here, right? [01:02:56][15.7]
Speaker 2: [01:02:56] And it actually you're making me think about Matt Brown and Sarah Brown. Yeah. And people, she is not your rehab. But if you don't know that that they're about to publish a book and Matt's done a TED talk and you know, they're in Christchurch, New Zealand. And him and his partner, Sarah are great team and we got the opportunity to meet them when we were traveling in the past, the past and the days before the pandemic. But if you don't know Matt's work and Sarah's collaboration with him, it's really amazing because it's not your rehab. Is this idea that don't make your female partner responsible for your emotional experiences through violence or through addiction or something else and and really your responsibility to take care of your own stuff, right? And so I think there's so much in here. So we're talking about both intersections and intersectionality now because we're talking about privilege and oppression and intersectionality is really about status and privilege and vulnerabilities. [01:03:57][61.1]
Speaker 1: [01:03:59] Well, one of the other things that this this particular critical component also addresses in a different way is that oftentimes mental health and substance abuse are used against survivors to question right parenting and their capacity to be protective parents when that was often exacerbated, caused or continued because of domestic violence perpetrators. [01:04:29][29.4]
Speaker 2: [01:04:29] That's right. And I think, you know, there's so much in here. We have a Hulk online course on intersection, just if you haven't done it and you want to do it. I think it's a great thing to do because it really gives you much more of this than we can cover in this podcast or we cover that in our core training as well. But with that, you have perpetrators calling up child welfare and use it against them or being used against them in family court or actively sabotaging their ability to access recovery programs or question them where they went to an AA meeting. And were there men there and you're cheating on me and and just every bit of a, you know, sort of getting in the way of if we were [01:05:08][39.1]
Speaker 1: [01:05:09] to jump down into the practice weeds of this, how systems work. Right. When we have two people, one who is a perpetrator, one who's a survivor who both have substance abuse issues, they're often sent to the same program, [01:05:22][12.8]
Speaker 2: [01:05:23] the same town. Well, that's a whole other thing. I mean, there's so many things, there's so many layers to this conversation because you could talk about that. [01:05:29][5.8]
Speaker 1: [01:05:29] And then and then she [01:05:30][1.1]
Speaker 2: [01:05:30] drops perpetrates and she drops out and she knows they're kids. That's right. [01:05:34][3.6]
Speaker 1: [01:05:34] You're not a fit parent. That's right. Abusing her? That's right. [01:05:37][3.1]
Speaker 2: [01:05:38] Stalking her or the allegations against her are completely fabricated, right? Or or, you know, I mean, just when you go down this road and includes both the real mental health issues, the real addiction issues are on both people's parts or misdiagnosis of the perpetrator, or it includes mental health issues that are used as a threat against a survivor like, for instance, PTSD or threats of suicidality. You know, I tell people, Look, if you have a perpetrator or. Domestic violence, who's depressed or suicidal? Then you need system for self-harm, right? [01:06:10][32.8]
Speaker 1: [01:06:11] That's a very dangerous [01:06:11][0.5]
Speaker 2: [01:06:11] harm to others. But also, is this really a straight up manipulation? Because one of the most powerful emotional things is to say, I'm going to kill myself if you leave me, right? You know, I remember when you confronted God. But did I? This is this story where you could have [01:06:28][16.7]
Speaker 1: [01:06:28] fronted up on a rooftop [01:06:30][1.6]
Speaker 2: [01:06:30] bar with our kids, with our children and at a [01:06:34][3.2]
Speaker 1: [01:06:34] wedding, at a wedding. And I was getting a drink at the the bar. And this this. This guy has been hounding the bartender all afternoon, and he was so drunk by this point. And he said, If you don't go out with me, I'm going to jump off this roof and kill myself and I turn around. My head whipped around and I looked at her and I said just a loud enough for him to hear. I said, that is a really dangerous person, because if he's willing to start a relationship by threatening to kill himself, you don't do what he wants, right? He's an abuser. That's right. Stay away from. Right. And he stopped [01:07:09][35.8]
Speaker 2: [01:07:10] me. We had to call security because security. But you, I loved you at that moment with you or so like, you're so quick to sort of resign. I think she really appreciated you naming it right because he was harassing her. And and I think again, those are the situations again, which is it's not just his behavior, but it's the response of the organization. You know, the the supervisors, the managers. I mean, I think those things you get to see really quickly that in a workplace environment, does the management need to read back? [01:07:38][28.0]
Speaker 1: [01:07:38] Correct. That's right. Does the management? [01:07:39][0.8]
Speaker 2: [01:07:40] I'm not sure they did, really. They did it. They I would [01:07:42][2.8]
Speaker 1: [01:07:43] sit there and keep drinking, you know, [01:07:44][1.2]
Speaker 2: [01:07:44] harassing her. That's right. So I think you clearly see in a workplace thing like that, a lot of it has to do with not just the response of that person, but the system was written [01:07:52][8.1]
Speaker 1: [01:07:53] by the way the system's response normalizes it right? It makes it seem as if it's normal right for for some human to be able to sit there and harass another human and threaten to commit suicide if we don't do what they want because they're paying for their alcohol. That's right. You know? Come on. Right? [01:08:12][19.2]
Speaker 2: [01:08:12] Seriously, so so when you when you dove into this area of intersections, you have so much to kind of unpack. And again, it's really important because I believe that mental health professionals, addiction professionals can be so useful to survivors and to perpetrators, because if somebody is coming in and generally wants help for their mental health status or their their addiction issues to not address their pattern of coercive control doesn't serve them right. And I think a lot of times people feel like, well, that's outside my specialty or outside my skill knowledge. But you need to both make a referral out if you need to, but you also need to integrate it into your assessment because because what I saw in my practice was you have people deeply committed to their recovery who continue to be abusive. They thought it would go away when they stopped drinking. Right? And it would be a place where they could relapse and top of harming other people. But but even their goal of recovery could be hampered by acting in ways that created shame or consequences, which are all appropriate, actually. But it didn't serve the recovery. So I think it really want to make a plea to to folks around who are working in addiction or mental health to to really look at intersections in this way. And we're super proud that we've got our first free standing addiction agency in Victoria, Australia Odyssey House. They're going to [01:09:34][82.3]
Speaker 1: [01:09:34] be a domestic violence [01:09:35][0.8]
Speaker 2: [01:09:36] in form partner, and they're really super excited. Yeah. So cool. [01:09:39][3.6]
Speaker 1: [01:09:39] Shout out to Odyssey House. [01:09:40][0.9]
Speaker 2: [01:09:40] Yeah, shout out to Sea House. [01:09:41][1.0]
Speaker 1: [01:09:43] I want to see a first domestic violence and for mental health agency because I know that untold harm is done to the victims and survivors via poor mental health assessments and de contextualizing diagnoses for four survivors who are going through domestic violence. And that is often used against us in Family Court to show that we're a bad parent because we're suffering the effects of long term perpetration. [01:10:10][27.4]
Speaker 2: [01:10:11] So I want to make sure we talk a little more in depth because we talked about intersectionality is a little bit and talk to a more in depth about it and then we'll wrap up. I think that intersectionality is, you know, in this box, we talk about socio economic cultural factors that can affect the domestic violence. And I think when you break it down and we've thought more about it, we want to keep pushing into this idea of systemic racism, oppression, privilege, vulnerability. It's the language we use is a little bit different today than than than seven or eight years ago when I when I put this. No, sorry. I said seven or eight years ago. That's crazy. Fifteen years ago, right? I don't even know what happened, you know? But when I first put these down and I think, you know, we need to name these things like, for instance, in the United States, a lot of Indian nations, while they have sovereignty, they don't have criminal sovereignty over. [01:11:04][52.7]
Speaker 1: [01:11:05] Non-Native criminals. Right, so if there's a white man who's abusing a native woman, right, they don't have they [01:11:11][6.7]
Speaker 2: [01:11:12] don't have the ability on the roads right then of the ability to gauge them. So it becomes a complicated thing to get other systems involved, for instance, right? Or you have [01:11:19][7.0]
Speaker 1: [01:11:19] systems which have historically harmed. [01:11:21][1.4]
Speaker 2: [01:11:21] That's right. And they have stolen generation prison in Australia, which is like the mission schools in the US, you know, are kids being taken, Eric or Canada as well? You know, so you have this history of of of cultural genocide and physical genocide, you know, against native populations. And and so people are really leery, rightly so. Formal systems, right? And particularly child welfare. And so then when you judge a First Nations person who won't call the police right because they're afraid of child welfare and say, Well, she's not protective, right? You're you're actually doubling down on the institutional racism. [01:12:00][38.3]
Speaker 1: [01:12:00] So first of all, just from an outcomes based perspective, how crazy that that's the measure, right? Calling the police does not make a child more safe. Right? Seriously. Right. That is not real, right? You know, I know that we all love these stories about police officers who come in and intervene in these situations and a child is taken to safety. Well, what happens to them after that is actually the most critical thing, right? Really, in reality? So, you know, I think that we need to separate this notion. Again, we talk about geographic distance does not stop perpetration, right? That's not right. Separation doesn't stop perpetration, right? Perpetrators have custody of their children and family. [01:12:44][43.6]
Speaker 2: [01:12:44] Well, this is this. But you know, this is when I got into working with child welfare systems, where they would often be very much concerned about the not related parent, the boyfriend caregiver, because they they didn't feel like they had legal jurisdiction over them. And I would try to reorient system to say, Look, you have to be just or is more concerned with the with the biological parents. Because when you look at a coercive control lens, their relationship is permanent unless parental rights are terminated. They have legal rights to use other systems to control their kids or their partner to gain access. And so once you move into this coercive control model that looks at patterns, not relationship status, where people living that all of a sudden the level of concern for biological parents should go way up, way up, way up. And and so when we talk about intersectionality, we really need to talk about things like income and education and status that often gives that perpetrator parent a lot of power in those formal systems. Right? You know, whether it's it's their police officer, whether their doctor, whether they're a politician or a lawyer, that they know the system, they're known by this system. They've got status. They're perceived as being respectable and in the people have a hard time putting those things together with telling you what? [01:14:04][79.8]
Speaker 1: [01:14:05] It's the respectable ones. You got a map, right? [01:14:07][2.2]
Speaker 2: [01:14:08] Well, and again, the language, of course, control gives you a better handle or possibility of labeling those things because it's not just beating somebody up or [01:14:17][9.5]
Speaker 1: [01:14:19] it's abuse of power. Abuse of power misuse. That's right. System. That's right. Intentional financial coercive control to to destroy a survivor and a victim's claims. Right. It's long term use of the family court to drain a victim who you're not paying adequate alimony or child support to because you refuse to and you have lawyers, right? And that survivor does it right. And now you're out of the relationship. The domestic violence field assumes that everything is done and taken care of because your geographic distances now you're not married or in process of divorce. You know, all of these systems now see you as an invisible victim. That's right. But the perpetration continues, right? And nobody's taking responsibility for corralling it. [01:15:08][49.8]
Speaker 2: [01:15:09] I remember a case that was brought to my attention where the perpetrator had filed 400 motions in Family Court of one year. [01:15:14][5.2]
Speaker 1: [01:15:14] Seriously, for shame on that, judge. That's right for shame on that. That's right, because they should have stopped that in their courtroom and they should have said, I will not allow my courtroom to be a tool of perpetration and specious litigation. This is a circus. [01:15:30][16.0]
Speaker 2: [01:15:31] I hold you in contempt. You tap your lawyer, you and your lawyer. [01:15:35][3.6]
Speaker 1: [01:15:35] Yeah, that's [01:15:36][0.3]
Speaker 2: [01:15:36] what should happen. And the difference is, I remember working on a trial for a case. No, no. I liked it. I get like. And I remember I saw Warford case where he was calling up multiple times and harassing the worker and they sat him down. The work of the jury said, You cannot call your kids in foster care. You can only call with serious, specific concerns about your child. Any other call that you do will be considered a harassment. And and to be honest, he actually got very agitated. He actually stormed out, I think he threw a chair, not at them, but across the room. But he stopped doing it. And so he responded to the boundary setting so many [01:16:13][36.8]
Speaker 1: [01:16:13] times, so many times the failure of systems is a failure to draw a boundary. [01:16:18][5.6]
Speaker 2: [01:16:20] That's right. [01:16:20][0.2]
Speaker 1: [01:16:20] So many times and it really is drawing a boundary with an infant. Right. [01:16:24][4.1]
Speaker 2: [01:16:25] Serious. And I think systems, because of the way power works, they draw boundaries more easily, more aggressively with. People from lower status groups traditionally discriminated against groups, right, and they have a harder time doing it against perpetrators with status. I think that's just to be honest and I think when we look at this issue of intersectionality and I'm remembering how I used to do it was called the status exercise, and I want to kind of bring it back to Paul Keeble, who's anti-violence anti-racism educator in the U.S.. Maybe it wasn't from him or but. But it really helped me understand that what happens is that status is very fluid in some ways and that people, you know, within groups like you said, context really, really matters. And so people, for instance, you know, you may have a discussion about where people have grown up and who's really from that group, right? And who's not and that being used against the victim. You're not really thinking about Puerto Rican, you know? You know, in the U.S. and you did grow up in Puerto Rico. Did you grow up in the mainland? Yeah. Like, who's really Dominican, who's really Puerto Rican? Who's really this? Who's really black? Right? All the stuff in the intergroup that's still part of lateral violence and part of the overall system of racism, colorism, you know, where there's prejudice against people who are darker skinned that that all those things matter? Right? You know, language status. I'm a citizen and you're not, you know, so. So we get into intersectionality. There's so much that we need to be sensitive to that [01:17:59][94.0]
Speaker 1: [01:17:59] we need to do a whole episode on intersectionality because we're at an hour and 16 minutes and we're way over time, [01:18:06][6.2]
Speaker 2: [01:18:06] we're way over time. OK, great to talk with you. Like to talk? Good at talking? Yeah. And we need to wrap up. We need to wrap up. So these have been the five critical components of the model. And we hope that this help people really understand how that forms the center of the model and really powers things like our mapping tool, our systems change discussions, all those things. So I hope this has been useful for people around that pattern. [01:18:32][25.6]
Speaker 1: [01:18:32] Based thinkers think contextually right, try to map perpetrators patterns and their actions taken to harm the adult and child survivor and the impact to that on the children. And Joe, don't miss protective act of efforts by the survivor. And don't be fooled into believing the domestic violence perpetration is a mental health disorder or an addiction issue, and those addressing those will not necessarily resolve the violence or the course of control. [01:19:02][30.1]
Speaker 2: [01:19:03] And don't leave out intersectionality is a privilege and oppression present issues. All right. All right. So we, we we did that. So I am David Mandel, executive director of the Safe and the Other Institute, [01:19:13][10.4]
Speaker 1: [01:19:14] and I am Ruth Stern's Mandel and I am the e-learning and communications [01:19:17][3.2]
Speaker 2: [01:19:18] manager. And you've been listening to partner with Survivor. And if you like this episode, you like this show, please share it and [01:19:24][6.6]
Speaker 1: [01:19:25] and become less subscript [01:19:27][1.9]
Speaker 2: [01:19:28] subscribers on your platform to it. And and you know, we want you to go to our website Safe Together Etsy.com or to [01:19:36][8.0]
Speaker 1: [01:19:36] the Academy Academy, Dot Safe and Together Institute dot com. [01:19:39][3.1]
Speaker 2: [01:19:40] And we're out. We're out. [01:19:40][0.0]
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