Partnered with a Survivor: David Mandel and Ruth Reymundo Mandel

Season 6 Episode 2: Coercive Control and Children

• Ruth Reymundo Mandel & David Mandel • Season 6 • Episode 2

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In this episode, David and Ruth explore why coercive control must be at the center of how we understand the impact of domestic abuse on children. Moving beyond just focusing on physical violence or whether children "witnessed" abuse, they discuss how perpetrators' patterns of behavior can devastate children's wellbeing in multiple ways.

David and Ruth examine how coercive control by perpetrators can rob children of vital resources including economic stability, healthcare, education, family connections, and safety. They discuss how these patterns intersect with systemic oppression and vulnerabilities, creating additional layers of harm that perpetrators exploit.

The conversation highlights how a coercive control framework helps professionals better assess perpetrators' harmful parenting choices, understand survivors' protective efforts, and make more informed decisions about child safety. The hosts emphasize the importance of documenting specific harms to children and challenging perpetrators who use culture or religion to justify control.

They emphasize that the costs of not addressing these issues - in terms of children's wellbeing and broader societal impact - are too high to ignore.

Related Episodes

Season 2 Episode 12: How Coercive Control Harms Child Safety & Wellbeing: An Interview With Researcher Dr. Emma Katz

Season 2 Episode 10: Trauma-Informed Is Not The Same As Domestic Violence-Informed: A Conversation About The Intersection Of Domestic Violence Perpetration, Mental Health & Addiction

Season 1 Episode 1: Coercive Control And Consent

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

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

Visit the Safe & Together Institute website

Start taking Safe & Together Institute courses

Check out Safe & Together Institute upcoming events

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

And we're back.

David Mandel:

And we're back.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

Hello, hello there.

David Mandel:

Hey, we're doing. Partner with a Survivor? Again we are, and I'm David Mandel, ceo of the Safe and Together Institute.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

And I'm Ruth Raimundo Mandel, and I am the co-owner and Chief Business Development Officer.

David Mandel:

Yes, and we are joining you from Tunxis Misako Land here in the East Coast of the United States and just doing a quick land acknowledgement in the middle of the frigid but beautiful winter of New England.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

There's a little snow on the ground.

David Mandel:

A little snow on the ground and we're dealing with a little bit of house issues that come with this.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

Oh my goodness, Pipes freezing and a little bit of whiplash from having been in the Azores and warm. But, it is gorgeous and bright and blue and beautiful outside.

David Mandel:

And it is beautiful here in a different way, and just want to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land, the Misako Tungstus people, and just the long history of colonization and land taking and settlement here in the United States and shared by many places in the country, and just that it's not a historic event but it's continuing, and just want to acknowledge and honor any Indigenous elders from the United States, from Canada, from other places in the world Australia, new Zealand that are joining us and acknowledge elders past, present or emerging.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

All right. So what is our topic today?

David Mandel:

Our topic today is a familiar one, but one we're revisiting because it's so important.

David Mandel:

You know we're going to talk about coercive control in children and the context for it is we have recently rebranded our regional conferences with the name Coercive Control in Children.

David Mandel:

So they're still Safe and Together Institute programs and they're still focused on the work at the Institute. But we're really highlighting that for 20 years and I'm really proud to say that because I think a lot of people started talking about coercive control in the last few years but for 20 plus years that coercive control has been at the center of the safe and together model and that the framework of course control is so essential If you're interested in children's best interest, decision-making and and work in this area. And so we want to explore for short, for about 30 minutes, you and I, this idea of of children and course control and really kind of, really kind of nail it down for people, Because for me, you and I, this idea of children and course control and really kind of nail it down for people, Because for me, you know, this is one of the reasons why we have to step away from the physical violence primacy that often drives a lot of policy and research.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

Well, let's talk about the problem with just relying on physical incidents of physical violence when we're dealing with assessing the safety and well-being of children. What is the fundamental issue? Because, you know, let's put it in the context of all the systems that have been set up, there's a real preference for that very isolated, incident-based lens, and that arises primarily out of the legal system and everybody has followed that lens. And though that may be a lens that many people need to follow because of the structures of the legal system, we need to be more aware of patterns of behaviors and how those patterns of behaviors are information which indicate to us the potential risk for death, for harm and for extreme trauma and dislocation of that child.

David Mandel:

So the most fundamental way to think about this is when you think, through a physical violence lens, that the primary, or sometimes the only, nexus people make between domestic violence perpetration and children is the danger of them being physically harmed during an incident of physical violence directed by one adult against another. That is this very narrow definition that is often embedded in the word exposure or witnessing. You know so that it starts with this idea of how much physical danger. You'll hear this language in child protection where the kid's in the zone of danger. If they weren't in the zone of danger, which is the danger of physical violence, which is such a narrow definition, then we're not going to open a case. We're not interested. We can't make the argument that the kids were at risk.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

It's such an interesting division of responsibility when it comes to a parent being the person who's perpetrating that violence in the home, and it's very interesting, in light of the vast legal precedents where people who have been coerced by somebody who is violent to engage in behaviors or into an incident of criminality have often had to take responsibility, even if they were being abused and coerced into that criminality, that we assume that a person who's perpetrating violence in their home, which is a criminal act against an adult, is not also perpetrating violence against their children. It's a huge assumption and it's a poor assumption based off of the reality that child deaths in those cases, especially neglect deaths, vastly rise.

David Mandel:

So what you're pointing to in my mind, I think about this, which is that keeping a focus on the definition being really narrow, the nexus being physical violence in the home and children being in danger of being physically harmed, or, with a slightly expanded version, which I think is also common, did they see it and were they scared and were they upset, Were they emotionally kind of?

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

distressed by the physical violence. I'm actually objecting to the initial assumption itself, the initial assumption being that if there's violence in the home between two adults, that that doesn't necessarily mean that those children are in danger, that the violence is going to stay within that adult context. That's a poor assumption.

David Mandel:

Absolutely, absolutely, and I think it's you know, what I was thinking about is just how we've siloed child maltreatment discussions from domestic violence discussions and what the model does, as many of you know, kind of ties those two together and says, in the perpetrator pattern-based approach, you need to be thinking about both the perpetrator's behavior to the adult victim and also to the children, directly and indirectly. And so I think when you think about just physical violence, it makes it harder to hold the perpetrator accountable for all the types of harm. So this is one of the issues, right, and we'll talk about coercive control and its nature in a minute. But just one of the most basic issues is when you narrow the lens to physical violence, you narrow the lens to just this idea of did the kids witness and see it that you make it harder to really understand, idea of did the kids witness and see it that you make it harder to really understand the patterns, the connections, the overlap with physical sexual maltreatment, neglect, issues caused by the perpetrator and therefore your ability to hold them accountable as a parent is so limited and we see that show up in so many systems where the criminal court system rarely holds perpetrators specifically accountable as parents for what they do, for instance, and even child protection is drastically struggled and family law systems have struggled.

David Mandel:

So what we see here is is the effects of a very narrow definition of domestic abuse versus, uh, one where you are looking at coercive control. So let me just talk about really, because I think the term gets used and I think sometimes people will like some systems will substitute emotional maltreatment for coercive control, which is just such an inaccurate kind of translation. Coercive control is about a series of behaviors, some involving physical violence, but some never involving physical violence, so it can be included but that really are about limiting the ability of other family members to function. I mean, that's the most basic thing we can talk about entrapment, deprivation of liberties.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

I want to go a little bit behind those terms, because a lot of people talk about the removal of liberties but they're not talking about it in the standpoint of the responsibility of that person, as a parent, to create an environment where the children are well-nurtured. That includes physically, food, housing safety, the ability to learn, to engage in education, the basic ability to be safe as a child and experience the world in a place of creativity, of learning, of safety without physical damage which causes disability, without emotional harm, which causes mental illness and other issues, including future substance misuse. We know all these things through research which doesn't rob economically from that child, it doesn't put them at a disadvantage, which doesn't rob them of education in connection with their family members right and the ability to be in connection with those family members. I hear a lot of people talking about personal liberties but not talking about what that actually means, the specific things that are taken, the specific things that are perpetrated.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

And then people get caught up in these conversations of well, maybe it's cultural, maybe it's religious, oh, it's a parental right, and none of us are asking the question what are the fundamental responsibilities that we can all agree upon as societies and cultures, that parents, regardless of their gender, regardless of the term that we use for them as a parent, they're a parent figure, they're a stepfather, a stepmother, a mother, a biological mother, a biological father.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

What are the fundamental responsibilities of parents? And I think that we can all agree that if a parent is doing a repetitive action, shows a pattern of behavior which puts their children at a disadvantage economically, which robs from them economic stability, which destabilizes their housing, which causes them physical injuries and disabilities, which causes them trauma, mental illness and substance misuse exposure potential in the future, we can say that those are not the behaviors of a responsible parent. I think we can all agree on that. Maybe some of us won't agree on that because we actually think those behaviors are within somebody's right. But we have to talk about what the behaviors look like of removing physical liberties, because it's not just about removing physical liberties.

David Mandel:

No, and I think you're really speaking to this. This is why I wrote the paper last year about the alignment between Save it Together and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Children, because all the things you just listed are in there. Right, and people often say it's about the state, but it's also about parental responsibility, because you can't enforce the state, but it's also about parental responsibility. Yes, because you can't enforce the state's responsibility without looking at the parents.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

Yeah.

David Mandel:

So it's all in there, I think it's, and I agree with you and I think this is where you know and I love when you talk about the robbing and the taking away of economic capital, social capital that may come with connection, education capital, educational capital, physical health.

David Mandel:

These are right investment Just basic physical health you know that this is so much bigger than just with a kid scared.

David Mandel:

This is about seeing that pattern of behavior where I maybe I get violent, maybe my violence forces my children out of their own home and then I won't pay. So if I just get physically violent this is so important for me If I make quote, unquote the mistake of getting physically violent and there's no wider pattern, I will feel remorse, regret. I will want to help heal and fix, make sure my kids don't pay any more consequences. But what we know, when there's a pattern of coercive control, not only am I going to engage in violence, maybe that forces my kids out of the house, but now I'm going to not pay money for them to eat or to pay to live in safer housing. Or I may use the courts to go after the other parent to get the kids or to pay to live in safer housing, or I may use the courts to go after the other parent to get the kids or to punish them. That all these things have ongoing costs for children, let alone the adult survivor.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

They don't just have ongoing costs for children, they have ongoing costs for society, the cost to us. If any of the people listening to this podcast work in family law, custody and access, access or child protection, they know that they have huge caseloads and that those cases often comprise extremely contentious, contentious cases where there's a pattern of contention and that represents a person who is intentionally wasting their family's capital, starving and robbing from their own children, and I'm so sorry but we cannot call that person a good parent. If, ultimately, at the end of the day, that person's main concern is not about the wellbeing, stability and safety of their children and family, but about their control over them, you have an abuser.

David Mandel:

Right. So I think when we think about this idea of really kind of leaning into coercive control in children as a kind of primary framework to discuss kids and domestic abuse, you know we need to think about how it increases one accountability for perpetrators as parents, by articulating there's multiple pathways to harm, you know, by helping people understand the behaviors that go far beyond physical violence but include these things about limiting their kids' access to medical care. I remember one case where the child had a CP and his abuse was to stop health care providers from coming into the house and the mother from spending money to buy new crutches and other physical health things that the child needed as she was growing and her body was changing, and so this wasn't just sort of he was abusing physically the mom, but he was controlling the whole household financially, access to outside resources.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

He was causing suffering to his own child. That's right. He was causing physical challenges and health challenges that potentially could harm his child by his behaviors. I think that actually, we need to start naming these things more directly, more specifically in how it impacts the children's experience and ability to access vital healthcare, vital resources. Starving your children of vital resources, whether it's medical care, whether it's food, whether it's access to education or to cultural or to cultural connection that's right Should always be considered poor parental behavior. That's right.

David Mandel:

That's right and I think so when we think about really articulating harm and harm being the foundation and risk that comes along with that harm is the foundation of good decision making, by child protection, by family court systems, that this is not a just tick box kind of exercise. It's really about getting the reality of the family reflected, understand the quality of that person's parenting or the poor quality, articulating the connection directly between their behavior and the harm to the kids. And then another thing which is once you have that kind of more clear, then the decision making of the adult victim becomes clear and their protective behaviors make more sense. You know which is? You know, if I'm worried about the devastation that my partner is going to rain upon me and my children if I leave, maybe part of why I don't leave, yes, the financial costs that they're going to make my kids pay, the way that they're going to destabilize, the way they're going to call the police or child protection on me.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

Or even other more subtle behaviors, if the person that is the co-parent of the children that we parented together is making decisions which I know put that child in danger of sickness, of dislocation, of potential causes of physical injury. And I am trying to enact protective behaviors within that context, really understanding that things that may look like behaviors that I would object to under normal circumstances, like lying, hiding resources so they can be reallocated to children Right Going around that parent's stated wishes which are harming that child to try to protect them, and a lot of times those behaviors are punished in custody and access context as parental alienation, when there's actually a person trying to protect that child's well-being and safety from a person who has decided that number one.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

they get to dictate all of the actions of the family, regardless of the emotional and physical consequences of those actions, and a lot of people are supporting their ability to do that.

David Mandel:

Well, this is the idea of the perpetrator who takes the car keys or takes something out of the car or takes the mobile phone, and the family lives in a rural area and the kids are sick.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

I mean, we've heard of cases where a perpetrator was the police were called because there was physical violence and the perpetrator had cameras and locks on all the doors. I explained to the police that, oh, I thought she was cheating on me, so I did that, and the police said, oh, hey, yeah, bro, that's totally understandable. She's dead two days days later.

David Mandel:

This is how crazy things are right and, and you know to, to finish the example, you know. So the woman takes needs to get the kids to the doctor, or there's not enough food or trying to get away. So there she is, walking down the road with her kids. And you were telling me a story about this woman who was fleeing a domestic abuse situation, you know, with three babies in a car seat, yeah, and luckily got help, you know, but she had no car and she was moving them into the shade and then moving the babies up the road and she's doing this incredible thing and that, that.

David Mandel:

That a lot of people would look at that and say what's wrong with this woman If they don't put into the context of course control, and course control gives you this context to better understand survivor's decision-making, what protection looks like, and I love you talking about lying.

David Mandel:

I want every professional to understand that when we walk in and measure survivors by quote-unquote how truthful they're being to us and we don't have a nuanced understanding that speaking the truth doesn't guarantee safety and that lying isn't a legitimate act of resistance and being fearful about what telling the truth is a legitimate fear in the context of dealing with domestic abuse and coercive control, that I'm always saying that we need to really understand in the conscious course control, really embrace these things that often will be labeled as pathological or negative behaviors, and when you put them in context, they're about survival, they're about rationality, they're about logic Like why should I trust you? Or why should I trust even if you're well-intentioned? This is what a lot of my colleagues in the professional field can have a hard time. I'm a good person. They'll feel like I want to be understanding. I'm here to help, I'm empathetic, and that may be true, but you're not accounting for either the rest of the system or what she knows about the perpetrator.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

Or what her experience is of the system in the context of perpetrators and that may not be this perpetrator, that may have been the perpetrator before this, or her family of origin. Because many of us have come into contact with institutional systems and that doesn't mean that we are safer because of it, and often it means that we are more vulnerable.

David Mandel:

That's right, and so I want to talk about two more things here which are really critical to why we for 20 years and the passing of Evan Stark has really been impacting me he died last year, but he really popularized and kind of really brought the term coercive control out into public use, and he isn't the only person who's talked about control and power and control and issues.

David Mandel:

But he is a colleague of mine. We worked together on projects. I wrote a book chapter for him. You know we were actually in the same geographic era, so Save it Together has been connected to coerc course control for 20 years because of Evan's influence on me and really appreciate that, and so when we talk about course control we have this tremendous bank of experience with it. And one part that are really so important for me to talk about is intersectionality, is intersections, Physical violence. Lens doesn't help you appreciate the whole range of privilege and power and oppression issues that come with an intersectional lens. You know, one of the things is people say, well, a punch is a punch is a punch regardless if you're black, you're white, you're First Nation you're gay, you're five-two.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

You're six-foot. You're 200 pounds. You're white. You're First Nation. You're gay. You're 5'2". You're 6 foot, you're 200 pounds, you're 125.

David Mandel:

There's a simplistic kind of equality. That sort of people look at physical violence, physical violence but once you add in intersectionalities and group of people where there's police brutality or your community has been targeted, that if you're dealing in Australia with worries about, if you're Aboriginal First Nation, about deaths in custody, then what you're going to say as an abuser isn't just you're not just going to be threatening or physically violent, you're going to say so, you're going to call the cops and they're going to kill me. So that's really what you want. You want me to die in jail.

David Mandel:

So, part of my control is using and leveraging the system.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

It's very common. I mean, growing up, we were often told that we should not talk to anybody because if we did, we would be taken by social services. They were very overt in their threats to us and the fact is is that I'm so sorry, even if you're the best person in the world working in social care that you're scary. You're scary. Being taken away from your family is very scary, and that's about power.

David Mandel:

Being a kid in foster care, being a kid in an institution, is often going to mean you're going to be treated with less respect than another kid, or, let's say, your partner is. I remember this case we worked on, where it was high school dating violence and he was the captain of the football team. This was a private religious school and she was a foster kid. His status in that school was so far beyond hers and if you ignored that status relationship then you would miss so much about the power he had. It wasn't just that he was big and a football player and was trained in violence that's part of it too but he had status, he had friends, and so what ended up happening in this particular case is that when the school got involved, they kicked both of them out.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

Yeah.

David Mandel:

They didn't kick him out as the perpetrator. They kicked her out because she was a problem in low status. Now she was higher status, I bet that wouldn't have happened. And so I think that really we want. So intersectionalities really matters. You know um, if you're, if you're um trans and you're a victim, you know you may be afraid of calling the police because of how you're going to be treated. So intersectionalities and coercive control go together and not in a way that physical violence really does in the same way and then around intersections, there's really no way to understand without coercive control, to understand the dynamics because domestic violence perpetrators threaten to use somebody's substance use or make up, made up substance use against them. They interfere with recovery. They use drugs to get somebody hooked, they force them to do sex to get money for drugs. That without this concept of coercion it's really hard to really make sense of the intersections of mental health and addiction and domestic abuse.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

And I think that people have a really hard time converting what seems like intangible definitions, like coercive control, to really specific, tangible patterns of behaviors. To really specific, tangible patterns of behaviors. We perpetrators are so good at using language, twisting it, twisting the meaning of it, twisting the meaning of religion and culture to mean that they get to control, abuse, own dictate to other people, cause deficits, cause drama, cause disabilities, remove access to resources. They're really good at twisting those concepts to defend their power and control. And we really need to be better as professionals, as people, at being able to agree on a very basic standard of what we expect parents to be. If we really want to live in a world where our children are thriving and families are strong, we actually have to agree upon what those behaviors that support those things are.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

I don't know how any reasonable person of goodwill and good intention can believe that behaviors which we know cause drama, which we know cause physical disabilities and long-term health, mental health issues, health, mental health issues, that behaviors which destabilize families and their homes, that cause economic poverty. I don't know how any of us can be drawn into that web of believing somehow that those behaviors are justified. But we have been, that's right and it's time to extricate ourselves from that web of entrapment in our own minds. Whereas professionals, we're able to justify behaviors which are fundamentally harmful to the well-being health connection, access to resources, health connection access to resources. And lots of people can debate whether or not children actually have the right to access to safety, physical safety, economic stability and education, and I would say to those people that not only are they wrong, but that they're causing tremendous suffering and they're the ones who are causing the costs which we're all experiencing in this world, and we need to do better. That's right.

David Mandel:

And doing better. In some ways, I don't want to make this sound too simplistic. Doing better in this area is saying, when a parent, one parent stops another parent from getting sober or encourages them to keep using drugs, that they're undermining not only that person's well-being and health, but the well-being and health of their kids when they're engaged. And and to be able to just say that simply and to say that clearly in our language and the way we talk about these cases and situations when we hear that somebody's denigrating their partner's culture or attacking them verbally or saying they're stupid even when it's not a cultural attack, to understand how they're attacking their kids as well that this is the siloing that we need to end. These are the connections you're inviting us to make Really, that when perpetrators force their own family out of their own home, that we don't just clap and say, look, good job, mom, you went to refuge with the kids, which is true we say, oh my God, dad, how could you force?

David Mandel:

your kids out of their own home. How could?

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

you do that.

David Mandel:

Away from the schools that they know, away from the streets that they know, away from the stuffed animals and the toys and whatever else that they're familiar with and their family and their family.

David Mandel:

Let's catalog all the losses that that behavior caused, not just celebrate that she went to refuge because we think leaving is the answer, because that case is going to end up in family court and somebody's going to ask the question about his parenting and they're going to need to know that somebody with a professional credential, not just a survivor, is saying this is the harm this pattern of behavior caused to those children. This is where it needs to be brought into child protection where they say you left the state with your kids. That's not kidnapping, that's protection.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

And part of the resistance of the influence of perpetrators who love to manipulate language, culture, religion and reality just to maintain their power and control, is that all of us who know better need to stand together and affirm reality, very simply, looking at these patterns of behaviors and saying to that person, this parent, this is not good parenting and if you continue these behaviors, not only are you harming your children, but you are not a responsible parent. You are a dangerous parent. You need to be managed and contained and assessed. I'm so sorry.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

I think that this is going to be really hard if we really reach this world for men in particular, to feel okay with the fact that there is a lot of behaviors that are being engaged in by other men that are truly, truly damaging to connection, to stable families, to the safety of children, and that all of us have to look at that and say that's not okay. You can engage in these behaviors. Here's some other behaviors you can engage in that will support your family. And if we offer you this and you completely reject it on the basis of no, my religion says I can do these things, my culture says I can do these things, you are a liar. You are a liar and all of us are going to affirm that none of those behaviors are good parenting. They do not cause strength, they do not cause strong children, they do not make stable families, they do not build relationships and connection, and none of us are going to buy into your lies. We actually have to be stronger.

David Mandel:

And I've seen in our work around the globe that when professionals change their language, change their thinking, confront this behavior. Not always, but much more frequently, courts and other systems respond like ordering this perpetrator, who took the family car when he moved out and left mom and the kids stranded. When it was presented as a child well-being issue and was a part of his pattern, the court ordered him to return the car to mom so she could use it, even though the car was in his name, because it was identified as the family car.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

And one more thing that you all have to be aware of yes, that once we actually start holding those perpetrators accountable, the whole system and professionals have to be prepared for the backlash that comes when we do it.

David Mandel:

So you're, I love it. You're like you see the chess pieces.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

Oh, I always see the chess pieces.

David Mandel:

I'm 10 moves ahead, but I want to give people a chance to feel the first round of successes. That this is possible, absolutely, this is possible.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

But I think we get afraid we get afraid as professionals when that whiplash starts to ramp up. You know we hear a lot of people saying, yeah, we are holding perpetrators accountable and we're getting a lot more professional complaints. We're getting challenges. Absolutely, expect it, expect it, plan for it.

David Mandel:

We're seeing this out of the research in London actually on the models application and we're responding to it. There's some work around that and worker safety has to be built into all these efforts. And when you look at children and domestic abuse through the lens of coercive control, that you start thinking about things like well, they separated, but is he still paying for food? Is he still paying? These are still his kids, even though they're living in a different address.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

Right? Or is he spending the capital that was meant to go towards his children's support on litigation, on specious litigation? Is that what's happening? Is that what's happening Because those children? If governments do not want to have to economically support families, they really need to pivot to perpetrators who are causing them to have to ramp up their costs in social care because they're not doing their job. Let's just land it in a fundamental basic parental responsibility world. If governments don't want to pay so much money for unhousedness, for the medical care and medical emergencies of children, for the long-term health impacts, education impacts, then they better start dealing with men as parents and the way they are parenting.

David Mandel:

I know we want to wrap up, but there was a study I go back to from New South Wales looking at child deaths known to the agencies and one is like 61% of the known deaths to this agency of kids domestic abuse was in the family and most of these, like you said earlier, were neglect deaths and there's no way to disassociate that we're from coercive control, that's. You know. I think people think about children's deaths related to domestic abuses as overt homicides, you know shootings, stabbings, beating deaths, but the vast majority are associated or neglect deaths. And the same analysis, same child death report. They talked about the gap in addressing fathers in the casework.

David Mandel:

I think those two things go hand in hand, just like you said. And if we want a lower cost, if we want to keep kids safe, we want to keep kids out of care, we want healthy and strong families.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

If we don't want such a huge housing crisis.

David Mandel:

That's right. So you know the invitation to folks. So you know the invitation to folks. One is you know, if you listen to this before our March 18th to 20th, 25th 2020 conference, come to our Children in Coercive Control conference, virtually or in person.

David Mandel:

So that's sort of the direct page on that one and there is a family law track that a lawyer who's talking about trauma-informed lawyer practice family courts survivors.

David Mandel:

I feel really proud that the model brings together these disparate voices that are often at odds with each other to be in the same space and to listen and to talk.

David Mandel:

But just think about writing down more about how the perpetrator's behavior impacts the functioning of the children, impacts the functioning of the household, impacts the functioning of the other parent.

David Mandel:

And if you start just looking at how did that, even with incidents of physical violence, how did that change the day-to-day function of the kids? If you just commit like for a month, like, do that in your practice, see what you just commit like for a month, like, do that in your practice, see what you find out, see what a change is, see how it helps you really understand the perpetrator's responsibility for harm, connecting the dots, giving context to victim's decision-making, helping you understand. Well, maybe, why did mom fail out of that recovery program? You know how is mom so disconnected from her culture and community? Because I think that there's a trap that we want to avoid, which is that the focus on victims' trauma can be very decontextualized from the perpetrator's behavior, and so this is about fixing. This is why it's so hard sometimes to explain the model, because we're fixing about five to ten things at once with the model.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

That's a whole other topic.

David Mandel:

But try that one thing Look, connect them. That's from the perpetrator's behavior, children's functioning, the adult survivor's functioning, the function of the family, even the perpetrator's functioning Right, because if they lose a job they did that, then that harms the kids as well.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

And not only that. If they're mentally ill, their perpetration is not helping their mental illness.

David Mandel:

Let me tell you, it's exacerbating, helping them recover their trauma from their own trauma. So this is such a big topic, it's obviously central. We've covered it in different ways before, but I hope this gave you kind of a little refresher on the importance of focusing on coercive control in children. If you were here in the room with us, tiberius the dog, it was just….

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

Just sighed, heavily Just sighed. You might have heard that on the tape.

David Mandel:

But thank you for joining us today for this frigid New England…. Frigid New England version of…. Partnered with Survivor. Check out our website safetyattheinstitutecom. Check out our events page. Check out our virtual academy at academysafetyattheinstitutecom.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

And also if you do want to attend the Course of Control and Children Conference, which is going to be Melbourne time zone, just be aware that the virtual events version is going to be. All of the recordings will be available for 12 months, so you'll be able to watch the whole conference on demand whenever you want to. So we are uh david mandel.

David Mandel:

Oh sorry oh, I was jumping in I'm david mandel.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

I'm david mandel, ceo of the safety other institute. I'm ruth ram.

David Mandel:

David Mandel, CEO of the Safety Other Institute.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

I'm Ruth Ramundo Mandel. And I'm the co-owner and chief business development officer.

David Mandel:

And you've been listening to. Partnered with a Survivor.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

Take care everyone Be warm. And we're out, thank you.