Partnered with a Survivor: David Mandel and Ruth Reymundo Mandel

Season 6 Episode 17: From Boys to Men: Dr. Kate Fitz-Gibbon on Coercion, Misidentification & Real Prevention

• Ruth Reymundo Mandel & David Mandel • Season 6 • Episode 17

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A clear map beats chaos when lives are at stake. We sit down with Dr. Kate Fitz-Gibbon to draw a sharper line between “losing control” in life and being coercively controlled by a partner, and we keep children at the center where they belong. Through careful research and straight talk, we unpack why men’s and women’s experiences of intimate partner abuse often look different in impact, fear, and loss of liberty—and how that difference should guide courts, police, and service providers in mapping patterns and identifying who is the victim and who is the perpetrator.

We dive into male self-reports of coercive control, exploring cases that include humiliation, verbal abuse, and financial restriction, as well as accounts driven by entitlement to control over partners or children. Then we widen the lens: Pattern mapping across time exposes the primary aggressor more reliably than incident-by-incident thinking, prevents misidentification under new coercive control laws, and creates a direct line to child safety by holding domestic abusers, prevalently fathers, accountable as parents. If you work in child protection, probation, or family courts, you’ll hear practical ways to separate counter-allegations from documentable behavioral patterns.

The stakes rise when we talk about boys. Australian national data shows high rates of childhood maltreatment among both girls and boys, with domestic abuse often at the center. When boys’ trauma goes unrecognized or untreated, the risk of later violence, school disengagement, and mental health crises increases. We argue for prevention efforts that help boys navigate rejection, loss of control, consent, and emotional vulnerability—while unlearning coercive patterns used to manage relationships and life stress. This must be paired with services truly designed for children. Add culture change that dismantles the “man box,” and you begin to connect the dots between men’s health, family safety, and the prevention of future homicides.

Listen for a practical, compassionate framework that respects male victims, safeguards women and children, and helps systems stop guessing at who is the victim and who is the perpetrator. If this resonates, follow the show, share it with a colleague who needs a better map, and leave a review with one insight you’ll use this week.

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

Check out David Mandel's new book Stop Blaming Mothers and Ignoring Fathers: How to Transform the Way We Keep Children Safe from Domestic Violence.

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Ruth Reymundo :

We're back.

David Mandel :

We're back.

Ruth Reymundo :

Hello there.

David Mandel :

Hi, how are you?

Ruth Reymundo :

I'm very good.

David Mandel :

Yeah.

Ruth Reymundo :

So who are you?

David Mandel :

I am David Mandel, CEO and founder of the Safe and Together Institute. We're always so laughing when we do this. It's so basic, but so important.

Ruth Reymundo :

It's like Mr. Rogers coming in and putting on his sweater, taking off his shoes.

David Mandel :

And who are you?

Ruth Reymundo :

I'm Ruth Ramundo Mandel, and I am the co-owner and chief business development officer at the Safe and Together Institute.

David Mandel :

And what are we doing? What is this?

Ruth Reymundo :

What is this? So today, before we launch into our guests, I just want to do a little bit of a land acknowledgement that we sit on Tungstus Bisako land here in the beautiful state of Connecticut, um near the Farmington River. And it is fall time, and uh the weather is turning and the leaves are turning. Um and we can see all the birds migrating.

David Mandel :

Um tremendous amount of migratory birds right now, including Canada geese, which are often confused and called Canadian geese, and they're actually Canada geese. Sorry to interrupt with that small factoid.

Ruth Reymundo :

Um and we just want to send our regards and our our respect to uh to those who are the the um custodians of the land, and that would be First Nations people, um, and those leaders, past, present, and emerging. And we want to talk a little bit about our guests today.

David Mandel :

And our and our topic, you know, I I am really excited about our guests today, actually, quite excited, and and somebody who uh I'm deeply impressed by and have shared some some experiences with um in terms of working on perpetrator work. But just um, you know, in this field, you have different areas of people sort of focused on one area or another. This is somebody who has such really a broad range of experience um and and and different aspects of of looking at domestic abuse, looking at adults, looking at children, looking at it from different angles. And and for me, and I think for the work of the institute, we're always trying to break down silos. That's one thing. Um, but within that, today sort of had to say, where do we want to do a deep dive? And I'm hoping the conversation is going to really kind of do this deep dive into some of these areas about men and boys, perpetrators, um, you know, and and all these areas that that are I think are so important to talk about because that work is about healing, about change, and about um shifting society. Um, so our guest today is is uh Kate Fitzgibbons, uh, and she's a leading violence against women scholar. She's what I love about this bio and introduction is she's a professor. So I just did this long introduction about domestic abuse, but I want you to connect the dots, and we're gonna ask Kate to connect the dots. She's a professor with the faculty of business and economics at Monash University. She's also an honorary professional uh professorial uh fellow with the Melbourne Law School at the University of Melbourne, and she's got a wide association with international universities. And so, Kate, I I want to welcome you to Partner with Survivor.

Dr. Kate Fitzgibbons:

Thank you so much for having me, David and Roof. I'm thrilled to be here.

David Mandel :

You know, and and we're just gonna jump in.

Ruth Reymundo :

Yeah, did you want to move ahead with your land acknowledgement and then we'll jump in?

David Mandel :

Oh, sorry, I jumped ahead there.

Dr. Kate Fitzgibbons:

Absolutely beautiful, beautiful to hear hear yours. And I am so fortunate to be joining you from the lands of the Wuwandru people of the Kulin Nation, where I have the tremendous privilege of raising my children, working, living, playing on these on these beautiful lands and acknowledging that those lands have never been ceded and that they always were and always will be Aboriginal land. And that's particularly important in the area in which we work, as we know in Australia, that our Aboriginal communities are disproportionately impacted by the topics we're going to discuss today, both in terms of intergenerational violence and the impacts of that violence in communities for all involved, and particularly children and young people.

David Mandel :

And sadly, that subject shared here in the US as well. That same part of uh that same history and context is alive and well, unfortunately, here. Um so thanks, Ruth, for kind of stopping me from rushing. Headlong am I excited? We keep each other. Yeah, we you know, but you know, so now that we we did that very important land acknowledgement, um you know, Kate, I would I I want to jump right in. You know, when I look at your bio, your wide range of interests from impact on youth, perpetrator intervention, femicide, police interactions with survivors, suicide resulting from family violence, just to name a few. Um, you know, you pay attention to the needs of First Nation youth, uh, and others who are not well represented in research, including male victims. It made me think about I was really curious, and that you're associated with a faculty of economics and business. You know, uh what's your origin story? Like, how did you get from point A to point B? And tell us something about yourself that sort of helps our listeners understand where you were and where you are now.

Dr. Kate Fitzgibbons:

Thank you, thank you. Um perhaps just to say I think I'm inherently curious, which is why I keep trying to better understand, you know, this huge challenge and crisis that we have of men's violence against women and children and other men. Um, but in terms of my origin story, it's I've probably appreciated the significance of it more in recent years than I did at the time. But I was incredibly fortunate as a young girl growing up in Australia to grow up in a safe home. And as I say, it's been in my more recent work with children, young people impacted by domestic family and sexual violence, that I've understood how significantly lucky that was, um, and that it wasn't the experience of many. But I did grow up in a safe home and I grew up in what I now know is, you know, probably a pretty naive bubble, that this doesn't happen in my areas, doesn't happen in my school, in my community, amongst my family and friends. And of course, we know that by the sheer prevalence of domestic family and sexual violence, of course, it was happening in and around me. I just wasn't aware. And when I was 16 years old, that bubble was very much shattered. I had a um good friend of mine, and we can pitch of the day at school, found out that her dad had killed her mum. And it just completely kind of challenged my understanding and of safety, of security, of her family life. And so I really came into this first wanting to understand was that an exceptional act? Was that uncommon? And then beyond that, the justice system response in that case was nothing short of horrific. And her father confessed to the killing. He argued that he had been provoked to do so. And the contested trial that followed, it was the victim that was on trial, the deceased victim. We were pulling apart her actions in the media, what she did to provoke him to kill her. And so then again, from a naivety, I thought, what's this? The justice system, does this not work? Do we not, do we not respond well in cases of violence against women, even the most horrific cases? And so you'll see in my work, kind of the early work that I did, and certainly my PhD was very much focused on better understanding legal system responses for men who killed their wives. And then that really set me on a trajectory of kind of going, okay, well, let's understand male violence better. Let's understand, you know, do the patterns that we see in those horrific cases of homicide, are they replicated down the chain? Okay, coercive control, what's that? And uh so that's kind of set me on a lifetime work to better understand not only how we can better respond, but how do we prevent this? And I think that's been really where my more recent work on children and young people, you know, let's we need to start with the next generation and trying to undo the horrific patterns of abuse and the intergenerational cycles of harm that we're seeing. And it's taken me through social sciences, very much taking a law focus as well. And then in recent years, into a faculty of business and economics where in Australia we've seen this huge recognition in the last five to 10 years of the role of workplaces. We spend so much time in the workplace. And so the workplace can be really important, and engaging with corporations can be really important, both in terms of ensuring that we set the right standards of behaviour in workplaces. We know that will follow individuals into other settings. But also in Australia in 2022, we introduced national legislation for paid domestic and family violence leave. So victims' fathers can access up to 10 days' paid leave, including if they're casual employees. But as we know with so many policies, if we just drop that into an HR system and we don't do that meaningful cultural change work to make it acceptable, to access that, to make it trauma-informed, to put the supports around it, that we won't achieve the objective. So it's been really, it's been a really interesting experience for me to be in a faculty of business and economics working with some of the big corporates in Australia to bring that legislation to life in a survivor-centered way.

Ruth Reymundo :

That's wonderful. And I'm very curious to hear how it lands five years down the line after being implemented, because um we know that what starts to happen with victim survivors is that they're seen as a liability, uh, that perpetrators are not often seen as a liability to those organizations, but having to spend resources on supporting survivors is put into that cost and liability bucket in a lot of companies. So I'm very curious to see how that gets focused also towards those who are choosing violence. Um, and I love I love that you have in the mix so many different looks at the the problem, but also the response of the system. Um, because prevention cannot be seen as an individual action. It must be seen as a collective responsibility. So um I know that you had done some work with male victims of coercive control. Um, and I wanted to hear a little bit more about that research that you had done. Um, and and we know that that that working on research and putting, you know, investing into understanding male perpetrators has a lot of controversy around it.

David Mandel :

Male victims?

Ruth Reymundo :

Male victims, sorry, um, has a lot of controversy around it. And I wanted to hear a little bit more about that research.

Dr. Kate Fitzgibbons:

Yeah, thanks so much, Ruth. We I was really fortunate with um some dear colleagues, Sandra Walklate, Ellen Reeves, and Silkie Meyer, to work kind of over the last three to four years on a study to better understand victim survivors' experiences of coercive control. And a key motivation for that was to understand their views on criminalization. We've had some really um big debates across Australian states and territories around the criminalisation of coercive control and what victim survivors want from a justice system response. But as part of that work, we were somewhat surprised by the number of males that we had self-reporting as victims of coercive control. So, to give you a bit of a sense, we conducted an online national survey where we asked individuals to self-identify as victim survivors, and we did take everyone that's self-identified as at face value. Um, and we had we had just over 1,200 responses to that survey, predominantly from female victim survivors, and that makes sense. We know that coercive control is a gendered, gendered use of intimate partner violence in this case, but we had 206 responses from males. And throughout our analysis, it was really clear that the experience that majority of those male victim survivors were self-reporting was fundamentally quite different to the experiences that were being described by females. So we decided to look at look at that differently and to do some work in better understanding what self-identified male victim survivors described. And it was really interesting to see within not only the descriptions of the coercive control and behaviors they'd experienced, but also the impacts of that behavior, the importance of control. These were stories of men who were in control in their relationship, had often lost some form of control. And that might have been control of children, control of their partner, control of their financial circumstances, men who had lost their jobs, who had lost wages, who had been under financial strain, and the impact of losing control in their lives. And so we really looked at that in the way that we understood their experiences of victimization.

David Mandel :

So help me understand this because this is so important. I think it's, you know, we we at the institute talk about the fact that both men and women can be controlling, men and women, both men and women can be violent. And domestic abuse can happen in in heterosexual, same-sex relationships, trans, you know, just the gamma relationships. There's nothing off the table. And that a pattern-based lens that uses coercive control and combines it with looking at child maltreatment behaviors is the is is the key to to a fresh unu-biased objective analysis, like what's going on, and then connect that up to impact, you know, impact on functioning. Can you go a little bit deeper in what you what was self-reported by the men in your study about because how they were impacted and who was doing the impact? Because when I listen to what you're saying, you're it sounds almost a little more like they were in some cases. I want to say this, I want to be really thoughtful about it, and I really want to hear your answer, that in some cases their loss of control was related to circumstances, not to the behaviors of somebody, um, which I don't directly associate with coercive control. You know, life is loss and pain and suffering in life, and things change in our circumstances. And also that it sounds like in some cases, systems were responding maybe to prior abusive behavior, where they were now being um held accountable or lost some liberties that they thought they were entitled to or were entitled to, but because they'd crossed some lines prior, they were now being contained and controlled by systems. So tell me if I'm off base based on yourself reporting.

Dr. Kate Fitzgibbons:

I'm looking straight into our data set.

David Mandel :

I will actually I haven't looked at it directly recently, but but but I you know, I but I really I want our audience to hear this that you were dealing with self-reports. So people you weren't making a judgment prior. You were taking this on face value, and you were listening to these men and their description of their realities, and you were hearing a different reality described by them that you heard. No, I'm not saying every man, but you were hearing lots of differences than from the female study uh participants.

Dr. Kate Fitzgibbon:

Absolutely. And just to start on that piece, I mean that there's a lot there to discuss, but just to start on that, the one thing that really was so clear to me is that in the interviews that we did and the survey that we did with male self-reported victim survivors of coercive control, there was not one man that described fear of being killed.

Ruth Reymundo :

Right. Interesting.

Dr. Kate Fitzgibbons:

And that is so fundamentally different to women's experiences.

Ruth Reymundo :

Well, I want to go back to where you you said that there was a sense of loss of control, and then therefore an assumption that they were experiencing coercive control, because never has it been framed in the experience of criminal coercive control that that is a loss of the experience of control over life situations, but more that a specific person is impeding the personal liberties of oneself. So I wanted to go back to what you had said about feeling the sense of loss of control of a partner. They was that one of the ways that they believed that they were experiencing coercive control was losing control over a partner.

Dr. Kate Fitzgibbons:

It was Roth, and in particular and also losing control over children. And I think this kind of really comes into these wider debates around parental alienation and around where we were receiving the account on one side and not knowing where some of that loss of access to or loss of relationship with a child child was due to safety concerns. Um without a doubt, from these interviews, these were men who were having a hard time and who were experiencing negative impacts of an intimate partner relationship that had not gone well. In some of those cases, there were absolutely behaviors that were self-reported by the men that would constitute, you know, if we look at Evan Stark or other definitions of coercive control, there was humiliation, there was verbal abuse, there was disclosures of emotional and psychological abuse, there was intimidation. Some of the men spoke about having limited access to money and finances or having their access to money and finances controlled, often in the context of where there had been a change in their circumstances, be it employment, be it access to their own funds. Um, so there were absolutely some of those behaviors that we typically understand as part of a coercive and controlling relationship in male perpetrated, female victimized. But there were also some fundamental differences and some things that came to the surface far more than I've certainly seen in research involving female victim survivors. And one of those key things were around loss of access to a child in the context of an intimate, an abusive intimate partner relationship. And that was where some of those debates around parental alienation were certainly coming out. And male, male self-reported victim survivors feeling that the children had been used, had been manipulated against them, had been used as pawns in an abusive relationship, um, and that they had been unfairly impacted by that.

David Mandel :

So, so I have so many questions, and I want to make again one statement for listeners. I I I think it's essential, it's essential. This conversation is so important from a number of different angles, but one of the biggest ones is we don't want to miss true male victims.

Ruth Reymundo :

Right.

David Mandel :

We don't want to not see them. And one of the concerns I have, and I know Ruth has this too, I'll speak for it because I know we've talked about it, is that when people who are perpetrators of abuse hide behind the identity of being a victim, they're making it harder for us to see the true male victims that are there. So that is really critical because we know the people who are ongoing perpetrators of course control and domestic abuse will present to others, it's part of very much the pattern. I'm the victim here. So we know that's part of a perpetrator pattern. So the job of the professionals, whether researchers or practitioners, is to say, I've got two men saying they're victims here. One of them may be a real victim, and one of them isn't. And it's my job to help sort that out. Now, I want, you know, in the situations you said, you said, so you didn't see with any of the men markers of I'm a fearful for my life. Now I want to backdrop this for a second. When I look at US statistics from our our National Institute of Justice, which is one of our kind of premier sort of uh places of looking at these issues, they'll they'll talk about both men and women's use of violence or incidents of violence having similar levels, you know, from an incident point of view. But what is dramatically different is that men do not report the impact on their functioning at the same level, that their way of moving through the world. And I'm wondering if you also saw a difference in even with the men who said, My kids, I can't see my kids, were they describing a wider pattern of being controlled in general, like she prevented me from getting a job, she prevented for me from seeing my brother. She, she, uh what did you see in terms of the patterns with male victims?

Dr. Kate Fitzgibbons:

This is such an important point because we didn't see that loss of liberty that we see in cases of female victimization. We absolutely, and it's a really important point you make, um, Dave, because we know that, you know, we know women are more likely to be victims of coercive control from a male perpetrator in Australia. But certainly there is male victimization. And where there is, there were males within our study that reported impacts on their well-being and significant barriers to seeking help for that. And I think that's a really important point that for, while it may be a smaller number, for those male victims of intimate partner violence, we need to ensure that there are services and there are supports. We know that untreated trauma around males leads to further harmful and risky behaviors. So we do need to ensure that there are services available for those that are experiencing these behaviors that are male and to acknowledge the significant challenge. For a number of men, they spoke about the challenge of identifying as a victim because that really challenged their notion of what it means to be, what it means to be a strong man, what it means to be a heterosexual man in a relationship and what what have they done wrong if they've been a victim from a female partner in particular? So there are significant barriers to reporting for genuine male victim survivors.

Ruth Reymundo :

You know, I I I want to just put put a pin in the reason why we have so many barriers to identifying and supporting male victim survivors. And that is that we really don't do a good job at behavioral pattern mapping, and everybody is confused by the counter allegations and the drama. Everybody gets pulled into the drama rather than grounding themselves in patterns of behaviors and the reality of the law, because it is very important that we understand our limits as professionals in mediating uh interpersonal conflict. And this is where things get a little bit sticky with victim survivors in their expectations of what the the uh law enforcement can do when they come and intervene in a situation, what a lawyer can do, what family courts can do, what a professional can do to intervene in that interpersonal conflict and where the boundaries are where we should be intervening, because certainly there are interpersonal conflicts where there is low-level coercive control, verbal abuse, emotional abuse that may not remove somebody's liberties or functioning, but is absolutely a corrosive element in the home, is not good for the relationship, and is not good for children. But at what level we professionally intervene rather than doing preventative and behavioral social supports is a really important question because then those people are dragged into a court and legal system and our resources, our social resources and intervention. So, really understanding that line is so important, and it is not adequate enough for somebody to feel that they had entitlement to control their partner and their children, and then claim to be a victim of coercive control and everybody to jump to try to support them with services. That is a tremendous waste of our resources, and we must do that in other ways. And that's my little soap box right there.

David Mandel :

Well, and and and and I think it's sort of it, it's even against the backdrop. You know, we've got, I don't know how many states now in Australia or territories that have course control laws, like New South Wales does, Queensland does, you know, those are the two that jump out, but the New South Wales one has intent built into it, you know, and it sounds like a lot of these things wouldn't meet the criminal threshold uh based on what you're describing.

Dr. Kate Fitzgibbon:

No, and that's certainly what we're seeing, you know, that charging numbers in New South Wales is still extremely low given the legislation has only come in in recent months, but we are seeing it play out in ways that we would expect in terms of the gendered nature of coercive control, with female victims being predominantly represented in the cases and male perpetrators. But that's also been a key piece of the education and training and the lead up to those new laws has been ensuring that the gendered nature is understood, the difference of impacts is understood, because there's significant concerns around risk of misidentification and how these laws might be weaponized against victim survivors, maybe misused by people who are using coercive control to abuse the system to continue that against against the victim.

Ruth Reymundo :

There's tremendous amounts of evidence globally to indicate that any law that is made about domestic violence is weaponized against victim survivors and very, very effectively by perpetrators because professionals and law enforcement are terrible at identifying even incident-based domestic violence, and coercive control is so much more complex than that.

David Mandel :

So you're sparky today. I am sparky. You're sparky. I love it. But it, you know, it's I I guess one of the things I'll just put a pitch in, you know, for people who don't know the model, which is that one of the ways historically we've handled this is um uh you map each person's pattern of course control and access to ignoring the kids. And I think a lot of times people will look at these things through a relationship lens, he said, she said, or and you just sit back and you say, if you've got because this is Kate was my experience. I worked, I cut my teeth in the in professionally in a in a state in the US where we had a 15% dual arrest rate, which is extraordinary. 15%, the numbers are normally were two to three percent. I know what they want to describe, right? You know, 15%, which meant in my working with child protection, I would regularly get the statement from the child protection worker. Well, they're both perpetrators. And and so actually, some of the methodology, the safety together, kind of grew out of this environment where I had to help them without using gender or sex or predicting. This was a government agency where people had the right to, they weren't coming for advocacy, they weren't self-identifying, they were they were coming in, they were being pulled into the system. And we had an obligation from my point of view to look at them dispassionally and say, can't say, oh, just because you're a woman, you're a victim, blah, blah. That's not right. So it'd say, tell me about each person's pattern of course control and actions taking to harm the children. And using that that behavioral pattern, based on the information we had, almost always looked like we expect it to look like, which is a male perpetrator and a female victim, looking at each person's pattern. It was almost not even a comparison. It just happened that in this moment the police arrested somebody who was a victim as well. That happened, it just wasn't an act. That was like you're saying, it's it's it's more than that. But I and we would find female perpetrators, primary aggressors, using this methodology, not pre-judging. You know, we'd find and look at abuse in same-sex relationships, identify who a primary aggressor was. So I wanted to say this for people out there, this there's this is not intractable. And you don't need to pre-judge, even though what we know is is is a statistical reality. Uh we can take each of these scenarios on a face value and say, okay, like you did in your research, you listened. You listened to what male survivors male male survivors were saying, what female survivors were saying, and you said these stories sound different. They're telling us different things. They're actually reflecting a different set of experiences. Just even based on self-report, not even based on a professional assessment, right?

Dr. Kate Fitzgibbons:

Yeah, absolutely, Dave. And I think, I think it's so important. And then, you know, your your experience there with the jeweleress as well, it also reminds me that of some of the work. And I know you've been heavily involved in this with behavior change programs, that often one of the biggest gains that can be made is actually getting a male person using violence to understand the impacts of that abuse on their children in a way that often is not immediately or has never been apparent to them. So I think often we are working with people who use violence in the context of an adult intimate partner relationship and don't appreciate the impact that that web of control, that pattern of abusive behaviors is having on the children in their lives. So in the context of our study of them losing access to or losing control over young people, the impact that they've had on those children also may not be apparent.

Ruth Reymundo :

Right. You know, I mean, for walking that line, because there are real male victims, of course, of control and family violence. And we are not doing a good job identifying them, supporting them, and helping them to be able to go through the system to find safety and accountability for their perpetrators. And also understanding that that experience of coercive control may be very different in a male context. And we have to really look at that from the standpoint of the thresholds in the law that we're using to be able to hold people accountable. And in most instances, coercive control is defined as a severe loss of liberty, not simply loss of contact with a partner who doesn't want contact with you. That idea that you're being victimized because a person leaves you in a consensual relationship, even if you've made commitments, is an indicator, a red flag, a marker of a tremendous amount of entitlement. And not even if you've lost contact with children because you had a pattern of being a poor parent or because you were violent towards your family members. So I'm always fascinated by how the male entitlement hits that sense of victimization, where the loss of entitlement that they perceive is theirs is considered abusive. So that means your partner leaving you is abusive. That means people keeping you from your children when you've been violent or criminal or child abusive or sexually abusive is abusive. And so, how do we prevent how do we pull apart those experiences, Kate, particularly with research, and help practitioners to be able to really contextualize the male victim experience to help them when they are really truly experiencing domestic abuse, not when they think they're experiencing domestic abuse because they don't have the entitlement to control other people.

Dr. Kate Fitzgibbons:

Yeah, Ruth, I think I think it's critical because of course we also we know we don't have enough resources in the system to respond adequately often to those that are at greatest risk of serious harm death. And so we can't have the system being clogged up with people that aren't genuine victims. I think exactly as you've said, I agree with so much that understanding the understanding the impacts of the behaviors, but also understanding the motivations for the behaviors. So almost taking like what they're saying, you know, I'm experiencing coercive control, taking that at understanding what is motivating the use of the behavior and then what is the impact of it often belies the difference between those victim survivors that are being coercively controlled as a pattern of abuse to completely destroy their sense of self and liberty as a human, as an individual.

David Mandel :

Right.

Dr. Kate Fitzgibbon:

As we've seen, you know, absolutely documented in so many cases of female victimization, and then the impact on that in their lives, as opposed to someone who is losing control, fearing a loss of control in their lives for reasons that may have a sound basis.

David Mandel :

It's uh, you know, coming back to this, and I want to pivot to the discussion where you kind of brought up youth and children, and I want to kind of explore that more in a moment, but I think it is this um keep coming back to describing behaviors, describing patterns of behaviors. It's not just this moment of time where you lost contact with your kids. It's putting in the in the context of a longer period of time. Uh, what was the pattern of behaviors? What did you experience? What other what have you experienced in terms of loss of liberties, right? You know, across your functioning? Are you afraid of what are you afraid of if you pursue this course of action? I mean, this is what we hear a lot from survivors. Coercion is isn't just what happened to me yesterday, it's what happened to me a year ago or five years ago that I'm worried is going to play out again now or in the future if I win in court. Or uh I'm worried that, I mean, this is like in and Kate, you know this. One of the more confusing moments for legal professionals is when a survivor who says, I've been abused, this person's harmed me, they've used violence against myself, my kids, but I want them to see the kids. And and that, and and what's not being explored is what are you afraid is gonna happen if he doesn't get to see the kids? So uh, and and the statement might be, I'm worried that they're gonna die, they're gonna, I'm gonna die. So what's better is giving him contact and us living.

Dr. Kate Fitzgibbons:

You know, and what a terrifying situation to be in. And, you know, that pattern of abusive behavior we also know can take years, can take decades for an individual to even understand, you know, in that same study, the number of interviews that, you know, I was privileged to learn from the horrific experiences that some victim survivors had had lived through. The amount that said, you know, in a way, I was relieved when he finally hit me because suddenly a decade or years of coercive and controlling behaviors made sense. Right. But in a way that I hadn't been able to. So I think that clarity of that pattern, because of the way, you know, it fogs the mind. It absolutely instills doubt in individuals about their own self-worth, their own understanding of their lives, it can take so long for someone to understand it for what it is.

David Mandel :

So I'm gonna pivot us a little bit, if that's okay. Yeah, yeah. You know, and you you said, I want to talk about youth, and I won't and you said something that I really appreciated earlier. You talked about becoming interested, it's going back to your origin story, in male violence against um women and children. And and oftentimes we're struggle, and I know I struggle. I was talking on a call today with somebody, we were on a call today with somebody, a researcher out of the UK, you know, about the tension between sort of the field or discussion about violence against women and girls, and and the place where in that strategy or that response, what we're really talking about actually, in part, is male violence against men. I think you said this against boys, women, and girls. And and can am I capturing, did I hear correctly when you sort of the words you use?

Dr. Kate Fitzgibbons:

We can't forget boys. I think this is a really important point. I think we do a disservice not only to our efforts to address victimization, but also to prevent perpetration when we forget, when we forget boys. Now, we've been really fortunate in Australia, if I can say that, to have nearly two years ago now the Australian Childhood Maltreatment Study, which gave us a national capture of the prevalence of violence against children in our in our country. And, you know, yes, it shows in some categories that girls are overrepresented in victimization, but in a significant number of forms of childhood abuse, there is high victimization rates amongst both girls and boys. So we are doing a disservice to boys when we forget them in that conversation. And what we also know, and it's not deterministic, and I really always want to stress that, but we know that young boys who are victimized, who experience different forms of domestic and family violence or child sexual abuse are at high risk of going on to use violence themselves. And that's heartbreaking. Like if you think of a young, a young person who has been a victim first and foremost, and they go on to then be someone who's using violence, like what a horrific life outcome for them in so many ways, as well as the ripple effect impacts on the people, the people in their lives. Um, so I think we need to do a lot better in terms of paying attention to victimization of boys, the impacts it has, but also the help-seeking needs. Um I've been really fortunate in in recent months, um over the last year, to be on the advisory group of Jesuit Social Services Adolescent Man Box Study. And that just provides such a clear call to action for us in terms that we need to upskill our young boys and men on how to seek help.

Ruth Reymundo :

Yeah.

Dr. Kate Fitzgibbons:

And we need to ensure those services are there when they do.

Ruth Reymundo :

Yeah. I mean, you know, that Australian maltreatment study is just globally pertinent and an amazing study. I just want to encourage other countries to really replicate that large population study because it's not just about uh looking predictively at the amount of support that our services have to give to those populations. It's also about loss of economic power because you're you're allowing those children to really become have these huge deficits through domestic abuse and child abuse that materially impact their ability to be what we would call productive citizens, which I know is what the government is concerned about. What we're concerned about is healthy, uh healthy humans and and and governments and and societies. But one of the things that we do not we we talk about um boys uptaking violence as if it's a physical act alone. And we often do not speak about the the way the coping mechanisms, the mental behaviors, the emotional responses, the anxiety, and uh all of the behaviors that are taught to that child, which then need active reteaching to unlearn. And we're not doing that. We're not doing that in schools adequately, we're not doing that in therapy programs with children adequately. And one of the reasons we're not doing that adequately, and I'm going to give an example from the UK, is even though we've identified that domestic violence is that children are victims of domestic violence, when we focus on the therapizing of those children after domestic abuse, we often make them responsible for having contact with their perpetrator, and that they need to be well and open to that contact. So we're really messing it up on a lot of levels in a lot of different places because we don't understand the post-domestic abuse support, behavioral support, not just emotional support, but real behavioral reconditioning about how a child responds to stress, to challenge, to loss of control because their perpetrator has taught them how to respond. So normalization.

Dr. Kate Fitzgibbons:

They've grown up in homes where there is a normalization of coercion child. And you know, for young boys in particular, if that is the example of masculinity of what it means to be a partner, a husband, a father, yeah, you know, that's that's their go-to. And, you know, I think there's some some really important points, certainly in the Australian context, and I think it resonates in others as well. We've predominantly responded to children as an extension of the primary carer who is usually mum. And where we've mistakenly assumed that their needs, their risks are the same as mums. So if we cover mums, we'll have the children. I think that's where we've missed opportunities to intervene to support young people in crisis, but also to support their recovery and healing and to ensure that that trauma does not go on untreated. Right. Because as you say, that is where we get that range of different behaviors that is exhibited. And in particular, I'm really struck, you know, we see amongst adults, and we see as one of the leading recognized risks for intimate partner femicide where relationship separation, jealousy, rejection. But are we teaching young boys how to deal with rejection in safe ways? Are we teaching them when they have fear they're at risk of losing control how to sit comfortably with being told no? How to sit in a non-violent, non-coercively controlling way with that. I think there's so much more education work that we can do with young, young boys before crisis that will be of benefit to girls as well, of course. Um, and then we need to have a whole service system for them. And it has to be a service system that is designed for children.

Ruth Reymundo :

In Australia, children at the moment are being squeezed into an ill-fitting within system services that are designed for adults, by adults, without and also that at the same time, the threshold for criminal responsibility is being drastically dropped by certain regions. So if you aren't doing the work to try to support those children, be they men, you know, boys, girls, men, you know, we aren't actually doing well by people. We're we're really terrifying youth.

Dr. Kate Fitzgibbons:

Both of our countries have got, you know, pretty um, pretty horrific track records in the youth justice space. Um, and you know, Australia, we are seeing more and more punitive youth justice policies. And what there hasn't been, I don't think, enough recognition of, and I've written about this with my colleague Matt Tyler from Jesuit Social Services, is that it's not a hundred percent overlap overlap, but in so many cases, those young men that are coming to the attention of the youth justice system are victim survivors of abuse first and foremost. They have never had any service system response to their victimization yet. The second they start using violence, suddenly the symptom sees them very clearly.

David Mandel :

Right. So that's I want to I want to weave together a couple of things here that that I think will will be interesting to talk about. I'd love to hear your perspective. Uh you know, it not formal study, you know, but but did some work out with a state in the western part of the US, which with their child serving system, with their juvenile justice system, with their juvenile probation officers, and said um they self-report, this was numerous focus groups. 100% of our caseload of of youth on on on for on monitoring for criminal offenses come from home with domestic abuse. 100%. That was their self-report. They said, we get no training as probation, juvenile probation to to deal with domestic abuse, understand it. And they said, but you know what really the problem is and what most of the cases are are kids not listening to their mothers, setting boundaries about phones going out and and doing these other things and them getting aggressive with their mothers and boys and girls. And and I said, Well, what's your work with the fathers and the stepfathers and the and the boyfriends? And it's just almost like their eyes glazed over because they had no context. And I'm just wondering, you know, Kate, across all your work, because you do work on perpetrator programs and you do this work with youth. What you're seeing, you and you know my work, some which is sort of this low expectation of men as parents, is this reoccurring theme. I think it's it's prevalent in what you're talking about, Ruth, about sort of if we're lowering a criminal accountability, are we still, you know, where are we with holding men accountable as parents? And so where what do you see as a theme around how the system responds with or without expectations for men as parents when they're using violence and you know, in these homes? What's your what's your take on that?

Dr. Kate Fitzgibbons:

Oh, I mean, I think, you know, in Australia we've been so we've been so guided by a lot of your expertise and work in this space, David, in terms of how we work with fathers in particular who are using violence. Um, and that's you know, safe and together has been w woven throughout so much of our perpetrator programs and suites of interventions. But I think there's a couple of really important points here. Like one, we know that for men who are using violence who are fathers, getting them to understand the impact of their behavior on their children is perhaps one of the best evidence ways to encourage behavior change. So that's really important. But what that doesn't do, of course, is create a loop of accountability back to the young people that have experienced that behaviour and allowing them to understand that their father has been held accountable for that behaviour, that he has now, that he has now understood the impacts. So I think we've we've been very low in terms of our engagement in children and young people where it's safe and where it's appropriate to do so, in understanding what's happening there when their father is undertaking behaviour change and better understanding the impacts on the young people in his lives. And myself and colleagues Jasmine McGowan and Nicola Helps have written briefly about that, just in terms of interviews we did with affected family members of program participants and just the complete lack of awareness of that process amongst young people that were involved. Um, the other piece that I think is, of course, so important is where, as you say, there is no accountability for the violent behaviours used by adults in a family home, and then a young person's perhaps you know, understandable confusion in the youth justice space when they're suddenly held very starkly to account for the very same behaviors. And so a commitment by a government to, and we have in Australia state and territory and the federal level, a commitment to address domestic family and sexual violence is has to be interrelated to our commitment and how we approach youth justice as well, where they are victim survivors first and foremost. And we're just not seeing that thread at the moment.

Ruth Reymundo :

Right. You know, it's really interesting because um there is a there's a kind of a colossal failure of understanding the the inception point of violence within a family, that we're really willing to absolve certain perpetrators. We don't even need to name who, but we just are very willing to absolve certain perpetrators. Yet at the same time, once once young juveniles, particularly boys, start displaying similar behaviors, which they've been taught, or or or self-defend in the context of a family, um, then we start to see that criminalization happen. And and we're pretty horrible, I think, globally, distinguishing between uh crimes of violence between strangers as opposed to crimes of violence within families. And we tend to give a lot of leeway to certain perpetrators of violence and not others. And it's very interesting who those perpetrators are. They tend to be the ones that have money and power and the ability to influence the judicial system, whereas those who do not tend to get pulled into the criminal system and penalized for acts of resistance, penalized for self-defending, because we do know that a large percentage of children that go into the criminal system, the juvenile criminal system, have domestic and family violence in their homes. And if our first response is to criminalize them rather than trying to work with the families and where that's coming from, and then remediate that behavior. Again, I'm gonna say it, we've failed. We've failed to really support ourselves. Yeah, yeah.

Dr. Kate Fitzgibbons:

I I just agree so much. You can see my reaction, but we've absolutely failed. The first time that a young person who's experienced violence receives a response is in a police interview, that is a failure. Yeah, particularly in cases where they have sought connection through community or have sought to find services, and those services, child-centered services, simply aren't available. So it is absolutely, absolutely a failure as a society, I believe, and a failure of prevention and early intervention efforts as well. If we can get in and work with children as victim survivors in their own right, first and foremost, you absolutely, I feel so confident you'd have to believe that perpetration rates will go down over time.

David Mandel :

You know, for me, it's just such a pouring conversation, such a good conversation. I always love Ruth, your sort of ability to kind of get to this really kind of root and and uh foundational kind of kind of I have no patience tonight. Seriously. You're sparky. But but I I what I want to add to this is when I listen and I think about this, is I think about the struggle that's going on in the global, what I see in the global conversation about boys and men and men's health, and and how we're really we really seem to be struggling to connect the dots, what's in men's best interests, what's in what's in their interest of their mental health. You know, there's no question men are dying too young. You know, in Australia, it's 37% or something like that. Prematurely in the US, it's 53%. Prematurely, you know, that the suicide rate for men is four times what it is of women. Like these are incontrovertible numbers to me. There's, you know, there's mental health, there's there's anxiety, there's depression, there's there's substance abuse in the male population. Now, for me, it's really important to connect the dots. Many of those men are coming out of homes with domestic abuse, with their dad's violence. We need to connect the dots between that. When we say men have depression and it shows up as externalizing behavior or aggression or anger, we need to connect the dots to say some of those men are the coercive controlling men we're talking about, and they're depressed. They have both things that we need to look at, those things. And I and I think it's for me the the I look for these kind of uh points of um convergence. We have to get better at, and Kate, I'm really interested in your thought about this. We have to get better at seeing the role functionally that men play in families strengthening and weakening them. That that a lot of whether it's probation, whether it's child protection, those fields, like you said, have been very mother-centric. They're very focused. If they focus on the kids, it's through the lens of the primary caregiver, which is often the mom. And therefore, we have a whole set of interventions and lenses we put on the family where the father, good or bad, strengthening or weakening, is invisible to the system and the professionals. So I wonder if that's if it's you see that mirrored in your work and your research and what you can say about that.

Dr. Kate Fitzgibbons:

Yeah, I think that that really resonates, Devin, and you know, through through your commentary as well as others, been following some of those debates around men's health and men's violence. I think there's a couple of important points, and certainly in the Australian context to Matt, like male violence hurts everyone.

Ruth Reymundo :

Yeah.

Dr. Kate Fitzgibbons:

And men and boys are included within that. Like we know in Australia from our national personal safety survey that men are most likely to be victims of violence. They are more likely to be victimized by a male perpetrator outside the home. So that acquaintance, that male male violence. So men are hurting men as well. It's not in the same context as in intimate partner relationships and in family violence at the same rates, but male violence is hurting everyone. So that is really important. And then I think with that children, young people piece as well, that those boys that are being victimized, that are not receiving a satisfaction or receiving any response in far too many numbers are growing up to be those people who use violence. Um, and absolutely that has health implications with it for themselves and others. For me, it's that, you know, absolutely coming back to that plea for kind of prevention, early intervention with children and young people. If we do that well, we should see school engagement rates go up. We should see our boys better engage in school because they're safe and supported to do so. We should see mental health rates improve. We should see suicide rates amongst boys go down. I truly think violence prevention, early intervention efforts can be a key component and that we miss such an important part of the men's health space if we don't, if we don't do that.

Ruth Reymundo :

You know, I don't just think about violence prevention and intervention as the main pathway to men's mental health and stability, because I think that part of that is social reconditioning. And that is, is if you have a fundamental belief that you have an entitlement to control another person. See, we're going back to the beginning of the research here, where you believe that in a consensual relationship, somebody leaving you, you are now a victim of a crime. Or if you have perpetrated violence or you have substance misuse and you have patterns of behaviors that have alienated your own family, that you are a victim because somebody doesn't want to have something to do with you. So I also think about that deep conditioning around entitlement. What entitlements that we are saying that certain people have that other people don't have. And that is deeply social and it crosses spheres. It's not just about teaching children in school, it's about modeling in other contexts as well, not just in our services, but in the way that we talk about relationship and how we talk about what's meaningful in relationship and what creates healthy bonds between humans and relationship, being really clear and direct about the behaviors that will break those bonds, that will cause us to be lonely, that will cause us to be isolated, and understanding that collectively as a society, we have a duty to support relationship behaviors that are going to be healthy, connected, that are going to lead to children who are nurtured, who don't have disabilities through violence or trauma or physical harm, who don't have education gaps, to set that expectation that that's what a good parent does. A good parent will help their child to be able to get the resources physical, emotional, educational, social, that they need in order to be functional and successful in society. And these are all things that we need to support in our own way. I think about doing that through storytelling, through media, through prevention programs, through schooling, through, you know, just we really need to change the way that we talk about relationships. Because if not, men are gonna continue to be lonely. They are going to continue to be the most prevalent perpetrators of violent crimes globally. They're going to continue to be incarcerated, and their liberties are continue to be impacted. Their relationships are going to continue to be impacted negatively and adversely. And we cannot really put a dent in the causes of male loneliness, isolation, antisocial behavior, and violence unless we all learn to reframe the way we talk about relationship. So I know that's super big, but uh if you're out there listening, it's a big problem, Roth. It's a big problem. And you may have your little part to play, you know, but but I think really reframing how we speak about relationships and what is a healthy relationship. How are men connected? Where do they feel connected is so important?

Dr. Kate Fitzgibbons:

Yeah. I I really agree, Roth. I think for me, you know, that has a lot of synergies with the work that, you know, I've mentioned the work Jesuit Social Services have done on the adolescent man box. And that kind of stems from the work they previously led in partnership with Respect Victoria on the man box study, which I know has been done in several countries. But that really drives home the importance of that broader work that we do on challenging society norms, gendered norms that we know are not serving men or women well, and that are that underpin in many cases the use of male violence. Those expectations around what it means to be a real man and then you know what it means to be a tough boy are not serving, are not serving anyone well. And so I absolutely agree with you, like that kind of multifaceted interventions across parenting, upskilling parents to know making good fathers. Yeah. Making sure we have those different models of what it means and what it looks like to be a good father, to show vulnerability is so important. But also programs, education across schools, across all the settings that children and young people kind of live and play, um, to really try and challenge some of those norms that our society, our patriarchal societies are just rooted in.

David Mandel :

Yeah. Yeah. So Kate, I'm just wondering as we move to wrapping up, is anything you want to just highlight out of this intersection of work with perpetrators, work with youth, um, that you think our listeners need to hear about, you know, your observations and and you think are critical learnings that you've had.

Dr. Kate Fitzgibbons:

Uh a couple of a couple of things come to mind and perhaps just um kind of the different threads at which we've spoken about the the work that's needed to be done. You know, we're dealing with, and you know, you mentioned the with some kind of admiration, the work of the Australian Child Male Treatment Study. I think what has been really important in Australia is it's shown us the scale of the challenge. Like we're in a country here where nearly one in three children in Australia experience physical abuse. Just over 28% experience sexual abuse. So we would be completely naive to think that unless we have transformative response at scale, that we're going to address this issue when that is what our youngest generation are growing up with. That's the normalization of violence in their lives. These are everyday experiences. And I don't think as a country yet, we've really kind of come to terms with that. I think we do still see it as something that happens over there to someone else's children that some other families are dealing with. This should be everybody's concern. And kind of, you know, you've set out the importance route of the economic argument. You know, I hope the moral argument gets people across the line, the kind of general human need to the economic argument is huge as well.

David Mandel :

So just if I can underline what you're saying, we had Dr. Darrell Higgins on our show. We're having him at our conference in in in March. But just I think the number for domestic abuse exposure is even higher. It's almost 40%. And I think two out of three, I'm saying roughly Australian adults report some form of childhood maltreatment. If I've got the study numbers correct. So not only do you have this so this huge number on child sexual abuse, 28%, you know, physical maltreatment, but if you it's not, it's the norm. It's not the outlier. It's it's uh, you know, and domestic abuse leads the pack, and it's not only, and I can't remember how a Dr. Higgins says it, but it's not only the most common one, but it's kind of an organizing. I I kind of want to remember the language use, but it's kind of an organizing or leading indicator and kind of is heavily associated with these other forms of maltreatment, which shouldn't be a surprise.

Dr. Kate Fitzgibbons:

Right. Exactly, which children are experiencing multiple forms and kind of that commonality of experiences of domestic abuse within it. And so, you know, I think we should all be pushing our governments to to care for children. I mean, when did that when did that become something that should be hard? But and to really to fund, to commit across that full spectrum of prevention, early intervention, crisis response, absolutely, but then recovery and healing. Like we need to imagine and put into place a service system response that supports these young people to go on and recover, heal, and to thrive. And that's where I think a significant portion of our adult perpetration will also start to start to reduce.

Ruth Reymundo :

Yeah. Well, we're we're so grateful that you've come on to share your extensive research with our listeners. And is there anything before we move to wrapping up that you would like to add uh to the conversation?

Dr. Kate Fitzgibbons:

Or just so grateful for the opportunity um to you both. And as globally, you know, there are contextual and really important contextual factors, but we're also dealing with a very similar problem. So I think the the importance of international dialogue, sharing what works, sharing the challenges is so valuable. So thank you. Thank you so much for adding space.

David Mandel :

And thank you so much for your your your passionate engagement. And uh just to kind of tie things together, I just want to acknowledge as somebody who also grew up in a home that was safe in many ways and then had some experiences that I opened up to listening to women in my life, that I want to acknowledge that that you had a choice, what to you is history, you know, confronted with your friend's uh loss and the murder um by their father uh against their against the mother, which is one of the worst things that could happen to a kid. You know, you know, and is often not treated by the way as child protection as a critical incident, you know, it's sort of amongst other failings. But you had a choice, Kate. I really want to acknowledge you'd have choice in a moment to be open up and be curious, walk towards that uh experience and seek to understand it better, um, or walk away from it. I think a lot of people in those moments shut down. They they they step around them, they find them awkward, they find them hard, they they may feel passion or kind of response to the moment, but they don't organize their life around it. And I just want to appreciate you for your your you responding to the moment, not only to your friend's need, but to the deeper need that was implicit in the moment and and building your research and your career on it. So thank you so much for for all the things that you do.

Ruth Reymundo :

I I really just want to to to second that and say for any researchers out there that you are the voices of women who have been killed by their partners when you research domestic abuse and family violence. And that is a really critical thing, and even also the voices of children who don't have a voice in the system or may never have their stories told. So we just appreciate you so much.

David Mandel :

Yeah, thank you.

Ruth Reymundo :

Thanks for telling the the the story of people's experiences so we can better serve them.

David Mandel :

So you you've been listening to us talk to Dr. Kate Fitzgibbons, and we're really been honored out the conversation. And this has been our latest episode of Partner with Survivor.

Ruth Reymundo :

Yes.

David Mandel :

And uh, I am still David Mandel, CEO and founder of the Save Together Institute here at the end of this call.

Ruth Reymundo :

And I'm still Ruth Raimundo, and we are out of the