Partnered with a Survivor: David Mandel and Ruth Reymundo Mandel
This podcast is a series of conversations.
What started as a series of intimate conversations between Ruth and David that ranged from personal to professional experiences around violence, relationships, abuse, and system and professional responses which harm, not help, has now become a global conversation about systems and culture change. In many episodes, David and Ruth are joined by a global leader in different areas like child safety, men and masculinity, and, of course, partnering with survivors. Each episode is a deep dive into complex topics like how systems fail domestic abuse survivors and their children, societal views of masculinity and violence, and how intersectionalities such as cultural beliefs, religious beliefs, and unique vulnerabilities impact how we respond to abuse and violence. These far-ranging discussions offer an insider look into how we navigate the world together as professionals, as parents, and as partners. During these podcasts, David and Ruth challenge the notions which keep all of us from moving forward collectively as systems, as cultures, and as families into safety, nurturance, and healing.
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Partnered with a Survivor: David Mandel and Ruth Reymundo Mandel
Season 6 Episode 21: David Challen on How Growing Up with Coercive Control Warps Childhood and Manhood
The house looks perfect from the street—until you step inside and feel the air shift. We sit with survivor, campaigner, and author David Challen to trace the shape of coercive control through a child’s eyes: a mother’s world shrinking, a father’s rules governing every room, and a son trying to earn love by molding himself to a script that never fit. This is not a tidy true-crime arc. It’s the long echo of control on identity, mental health, and the stories boys are told about how to be men.
David unpacks how “small” acts—who can visit, when dinner is served, how money is spent—stack into a total system of power. He names what many miss: economic abuse as a lever, isolation as a tactic, gaslighting as the daily weather. We talk about the man box and the costs of belonging, from silence to self-erasure. We tackle the hard part too: accountability that goes beyond time served. Real repair means naming strategy and impact, especially on children who lived the consequences, and measuring change by consistent, relational behavior over time.
For practitioners, we get specific. Speak to children separately. Document patterns, not just incidents. See acting out, addiction, or stoicism as possible signals of exposure to domestic abuse. For schools, use relationship education to decode media, practice empathy, and give boys language without shame. For survivors—especially adult child survivors—claiming identity and community can turn a private burden into shared understanding and support.
Terms like coercive control, boys’ mental health, domestic abuse, economic abuse, restorative justice, and healthy masculinity thread through this conversation for a reason: They’re the keys to earlier recognition and real change.
If this resonates, share it with someone who needs language for what they’ve lived. Subscribe, leave a review, and tell us: what does real accountability look like to you?
Find David's book here: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/93021229-the-unthinkable
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.
I think we're back.
Ruth Reymundo:We're back.
David Mandel :I think we're just having some technical difficulties. I hope we're recording. It looks like it's recording.
Ruth Reymundo:Okay.
David Mandel :Hi. Do we have a partner with the Survivor still? I'm still partnering with the Survivor. Oh, you are? I'm still partnered with you. And this is David Mandel. I'm going to introduce him.
Ruth Reymundo:Yes.
Speaker 3:Reverse here, the CEO of the Safe and Together Institute.
Ruth Reymundo:And it's Ruth Reymundo Mandel. She is the business chief business development officer of the Safe and Together. She is a co-owner. I know and do that. And you're listening to another episode of Partner with Survivor. We're really happy to have you join us. And just before we jump into anything, yeah, I just want to do a quick land acknowledgement. So we are on Tunxis, Mosako Land, uh, the land of uh the greater Algonquin tribe. And um it is firmly fall time here uh and a bit dreary today with lots of rain and the leaves are coming down. So we are heading on into New England winter, which is harsh. Um, but this is beautiful land, and we send our regards to those indigenous elders, past, present, and emerging. Um, and we also send our love to the custodians of the land. All right. You want to introduce our guests?
David Mandel :Yeah, before I do that, I just want to remind people we're kind of coming towards the end of our sixth season. We are, and which is amazing to me. And if you like this show, please follow us, share it, subscribe, do all the things, write comments and reviews. We just found those recently. And um, today's show, I am very excited about this um guest, David Challen, who will be introducing in a moment. For me, I've been spending a lot of time recently um talking about how um issues of boys and men's mental health is really on the radar internationally, uh, boys' uh progress and achievement academically and socially, discussions of men and boys in suicide and depression. And I've I've really been struck, and I've written about this, and some of you may have seen this, about how a lot of people who are advocating for um boys and men's mental health, which I keep firmly behind, um kind of run up against a conversation where they feel uncomfortable, don't talk about men's violence against boys and men, you know, as part of this. And this is part of uh not only a domestic abuse conversation, but a wider conversation. And so for me, having David Challen on here, who's a uh longtime campaigner around coercive control, who speaks out of his own personal experience of uh living with a father who was coercively controlling. And um, you know, I can't even say that the scenario ended with his mom um killing his father uh in the context of that abuse because it didn't end at that point. And we're gonna talk with David about that, you know, and just it's a that's one of the points is that this is an ongoing uh reality for children that grow up in these homes. And um David's just published a book, uh, The Unthinkable, A Story of Control, Violence, and My Mother. Uh, and we're gonna be talking to David right now about his campaigning, his experience, his his sense of these issues around boys growing up in homes with with domestic abuse and family violence. So, David, welcome um to partner with Survivor.
David Challen:Cheers, thank you for inviting me. I really appreciate it, Paul.
David Mandel :Yeah, so we just like you. Um, I know many people know your story, but can you give us really a kind of a uh a brief, and I know it's hard, you know, synopsis or kind of context for people who may not be familiar about it it was your your mom, your brother, yourself in the context of your dad's uh course of control.
David Challen:Yeah, so um in 2010, my mother killed my father in the family home. And as surreal as that statement is to anyone listening or watching, it's as surreal as always to say it or affirm in my life. Uh, but what had escalated until that moment felt like a snowball effect. I'd lived with my mom after she separated from my father, and um, and when it came to the killing, it was just a horrific kind of nature of seeing my mother uh go to a criminal trial and be convicted of murder and then be sentenced to um uh 22 years and was brought down to 18 years on appeal. And I was 23 years old at the time. I was first told at work, waiting tables, that my father had been found dead um by a cousin, and um it was yeah, just caught in the grotesque of the surreal. And um I was uh taken back by a police officer and my cousin to my cousin's family home, and um I could hear cracks through the the walkie-talkie, you know, piecing together. It was like, where's my mother? How has my father died? I was all ruminating this up in my head and screwing around around what's happened. And she was on Beachy Head, which is a famous suicide spot in in England, it's a big cliff, and uh, she was about to end her life, and it took a suicide prevention team hours to speak her down off that cliff, and then obviously arrest her on what came of the events of her conviction. Uh, but yeah, writing the unthinkable is is the moment to center point of my life, is the unthinkable moment that you you each talk about in terms of the fatal domestic abuse, the escalation of what we proliferate on understanding about, uh, which is namely what we'll talk probably about is coercive control. So this story is really an intergenerational story of searching through my history, affirming a fog-like reality of that atmosphere and what it grew into. Um, my outcome, my family's outcome is just a permeantation of harm. Um, it's um one that really is seen, but one that very much exists.
Ruth Reymundo:You know, David, I just I have to acknowledge as a as a as a survivor as well that the the pain and the complication of that situation, just the tremendous amount of feeling. Um, because even though our, you know, we have parents that are violent or coercive, and we know that they are uh not not easy, comfortable to live with, they're not they're they're harming us on levels, it's always really hard to lose a parent to that type of violence. And so I just I want to put a pin in that, that that itself is such a hard, it's a it's a difficult situation for a child to be in, to mourn the loss of somebody who abused them, perhaps, um, or to mourn a parent that you didn't know was abusing your your co-parents, you know. Um, so just want to bring that into the room. Um, you know, we we talk a lot about growing up in a pattern when we grow up in coercive control. Um and I'd really like to hear from you what you think people still misunderstand about what boys and men experience of those environments of coercive control.
David Challen:Yeah, so coercive control didn't come into my language until um my mother's lawyer that helped you know eventually free her from prison, recognizing the the scale of abuse that had led to a loss of control. I had always kind of I guess at a pit in my stomach at the age of five, it felt like it was an acorn of that something that was inherently bad about my father. And that's where the intergenerational nature comes into it. Everything else I normalized, you know, how my father would control the smallest details in the home, and you know, if dinner was too late, or if friends were coming around, exterior people from the home very rarely came in, and if they came in, they were met with glares. My father would try to isolate my mother. Uh, by um, she made a friend at anti natal um antenatal classes and it was coming over for dinner, and um my father didn't want that person around and said, Well, I made a pavlova, he just threw the pavlova in the bin and said, You'll have to cancel now. Small accumulative pattern of acts that build into a systemic oppressive system of control. Um, I guess we could talk traditionally and name what that is in uh a male-led household, which is patriarchy. I think we have to kind of name it. But as a young boy, I I normalized that behaviour. I normalized the way he my father would kind of meet out his his control and submissiveness of my mother and how he would gaslight her when she tried to affirm her reality. You see, my mother in the um murder trial was painted as a jealous, jealous, vengeful woman, which is so many um abused women who kill their tormentors are. But she was a woman trying to um affirm her reality from which to leave it. I think it's probably a good place to say my mother met my father at the age of 15 and he was 21. That's that's grooming in today's society. Um, and it but it's grooming back then, and it's using it's someone who's a predator and you know, using a pliable mind to kind of conscript of what an idea is of a relationship, which is anything but healthy. Uh, but even at that young age growing up, I could feel that sense of I describe in the book a fog of control. Um and the in the front of my cover, I can hold it up here. It's uh you know, it's the it's my uh house, 3D model of the house, the pristine, middle upper class house, and how these these homes that we acknowledge or don't acknowledge as having domestic abuse are are shuttling families, you know, prim and proper, in and out, and you never they never look as if they're victims of domestic abuse. And so that this has always been the conversation in my life is what is coerced control and exposing that this lives behind doors and even doors behind that, and even upon the foundations of that home, a life before it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, you know, I just want to I I want to take some of the responsibility off of your little boy and tell and tell everyone who's experienced uh normalizing in their head the behaviors, of course, of control or abuse, that if you were a child, it was people around you who were normalizing it, that we didn't have the language to be able to speak it. And children aren't responsible for identifying it and having the language to speak their experience. It's it's the adults and institutions and professionals who are supposed to be able to wade through that experience and identify places where a child or an adult is being abused because that language uh hasn't existed, because society around us very much props up those behaviors and makes them normal in media and and excuses them constantly. Um, you know, but I know that that's kind of the direct harm that happens to kids through bystanders, not intervening and not identifying. So can you talk about some of the ways that were the most significant that your father's behavior affected your daily functioning, your stability, and your emotional world beyond simply witnessing the abuse?
Speaker 1:Yes, so I would probably describe my family as having you know traditional family. He sat at the top, it was the person that earned all the money, and my mother was everything else. She was cook, cleaner, um, carer for us. Uh, she'd help him with his taxes, help him run his business as well, be his accountant, and help him. He was a second-hand car show, um, sole trader. You so he used to buy and sell cars. And so my mother would obviously like, you know, there would be two dinner nights, making a dinner for us, and then making a dinner for him when he came in at eight or nine. And sometimes when she came in from a long day of, you know, run the gauntlet or whatever trials, you know, having to look after two kids, and she uh uh took on a full-time job as well. Um, she would have to um drop everything and pick up cars for him at the end of nowhere, and and I would just be left um without a mother to help me with my homework or help me with anything. So it kind of robbed me of um a parent as well. Um, but I guess my early adolescent years were kind of seeing the sheen of my mother that she hid very well. You know, I remember the parade of shops we used to go around. It was almost like a mise on scene of a Disney scene. She said hello to the butcher, say hello to the charity person. She was an evervescent person that was almost like a bird flying free. But in the home, I could see whenever she wanted to engage in conversation with my father or talked too much, her eyes would flip to his. And there's a very good picture I have where she's doing that. She's mid-conversation at a dinner table, and you can see him atop it, looking at her to try to catch her eye. And you could all I would always catch these moments where it would almost be and then she'd stop, she'd go back into that cage. So my mother, I always felt that she would talk to strangers and be this kind of person that wanted to connect. And I always was trying to understand how my mother was like that. I thought, and then when I discovered obviously her story of how shut away she was, not able to allow to have her own friends, and so it kind of impacted on me as a sadness of watching this person who just wanted to engage with the world but was shut away at home.
David Mandel :You know, you there's so much, David, in in what you're saying, in terms of uh, you know, how hard your mom was having to work, how your your dad's behavior changed the very terrain of your life. You know, you're describing, and I think a lot of people would say, Oh, your mom left you and abandoned you and she wasn't there. But if you pull the lens back a little further and go, well, he was calling the shots, expecting her to go to the end of nowhere to pick up the car with consequences if she didn't, I assume, you know, with that. And so, so your life was changed uh on a daily basis, it sounds like, based on your dad's behavior.
Speaker 1:Yeah, he's a person that could, as he would walk, it would be like the wake of his presence. You know, you wouldn't kind of go to him with any offer, it would always be to her that would be almost like a foot person to serve the message to him. If there was any, uh she would she didn't always work, but she then didn't have enough of up wouldn't have any financial economy of her own self. We talk about coerce control, economic abuse falls onto that, and so she used to um clean uh for friends, um, friends, not friends' houses, a family's houses for pin money, just so that she can make ends meet. She would always have to beg for money to pay for school fees. We were privately schooled, and it would always be trying to make ends meet. And so when she took out that job, it was more uh financial pressure put on her to pay more household duties as well. Uh, but I very much always felt like I was a burden in her life because of the struggle that she had to shoulder that responsibility and shoulder his mood and the weight of his presence. Um, his life was fast cars, fast women, and um, if you weren't into that, you didn't have a relationship. But I think for me, I always knew he would lose interest in me beyond the cute stage, even at the age of about five or six. And it felt very odd to have an adult sense of awareness to that and almost pre-forgiving when it happened. Yeah, but everything else I had normalized in that room.
Speaker 3:Sounds like you were a very empathetic and and astute child in your observations, David. Um, and that you had complex feelings really towards both your parents, which you do talk about a little bit. Do you want to dive a little bit more into that?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think it's very important at this juncture to say, you know, I'm a son of both my mother and my father. I'd always opined for my father's attention. Yeah, if it was MetaSports, you'd go into the living room or watch uh Moto GP with the bikes or Formula One with them. Although I wasn't massively into it. Uh and if it wasn't that, it was learning the guitar because he loved you know the Rolling Stones and like learning songs. And I could even feel the pressure when I was he'd come in and listen to me play and be disappointed if I couldn't play something properly, and then walk out like I was being judged. And even right up until you know a few years before he died, I chose journalism as a career path because his father was a motoring correspondent for a national newspaper, and I thought it would speak to him. But still, even when I wrote for I I'm a gay man, I wrote for in my internship a gay magazine. I could never share that with him because he couldn't understand that I was a gay man. He had uh behind closed doors, I would later find out, uh, blame my mother for me being uh a gay man because of the genetics in her family, uh supposedly because her uh eldest brother was gay.
Speaker 3:So it's yeah, that is so hard.
David Mandel :I mean, there's so much as I listen to you, and I really appreciate your honesty. You remind me of our conversations with Luke and Ryan Hart, who I'm sure you know, who you know you you share some experiences with. I can I want to talk just about your mom and and for a second, because I watched an interview on I think BBC with her that was recorded a number of years ago. And she she said that she holds herself responsible for killing, you know, killing your father. At least at that point she said that. And what struck me in that is when we hear women who have engaged in domestic abuse or to violence in the home or harming, you know, loved ones, that they're often compared to men, they're often much more accepting a responsibility. Your mother was was sort of, I did this, even saying that some degree of punishment was appropriate for her. Um and and um uh and I really contrasts with what I hear often when I worked with men, because I worked with men for 20 years, that often there was a lack of responsibility. It was there was like you were saying, this total blame. So I'm just wondering about just sort of how you put it together about your mom's responsibility or thinking about that. Does it align with her thinking? Is it different than hers?
Speaker 1:I think I'm well, I know my mother had remorse as much as she could have. Yeah, I think I never asked the question of what I I think I actually allowed myself one time to ask the question, but it was only because I was in an emotional vacuum that it needed to it needed to explode on a prison visit once. I only allowed myself to ask her. And I didn't want any answer. I didn't I had lived with her in when she separated from my father and lived by herself for a year and saw her become emotionally vacant, and she was just telling everyone, you know, talking about my father because coercive control breeds dependency, this idea that a victim uh should leave, and she actually finally finally got some autonomy, financial autonomy to leave, and that was the barrier. And then when she w got back, it was through that dependence. Her oxygen was her perpetrator, her uh her the person that she felt you know she was in love with. And so I didn't need to ever ask that question of her. And in the the years that's gone by, she's always had remorse, and she kept the wedding ring on right up until what even when she was released. And that was obviously a difficulty for us as as sons, you know, part when she obviously was freed. And um there was a almost a deliverance back to the start of like, oh, someone else is not here, and we're trying to almost Going through the grief of it again. And only, I guess, perhaps in the last four years has she kind of let go of that. But he is very much a spectre of our lives for a various different reasons. But I think her own responsibility has always been uh paramount, whereas yes, there is a disparity in a male um perpetrators, there is a remorselessness, there is a vindictiveness, there is a pattern of escalation of harm of which was in their control, and um that's where the revenge part of it comes to.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's it's just it's it's so heartbreaking because uh, in essence, when we uh as people grow up in an environment where there's coercive control, there is such a loss of both parents. We lose both parents to that to that reality. And and pulling apart the threads of that can sometimes be so complex, right? Um, and and especially if as victims, uh, you know, your mother was raised in an environment where she experienced the same things and then moved into the home with a perpetrator who perpetrated those behaviors as well, the loss of liberty, the loss of ability to choose, to move, to be employed, to have a relationship with people, and even to have a relationship with your own children, because those connections are so created during that critical time, David, where you talked about your awareness as a five-year-old. Like by the time you're six, seven years old, those real connections between those parents uh have been formed in habit. And you start to comply as a child and accept the situation, or you start to resent as a child and and feel rejected by by both parents because they're so focused on their cycle. They're so interlocked that the children themselves are not getting the energy and the attention that is really truly needed to create those strong bonds in that early part of childhood. So it's a real loss, and it's a loss that isn't a one-time loss, it's a continuous loss through our lifetimes where we realize we have these transitions and we want to share it with our parents, and they're not there and the relationship is not there. So that's so real, David. I really feel it.
David Mandel :Yeah, I think it's we'll talk about traumatic grief and just sort of the injection of that trauma into that everyday experience, even you know, continuing on. So so David, I, you know, I appreciate, you know, the the three-dimensionality as you share, you know, and the and the uh filling in the lines and the coloring inside, you know, what is often sort of just about the the abuse of the violence, you know, the wedding ring image and the fact that, you know, these conversations about shifting, rethinking about this. Can you for me it's I think it's so important. We'll talk about, and I'm a long time I've been in this work for for almost 40 years and really working against violence against women and girls, male violence against women and girls for that time. And I recognize that um we don't always pay attention at the same level to the experience of boys growing up in these households. I think there's complexity there. You know, you you hear refugees that won't take boys in over a certain age because they're right. I mean, there's just all these things, and they're, you know, talking about, I know you've spoken about domestic abuse and and gay relationships, and you know, I think there's just a whole area that we're not talking about. Yeah. But can you can you give our listeners some insight, more insight into sort of what you think people may be missing about boys' experience of growing up in a household like the one you did, and you, you know, in any way?
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's a very permanent conversation to have. And I I always think about you know how masculinity is shaped with me, how relationships are shaped to my own mind, and how that uh pattern escalates and embeds itself within you as a child that is normalizing what you see in your eyes. And then you are led to believe, obviously, to be a man. My my father taught me as fast cars, fast women, like I said. And I think um that you don't fit into a mold and you try one to force it, you then feel ostracized. And obviously, that's colloquially known through um uh Jackson Kat's work of uh the man box, which is a very real uh phenomenon that is present in our day-to-day lives, where those that exist within it can script uh the um uh more men and boys into it so that they can thrive and have more power to survive in that box themselves, in my personal opinion. Um, and I feel that because I didn't uh fit into that box, I was ostracised and that less led me to feel disenfranchised. Obviously, there's the element of being me, being a gay man, of course, but I think that's more or less the same for a lot of young men and boys who witness domestic abuse in the home. I think we can speak about it in terms of adults walking around today with maybe the 60s and 70s, where there's a stoicism that adults have, that knowing nod in a wink that I too came from a home, but we don't talk about it too much. And stoicism has so much power to it to survive, but it's like there's this fortitude of a wall that a lot of us are breaking inside, and also there's a permanentation of harm where we might break out of it into addiction or into being re-victimized as a victim of domestic abuse or even a perpetrator, uh, not as a reason or a justification for people that um escalate into that. But I find that as an interesting conversation point for how we need to recognize adult child survivors who not just children in these homes today, but the adults who are walking around this world today who just need a moment to have that ability to claim their own survivorship because there is strengthened identity in groups, you know, there's man sheds that are around you know the world developing where men speak and online communities where it's just becoming more common. I think it's such a positive thing. The man box doesn't want you to talk about your feelings because if you talk about your feelings, you're unlocking the door out of that box and you're wreaking your own freedom to have to be had. And I think for me, breaking out of that house and breaking out and finding a language for my own life has certainly been the freedom uh that has been the taste on my lips that I've always you know wanted to kind of share with everyone so it unlocks their everyone else's freedoms, yeah. Anyone else that they might run into.
Speaker 3:That's such a common uh gift that so many survivors offer to the world. And it's it's a wonderful gift that comes at a cost, really, because it's a lot of effort to try to bring that that freedom to people. But I I just I wanted to add to the conversation about uh the man box. So now I'm talking about men as a woman, and I know that's a little that's a little bit of a trepidatious territory. Um, but what I want to say is we often pivot to individual responsibility in responding to being groomed into these behaviors, not only by a parent, but also by society and institutions that support it. And that I really like to pivot focus towards our responsibility as professionals and as institutions to know that there's a certain amount of population out there that is being impacted and being taught the behaviors, not just taught, neurologically imprinted, reactive behaviors and responses, autonomic responses that we have the responsibility to untrain people out of, to support them in learning better behaviors. We need to name for men and boys those behaviors which limit their own freedom and others' freedom and which brings them trauma and harm. We have to name for them the anxiety control, because it is control that comes out of anxiety and a sense of entitlement that comes along with living in environments where you have an abuser who is constantly keeping you on high alert. And what that does to your neurobiology, to your behavioral reactivity, to your anxiety, to your ability to respond to situations in a responsible way and a balanced way emotionally, because abusers rob all of that from children. They train them neurologically into anxiety responses, which are then coercive and controlling. And that is so important for us to name, for us to be able to help those children who have grown up in those homes, especially boys, and bring empathy to the fact of that.
David Mandel :So, so David, I I wonder if you with your perspective on this, because I know this is still an unfolding process for you, you know, this is your, you know, and and your perspective on society based on what Ruth is saying, you know, do you do you do you feel like we've come? Are you satisfied with how far we've come with opening up space for boys to talk about their experience of being traumatized, particularly in their homes growing up? And do you do you feel satisfied with how you, when you look around, how professionals are aware of what Ruth's talking about, kind of are are looking for that boy who's acting out. Maybe he's coming from a home with violence. I mean, what's your take on that broader perspective?
Speaker 1:I think there's so much great work being done by a lot of professionals. I just don't think there's enough of it. And here in the UK, boy in England and Wales with the Domestic Abuse Act that recognizes children as victims in their own rights. If you witness it, you are a victim. Amazing. But what does that actually mean? And how many children are we seeing or engaging with? Um, we have relationship with sex education here, a curriculum where we talk about healthy relationships, but it's very patchwork, isn't like the the provision, the standards of that. I think we have to talk about the online age of which we are, which we are trying to bring children back to the safe spaces of classrooms to talk and unfill the thread of what they see, what they see as abusive relationships that inform them of the abuse that might be happening in their home. Not to go hold up a tablet and say, I mean, I've tried it many times before this is coercive control, and it is it becomes this ethereal message that you don't know what it is, and you hear that a lot from uh a lot of victims and survivors. It's this enough, is this enough? It's about predominantly sharing stories and deconstructing and whether and critiquing or whether that is abusive, and thinking about it from the opposing sex sides as well, you know, whether you're you're a girl or whether you're a boy, and thinking outside of your own box in parts empathy, which is key to kind of unlocking all the doors there forward. Uh, but I think there's there's a great short film by Chris Godwin um called The Timekeeper. That's great perspective.
David Mandel :I've seen that, yeah. I've actually seen that.
Speaker 1:I watched that and it had to be on a panel for the first time to react to it. It was just emotionally eviscerating, but you feel like a complicit tool, and that you can talk about predominantly how this work is very much needs to be focused within family courts around the world. Children is used as pawns to gaslight their mother, like I was, to make me uh think that my mother was mad, and you are a co-conspirator of that harm. So there's so much good fruition. I think obviously we talk in a uh sketch landscape of post-adolescence. We don't talk about the word, we're talking about the TV show and how it's uh precipitated a lot of conversations and adults that need to engage on this too, within communities, which is the wraparound of how we are shaping these conversations and what it leads into learning.
Speaker 3:Yeah, we have a lot, we have a lot more to do, and we have a lot more to learn about supporting children who have been through these experiences in similar ways that we support children who have experienced war or traumas that are long over a long period of time, right? Um, and we we really must do better at early intervention. There's a lot of conversation about men and boys and violence and economic instability and political instability. And we know through research that abuse at home, that having a coercive controller or a domestic violence abuser that is a male in the home increases those behaviors precipitously. And as governments, as professionals, as carers, we have to have the empathy to really start early, to intervene early and to assist.
David Mandel :David, I'm wondering, you know, I'm I'm imagining uh being a young man in in an audience listening to you. And I I wonder if have you had any young men or even older men come up to you after speaking and and saying you really unlocked my understanding of something, some experience I had. Do you do you have any stories like that? Because I can't I can't help but believe that you're doing that, even if they don't come up to you and say anything.
Speaker 1:I have some, not as many as as I would hope. Most of the spaces I talk in uh would normally be in a domestic abuse-related uh conference or space, and predominantly a lot of the professionals usually are women who've obviously done the large, staunch amount of work who are the experts predominantly in this harm, of course, and that all learning in my life has been shaped by uh and should be shaped by when we have conversations with men and boys too. Um but yeah, I have had those conversations. I've I've had a um I've just uh made a friend recently with an another adult child survivor of domestic abuse, and uh he's got an active case going, but he started a campaign called hashtag not just mum because there seems to be a gap in the awareness of um the legal recourse for adult child survivors of victims in their own right um for cases of where uh their mother is reporting. You know, think about coerce control. It's with a victim or survivor going to the police, we would hope, and a good police response, but it's very much you know using their experiences. If you have a family behind it with character references, like I was there, I can yet I'm kind of the cot, it mattered to me too. It's an impact on me. The equilibrium, well, the parity of harm rather. Um, I think we're starting to get there. I think there just needs to be more conversations about domestic abuse and not otherwise as an uncomfortable reality. All of us can look at a TV screen and have the lexicon of all that's a red flag uh behavior, that's toxic relationship. They start to move it and put it's domestic abuse, and it is uncomfortable, but that's the realization that that's the big part of the jigsaw is the professional, not only professional curiosity, but societal that is there persistently present for someone who wants to talk or speak about it, but you can also signpost and not just treat it as something like I don't know what this could escalate into and I don't want to talk about it. And you know, this violence it thrives in silence.
David Mandel :Yeah, yeah. It's you know, we're we're very interested. We've had on this show, obviously, and we've had our conferences Luke and Ryan Hart. We had a young man uh from Australia. How old was he? 13. Yeah, 13 and you know, who grew up with his stepdad's violence and you know, it gave him voice. We interviewed him, and and it's I think it's it's so critical for us to be uh interrogate the space of of masculinity, boys' exposure to to their dad's violence, particularly and how it shapes them and give permission like you're doing. I just so I I even if you're not having as many people come up to you as and share that, you know, I we know that um, you know, for instance, on this show, you're we're gonna have professionals and survivors who will play this show for their kids, including their boys. You know, so we're hoping to because we we hear that feedback in general. So we know that that's gonna happen. Um keeping on that the vein of kind of exploring masculinity, and for me, um, and this this is kind of a almost a thought experiment to ask you to engage in. You know, I've really um spent a lot of time. I worked with men for 20 years, I'm working with systems for 20 years. And as I kind of keep expanding that work, really start thinking more about how we raise expectations for men as parents. Because I think part of the issue is I'm sure, you know, that you saw very different expectations and very different treatment of your mom than than your dad, even in his memory. Um uh I mean I remember your mom saying that she was told by her solicitor don't speak that the juries don't like you you speaking ill of the dad. So even in defending herself, she was told to conform with gender you know, all these extra social expectations. But I'm just wondering, you know, if if your dad had survived, if your dad was still around, what what if anything he could have done to repair, take responsibility, what that would look like? And I don't know if you like you can tell me, you know, to bugger off. That's a sort of like inappropriate question, but just it's sort of like but it's it's it's sort of I think it's so important for us to think about what real change looks like and responsibility looks like and repair, not just cessation of violence, or I oh I stopped, or that was bad, but like what is what would it really look like from your point of view as a as a as a as a child growing up in that household?
Speaker 1:There's another ending to my book where I hope there's a different kind of timeline of where you know I had the language and I would have spoken out, and it would instead of my mother being dragged off to a prison cell, it would be my father. Um and I asked the question to myself, would I go visit him? And I would. I'd never hear anything back when I and I would visit and keep talking, so I never hear anything back in those those those mindscapes that I'm kind of carving up there. But I would want recognition of like it wasn't just an accident, it was a strategy, it was thought out and planned. You know, perpetrators love to play games, and it was always about playing the game for my father. He enjoyed it. There was a glee on his face a lot of the time. I would ask if he knew the impact he was having, that it wasn't just an assault on her. A lot of my campaigning has a lot of fuel in anger. And I was speaking with someone else about this. There's a lot of anger for child survivors, and like the wrongness that we're delivered, not in that this is just happening to our mothers, but it happened to us too. I used to look at my father and like, do you not realize that you're hurting the person that we love the most? And by essence, hurting us. I would want my harm to be recognized as a starting point for which to for him to unravel that and to ask himself why he thought this was acceptable. What and and and just affirm that from a place of of a starting point. Because the reality is we can't lock these people away and you know forget about them. They will come out. Um, you know, I'm an ambassador for the Prison of Vice and Care Trust. The oldest charities in England and Wales, and because I visited my mother for almost a decade in prison, and I can see the revolving door of just abused women who end up in that system left destitute on the outside, their abuse not recognized. And I'm not obviously saying all perpetrators have a root cause that stems from somewhere that we can unfurl, but nor am I saying they are there's an inherent evil and we must wash our hands. We need to explore their stories and help them unfurl it for themselves of and the wanting desire, like any kind of form of addiction. You need them to come to the table and want to unfurl their own story, want to unfur the systemic oppression that they delivered and in the harm that they wreaked in that in certainly my family's life and many other families. Um I think that's the great restorative work that can be done. Um, it's just um there's never enough will or intent around that work, around perpetrator work. Um, but I know it's very much a developing space of work that we're having here in the UK at the moment.
Speaker 3:I love, I love what you said, David, because I think right now we're engaging in a tremendous amount of performative punishment and performative compassion that has nothing to do with that person actually repairing their behaviors and their relationships. And that should be the measure of whether or not a person has changed. Not if they've done their time in a prison, but they still have the same and now compounded and worse behaviors and more vulnerabilities and so are more violent, or that we don't talk about it and we forgive them while we allow them to continue to wreak havoc on their own lives and others. We have to engage in more effective and efficient interventions that aren't just performative, that don't make us feel like we've assuaged some rage, right? That a person has done wrong and now they're the worst thing in the world. But that really, really dives down into changing the patterns and behaviors that facilitate that happening, not just in the individual. That's the key thing in our in our institutions and our responses in our education, in our society, in the media, all of those things.
David Mandel :Like you're saying, like you're both saying, versus I, David, when I hear you speak, you know, you know, you're you're still in relationship with your dad, if I can, you know, really, right? You're still in relationship with obviously with your mom who's still alive. And you know, and but I I think it's I think people struggle, want to make it black and white, and want to make it one-dimensional. And you know, you're you know, so if this happened to you in your imagination, that conversation with dad is I want recognition for this happen. You did this to me. Yeah not just to mom, not just to my brother, you did it to me.
Speaker 1:It's a massive complexity. I mean, from the very moment that it happened, you know, my mother killing my father, I felt my body sway to the side of my mother. Not because I felt the escalation of the loss of control that she had for about two or three weeks in that home that led her to commit that act unknowingly. Um, I think it was it just it just stuck with me the desire to want to identify my father without being macabre about it, but to affirm the the harm that was metered out to him as much as I could of because I held both of them as much as I could uh in the harm and and offering up their stories. Like we must say, obviously, my father doesn't get to have a word back. I understand that, but I also was a child in that home too. I'm a child of my father and my mother, and there is a relationship that will always exist as much as you you say it will, of course. Yeah, I believe that, and it's how we remonstrate with that as children, too. And I know there are many children bereaved of fatal domestic abuse who remonstrate with those stunted relationships, it's where it's cut off where you want to paint it's black and white, but you can't. You know, the reason I wrote the book was because it comes out of my head. I at the end of the book, I get addicted. Uh not to scupper it too much, but I get addicted to gambling. And the best service response I've ever had is from a gambling-related service, you know, there's actually fruition to gambling companies throwing all their pots of money into a statutory duty to help us. But it shows also that there's many children, adults, adults that uh grow up from the child homes that they've survived who appear in services that they would never normally have a response to domestic abuse. So it becomes the whack-amore game of treating afflictions but never asking what was your home life like and unfurling a bit more curiosity.
Speaker 3:Right. Well, I would, I would, I know we have to move towards wrapping up. And so I would love to hear um any reflections that you might have for professionals. What are some of the takeaways about what professionals and institutional responders need to know in order to respond, not react, but respond to this reality that there are children living in silent coercive control?
Speaker 1:If you're not speaking to the children separately, you're leaving at home without evidence, losing a moment. It's like speaking to a victim of intimate partner violence next to the perpetrator, the alleged perpetrator. It's a madness. And you know, for our laws, coercive control, it's every instance of domestic abuse will have it, and it's whether you want to do the work to get that. There's a 1% national conviction rate in the UK for coercive control. In my home county, where this happened, the charge rate is 7% because it's a lot more harder groundwork, and it is a tectonic shift, it's the 10-year anniversary of course control laws in England and Wales. And there is a tectonic shift in our understanding uh that this is not just uh uh an othering of abuse, it is the primary centrifuge of how this all explodes and radiates out into permutations of harm. My mother tried to end her life at the age of 21, that could have been her story. Domestic abuse-related suicide research in the UK shows there's as many deaths related to that as intimate partner homicide. That shows the scale of harm that's that's reached with stories that don't see the light of day. And children are the little alarm bells ringing in these homes that see and feel these atmospheres where parents have normalized it their whole adult lives. I'm a child telling a story in a book uh about what I saw and heard. You know, it was for the the mother I saw at the start of the book, I say, and the the child I I grew to know, you know, reaffirming back to my childhood and kind of repatriating the happy memories I had, despite there being a background of violence that I found and discovered through searching through my mother's story and trying to verbalize the complexity of my home. So it's about spending time, and yes, that requires more resources, but they all everyone has an act of agency, whether you're a social worker, whether you're a lawyer that's used being used as a part of system to harm in the family courts. You we are all mechanisms and moving parts of this. And as I always say, you know, we're all CCTV cameras as well, fixing a wall, watching what's going on, but we all have the ability to jump off that wall and be present and persistently present for someone if they want to talk about it. It's just having the the confidence to signpost and not other this as just toxic or red flag behavior. Yeah, it's the start of something, or it could be the start of something horrific, or it could be the start of someone's survivorship right there.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And and and David, what what would you want to say to survivors of this reality who may be secretly living with the grief, the disconnect, the consequences, the patterns of behaviors relationally, internally, that have never been helped, have never been addressed, have never been acknowledged.
Speaker 1:It's immensely difficult to be a victim survivor to have got as far as wherever anyone has got. You know, the the myth is that they're not strong. And it's the strongest people to survive that brunt of endurance through all the pain and weight and systems that refuse to acknowledge us even now, all the years of campaign I've been doing. Adult child survivor, I'm an adult child survivor. I'm not, I just realized that we don't have any recourse to kind of uh have you know report it. And another adult child survivor has told me that. And that's the power in you know community and identity. It doesn't shape, it doesn't define who I am, but it shapes who we are together. All our experiences, we are experts on our own harm, uh, but collectively, you know, together our voices are strong. It's not a trite saying, it is, it's meaningful. The harm that's metered out and uh the added value that we can give by sharing our stories. I continue to speak out because stories are our center point for understanding that shape professional awareness and societal awareness, dramatizations that happen, soaps or true stories, or even true crime, which you know have a love-hate relationship with. There's a learning to by proliferating that template and then seeing it like, oh my god, that's my life. And if you have an ability to share your story to survive and endure, then that's the reward to it. We would have always I would have always was a family in front of myself waving that red flag, but I'm doing that work, and every other survivor or victim that chooses to do so is doing so. But surviving is the biggest accomplishment anyway.
Speaker 3:You know, David, I just want to thank you truly from from my heart. I can really feel the the connected empathy and the integrity of what you're saying and the experience behind it. And that is so valuable that you're sharing with it. And I know the cost of sharing it with the world daily. So I just want to thank you directly for doing so and for your kind, kind heart. Um and um, yeah.
David Mandel :So we've been thank you, David, as well for me. And we've been talking to David Challen, who has written and shared his story and his mom's story and his brother's story, you know, in his book, The Unthinkable, the Story of Control Violence, and my mother, and and we'll be sharing a link of that on our our uh podcast show notes. So, David, thank you. And um, you've been listening to another episode of Partner with a Survivor. And if you um want to check out the Safety Taylor Institute, go to Safety Taylor Institute.com or our virtual academy, academy.safety Taylor Institute dot com. And if you're listening to this, and it's before February 2026, you can hear David at our virtual conference in the UK, coercive control in children, which is really on point. And we we're really honored to have David as a keynote speaker. So with that, we are still who we are. We don't even need to say any name.
Speaker 3:I still have a name.
David Mandel :And uh