Season 7 Episode 10: The Assumptions That Put LGBTQ Survivors at Risk

If your picture of domestic abuse is still “bigger person equals perpetrator,” that assumption can derail safety planning in minutes, especially in same-sex relationships and LGBTQ families. 

In this episode, Ruth and David sit down with Dr. James Rowlands, sociologist and founder of the Dyn Project, to explore what actually helps practitioners identify abuse more accurately: tracking patterns of coercive control, listening for fear and entrapment, and documenting real behaviours instead of relying on identity-based assumptions.

Ruth, David, and Dr. Rowlands unpack the tension many professionals feel between maintaining a gender-based violence lens, recognising gendered double standards, and being inclusive of queer survivors and male victims. While “gender-neutral” approaches can sound fair, they can also flatten power dynamics, erase social context, and obscure the role gender norms play in abusive relationships.

Together, they examine the “public story” that often steers professionals toward proxies like size, presentation, or stereotypes instead of evidence-based assessment. They also discuss how abuse tactics can look different in LGBTQ relationships, where outing, community stigma, and questions around “who counts as queer” can become tools of coercion and control.

The conversation gets practical, too. David, Ruth, and Dr. Rowlands explore why LGBTQ survivors are often missed in MARAC referrals, how generic risk checklists fail without LGBTQ-specific prompts, and what domestic homicide and death reviews can get wrong when queerness is treated as the explanation rather than focusing on perpetrator behaviour and systemic failures.

They close with concrete questions practitioners can ask to build trust with survivors, along with guidance for navigating biased or unsafe professional responses.

Subscribe, share this with a colleague or friend, and leave a review so more people can find these tools. What’s one assumption you’ve seen cause harm in a domestic abuse response?

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.

Transcript

Back Home And Land Acknowledgement

David Mandel 0:16

We are back. Hey.

R 0:17

Hi there. How are you?

David Mandel 0:20

We already had quite the morning. You know, for for those of us, those of you who are listening for the first time, you know, we live together, we work together, and we see these children together.

R 0:29

We own multiple businesses.

David Mandel 0:31

So, you know, when we jump on a podcast like this in the morning, we've like we've had a day already.

R 0:35

Yeah, we have and we have to have fun with life. When you work, when you work in topics around family violence, child abuse, and domestic abuse and institutional abuse, you have to have you have to have some fun.

David Mandel 0:51

Anyway, so you are listening to Partnered with a Survivor, and I'm David Mandel.

R 0:56

And I'm Ruth Ramundo.

David Mandel 0:58

And we are I I'm really excited about this episode. I know I always say that. You actually know, but it's true. But it's true.

R 1:07

Like, are you excited, David? Yes. It's such an Americanism. It's hysterical.

David Mandel 1:11

So anyway, before we go any further, just want to let people know we're back in the United States. We are. I know last time we recorded the episode, we were in Australia, and uh we are on Tonksis Masaka land, and just want to acknowledge any the traditional owners of the land and any Indigenous elders, past, present, and emerging, who are listening to this episode. So thank you.

SPEAKER_03 1:33

Yeah.

David Mandel 1:33

Uh, and it's beautiful land and it's been colonized, and you know, we're still living, all of us with the impacts of that.

R 1:41

You know, and I actually want to speak to why we do this land acknowledgement every single time. And and that is because we are particularly often on places that were colonial regions. I am a Latin American woman who has a Latin American history that is very much intertwined with those realities, having family come from Veracruz, Mexico, and been on this land since before it was the United States of America and before English was ever spoken on these lands. So that is one of the reasons why we have a deep commitment to acknowledging the histories of what has happened here, because those histories directly impact violence, family violence, family separation, and and a lot of the topics that we touch on. So that was just a reminder why we do that.

David Mandel 2:42

Yeah, thank all right.

R 2:43

Do you want to I'll lead us in. You lead us in.

David Mandel 2:46

So, you know, the safety of the model, we, as everybody knows, we talk quite a lot about uh a gendered perspective on family violence. We're looking at, particularly, you know, through the lens of fathers as perpetrators and and mothers as survivors, because of the gender nature of so many of our systems and approaching these issues.

R 3:06

But also prevalence.

David Mandel 3:07

And prevalence, you know, and and and at the same time, the model was designed to be at its core behavioral and pattern-based, and to be applicable across diverse relationship structures and family structures, you know, which is inclusive of you know, kin involvement with domestic abuse, and also with the focus of this episode really sensitivity to dynamics of domestic abuse and same-sex relationships. And

Why A Gender Lens Still Matters

David Mandel 3:36

and so this is something that I've seen in practice. This is theoretical. Uh when when I developed the model, we we applied it to looking at domestic abuse in in same-sex relationships. And I think a lot of times that part of it unfortunately gets kind of a little bit of short shrift, and I'll kind of just name that. So, you know, you and I are a little on a little bit of a campaign to really kind of discuss those dynamics. And today we're really excited to have Dr. Jane Rowland, assistant professor in sociology at Durham University in England. And just to introduce James, you know, just he's got a wealth of experience around domestic abuse in same-sex relationships in terms of as a practitioner, as a researcher. He's also got a tremendous background in domestic abuse-related deaths, which we're not gonna be the main focus of today. We'll we're gonna actually do another show with him in the future about that. But that one of the things that you know kind of will lead into is just he's uh founder of the Dyne Project, which is the first advocacy service for gay, bisexual, and heterosexual men in Wales. So, with that kind of intro, Dr. Rowlands, I just want to welcome you to the show.

SPEAKER_00 4:50

Thanks so much. Real pleasure to be here.

David Mandel 4:53

That's great. So thanks for having us and or you for being with us.

SPEAKER_03 4:58

Yes.

David Mandel 4:58

Thanks for having us with you. Thanks for taking the time out of your day. You know, we're gonna we're gonna jump right in and and really talk about you know your your your sense of sort of the struggle about and you've been living at this intersection uh during your career as far as we can we can see, you know, which is sort of having a feminist lens, having a gender lens, but also being really committed to speaking about responding to practicing at the space where where there are male victims who are heterosexual or gay and just same-sex, queer domestic abuse in general. So just you know, just let's jump right in with that, just your your thoughts on that.

SPEAKER_00 5:46

Yeah, and and I think you're right, it can feel like it's really intention, can't it? And it it it's often because I think if you're talking about LGBT or kind of queer domestic abuse or heterosexual men, it feels like you might be kind of pushing to get get at the table, right? And people approach that in different ways. Uh and at the same time, as kind of Ruth touched on, we're talking about gendered lens because the majority of victims are women experiencing domestic abuse at men. So sometimes it feels like there's this kind of push-pull. I think where I'd start is actually when I when I set up the Dean project, and I, you know, I left that a good good long while ago, but you know, I was there as a social worker doing my training, and that was in a a women's safety unit, right? So the the the founder of that unit, someone called Jan Pickles, you know, had set up a really great

The Tension Between Inclusion And Truth

SPEAKER_00 6:36

team. Uh it piloted some of the early work on multi-agency risk assessment conferences, but what she recognized is there was a gap, and there was a gap for for male victims, and that that's where where my service was kind of born from, right? So I don't think these things have to be exclusive. And actually, I think the connecting thing for me is thinking about gender and problematic gender binaries, right? Like that's that that's what we're talking about in heterosexual domestic abuse, where we've got uh often these very gendered frames, these expectations of men and women. And actually, that's what we're often talking about for queer folk too, right? Where there's a hierarchy that gay is not as good as straight, trans is not as good as cis, you know, and we're trying to unpack and challenge those binaries and and the hierarchies that come with those, and which often drive a lot of this violence, which is gender-based. So yeah, that's how I see these things. They they feel like their intention, but actually I think when you really unpick them, they they've got a kind of shared set of drivers.

R 7:35

Yeah, I think that's uh that's that's uh a nuance that we often fail to convey because of the complexity of it, and that is is that we often are deeply uncomfortable with different ways of loving, of believing, of of forming families. And that comes from history of prioritizing one specific way. And again, speaking back to our histories of colonization, one of the things that I know here in the Americas is that people who identify as trans or non-binary are often not white. They are Latinos, they are black people, they are indigenous people. There's a high number of people in those demographics that are comfortable with that non-binary way of being, and that the discomfort, the violence, the targeting of that difference is in of itself something that has been very ingrained into our understanding of gender from an English language perspective, and also the institutional focus that arose in how we view which families are worthy and which families are not, and therefore have targeted them for separation, for involvement of the system, for violence and punishment through family or community pressure. And that is definitely part of the legacy of what we're living with as queer people. And again, I always say this because it's confusing for heterosexual people, but I'm a bisexual woman who openly identifies as a bisexual woman. And yes, I'm partnered with a man, but you all can have a conversation and and figure that out. But you know, this is this is deeply part, I think, of the difficulty that we often have in being inclusive in our conversations about difference and comfortable in speaking about different ways families can figure. And that doesn't just extend to queer people, that extends to cultural people, that extends to to people who have been historically separated, their children separated from them, and violence perpetrated upon them and then groomed in their families because they had large kinship networks. So I just, you know, it's a it's a definitive thing we struggle with.

David Mandel 10:23

So I, you know, James, I'm I'm wondering, you know, sort of, you know, this about this intersection of these things you and Ruth are talking about. You know, when I was doing work with a child protection agency a number of years ago, they're asking me to develop a screening tool. I'm gonna make this very practical, you know, because these are the choices, the real life choices. Yeah, you know, so this was a for statutory agency, government agency, and you know, uh, you know, used non-gendered language for the screening questions. And I was very, you know, both proud of that because it really made room for same-sex couples, it made room for male victims, but it also to me felt like it was obscuring or kind of uh encouraging a mutualizing or a flattening of really what we know is the prevalence. You know, the data, the data's really clear, you know, men are much more likely to be victims of violence, but primarily from men in a generalized way. But when it comes to intimate partner violence, women are much more likely to be victims of men. You know, we we're really we're really pretty clear about this. What how how have you kind of in your career squared that very practical circle in that in this practice sphere?

SPEAKER_00 11:40

Yeah. And I and I think it is really tricky, isn't it? Because basically people and systems like people in boxes, right? Like it it's how we make it's how we make sense of the world, and particularly for a practitioner who's perhaps facing multiple referrals or a very high caseload, right? Like there's a I can understand how people get there. We we we kind of use these shortcuts, don't we, to just make make sense of things. And that's where it gets really difficult when you've perhaps got a queer family or whatever, the context is different, and you need you need that practitioner, that system to recognise that difference and and think through their own assumptions, amongst other things. And yeah, I think this is it this is where it gets difficult. I mean, for me, it's always been this question of saying, well, like what what's a you know, I would talk about gender-based violence, for example, and thinking about like what's the agenda lens to this violence and abuse. And you know, I think that's uh you know that that becomes really apparent why that's helpful. So if you think about a male victim of domestic abuse, it's really important to talk about gender for a male victim because the assumptions they have about gender or professionals have about gender are what gonna what are gonna stop them seeking help and support, right? So we can't we can't have a gender neutral language doesn't actually help anyone, in my view. If we kind of conceal the gender or flatten it away, we're doing everyone a disservice. So I think it's front front loading that conversation to some extent and recognizing that and then helping professionals have the confidence to think through, well, what does that what does that mean then in practice, right? Like how do I make sense of this person I've got in front of me? What what other information do I need? What kind of expertise can I can I draw on? So I so I think the the key is to front load it, not not flatten it. Um I think the argument sometimes though is to flatten it, which as I say, I don't think helps anyone really.

R 13:37

You know, I think it's an interesting question because one of the reasons that the Safe and Together model works so well is that it is not identity-based. A lot of our domestic abuse interventions are identity-based, whether or not they're women's sector-based or they're specific to men or queer LGBTQ relationships, there's a level of identity that we move from. And I consider that to be a little bit covering over of the reality of the dynamics of behaviors and violence. And and and though we have to consider particularly how male and heterosexual identity empower violence and and excuse it as part of an identity, we also have to be very circled in on behavioral patterns and the actual behaviors that are showing up in the room. And in that way, I think that we really help to avoid identity being confused with with violence, because that is easily twisted in certain contexts, as we've seen with uh the way that people dehumanize and speak about trans people. They speak about their identity and they equate behavioral patterns to them, which they don't actually have and that are not prevalent in that population. And it is a really good way to cause confusion, to blame populations for violence when those populations are not the source of that violence through their identities. And so, though I really think it's important to have a conversation about gender, particularly about masculinity and heterosexual versions of masculinity, although unfortunately those also live in same-sex relationships, even in same female, you know, women female relationships, those masculine ideals show up. And we see how it confuses people about violence and about victimization. And I'll give an example from you know, uh lesbian and and and bisexual queer community, and that is that there's a lot of masculine presenting women who it is assumed can't be victims of violence because they're the man in the relationship. And this is absolutely untrue.

David Mandel 16:25

You put this, and people who are just listening can't see your quotes around the man in the relationship working.

R 16:32

But but what I would challenge you listeners to do is to move away from identity as defining violence to behaviors and behavioral patterns as defining violence.

David Mandel 16:44

I just want to say something then then kind of uh pitch it over to James, you which is that the model for me, because it I James, I hear you talking about like this really broad understanding of gendered, it's a gendered issue, but really in a broad way. And the model was really, I really developed it specifically with the idea that if if we believe that gender dynamics and dynamics of patriarchy and other things shape these issues of domestic abuse, that we have to be able to show, not tell. Like as a from a practitioner level, like it can't be, well, this is just the way it is in general in the world. It actually has to be specific to this family. How is this person being entrapped? How is what kind of advantages is this? How is this person getting advantages based on their sex or gender? You know, and so you know, and that's where all the stuff around sort of holding fathers to high standards comes in, or sort of looking at, well,

The Public Story That Misleads Helpers

David Mandel 17:40

what does him being a good dad look like, for instance, you know, and and and when we when we say she's failing to protect, well, describe the behaviors she's doing that lead you to the conclusion, because a lot of this is based on like you're saying, Ruth. Well, you're saying conclusions. People are presenting conclusions as facts all the time in policy and politics, but also in social work. And I and to me that's that's uh I at the extreme unethical, you know, to present conclusions as facts, conclusions as behaviors. So anyway, I I that just the model was designed that way, and that's I think what one of the things why it carries. But T, I'm just curious what your your thoughts about all this are.

SPEAKER_00 18:21

I mean, it's really interesting, isn't it? Because I mean it it makes me think of two things really. So one one of my colleagues here at Durham, Professor Catherine Donovan, with others, have written a lot about this idea of the public story of domestic abuse and why that can make it really hard for queer folk to get help. And you know, the basic version and going back to the air quotes, is that you know, you've got this idea of a big heterosexual man and a small, weaker heterosexual woman, and that's the way domestic abuse goes, and and probably that it's also violent, right? So that that's the kind of shorthand that people have for domestic abuse. Now, obviously, that's potentially problematic for heterosexual relationships for various reasons, but but what that means for queer folk obviously is exactly what what Ruth just described, right? That you can't you you rely on a kind of proxy for who the victim and who the perpetrator is. You're not actually interested in the or you're not focusing in on the relationships and the behaviours. So I think that's really, really true. And it just makes you think about how how much uh gender assumption we build into the world all the time. The other thing which it reminds me of is when I first started working in this area, what was really apparent is we weren't really talking about LGBT domestic abuse at all. And there were very few tools to help professionals work this stuff out. And actually, one of the places where there was some really great work at the time was in Boston and in Cambridge in the in the US. And there were a couple of LGBT domestic abuse projects there who were developing these tools to try and understand what was happening in relationships. Because what they were finding was the police weren't responding. They were just saying, well, we can't tell, or it's the it's the big guy, or it's the butchwoman. And so they they developed these tools to which ultimately go back to what you talked about. It's behavioral, it's saying what's happening in the relationship, who, who's doing what, who's experiencing what, who's talking about things like fear, for example, or changing or accommodating behaviors. So yeah, I think it's a really important way to think about it.

R 20:22

And this is where it really challenges practitioners and law enforcement to do a good job at assessment. Because right now that's not happening. Right. That's not happening in heterosexual relationships, you know, not even close in queer relationships. So, so we really have to be committed to to demanding that though we know that there's prevalence in a certain population, that we have to center ourselves around patterns of behaviors and coercive control, because that is going to be the way, particularly in in queer and non-binary relationships, that we can clear away that identity confusion and really understand what's truly happening. And I'm a big advocate for us having real tangible evidence. When we are going to accuse somebody of a crime or we're going to remove their liberties or their custody and their access to a child, the burden of proof should be on professionals in the system to have real evidence, not just not just identity based conclusions, but real tangible evidence.

David Mandel 21:45

I I think the the the the analogy across to, you know, so the this carrying across multiple kind of relationship setups is the social worker who said to me, Well, I talked to this mom and she described her partner and how scared she was of him. And I said, Have a sexual relationship, how scared and how terrified she was, how much power he had over her. And then she said, I met him, and he was a hundred pounds soaking wet. So she had had this image again, James, this idea of this big, big guy, scary, physically scary guy. And thankfully, she believed she wasn't caught, the social workers aren't caught in that bias. But she was sharing her kind of the contradiction in her brain between her image and what the physical reality was. This guy was dangerous. He was scary, but he didn't present in this bullying big, you know, kind of macho way. And that's kind of again is a lesson across all this diverse scenarios. So I wonder, you know, you you you mentioned back to Boston and back to the beginning. Can you kind of talk, James, about sort of when you you, you know, started with the DIM project in 2020, 2006? What what have we learned? What have you learned? You know, what can we do better at? You know, it's just to talk a little bit because you've got a you've got this 20-year perspective on the you know, from that particular lens. Do you know that? Sorry. Let's not bring ads into it. Yes, uh, but I you know, I get to say things like I have 40 years' experience in the field, you know, which makes me uncomfortable. So I totally but anyway, can you give us a little bit that your historical perspective on like what we did poorly then, what we're doing better now, you know, where we have to grow.

SPEAKER_00 23:29

Well, I mean, it I think this it's interesting because there's two kind of parallel journeys were happening, I think, in the early 2000s in in the UK. So the the bigger journey actually was actually a lot of the work around coordinated responses to domestic abuse. So some of the tools we think of as routine now and which we can critique, those the things like risk assessments, multi-agency risk assessment conferences, you know, they they were being developed and it was a real period of change for uh how we thought about domestic abuse, how we try to assess it, and how we try to engage multiple agencies in that that process. So I think that's that's an important backdrop to this story. I guess the other big change really was that you know, we were at the this point in time where LGBT relationships were getting ever more visible, right? And that change had been happening at that point for an for a good number of years from from kind of early legal change. But you know, I was bought I was growing

What Changed Since The Early 2000s

SPEAKER_00 24:28

up in the 80s and 90s, so I was a kind of um young man in in in the 90s, coming out as kind of gay, and like there were no role models. You know, I was growing up in a small Welsh town, I didn't really have anyone to look to or a sense of what to to draw on. But in the 90s and 2000s, that was changing, right? So people were appearing on on television, being represented in shows, uh increasingly in in media, but it was also a period of legal change. So we had a big piece of uh l reform which introduced lots of changes around domestic abuse, including recognizing same-sex couples for the first time. And and you know, that provided a really important context. So I think the difference, the the change was that that was a period of recognition, and it was a period when otherwise LGBT people just weren't being seen by the state and certainly not agencies as having relationships, let alone experiencing domestic abuse. And the other side of that, of course, is the communities didn't necessarily want to talk about that because we were still dealing with this as we still are today, but in a different way, this kind of legacy of kind of stigma and shame and homo by and transphobia. So there was a kind of bit of a conspiracy of silence in a way, like LGBT people just weren't in the frame. So I think that that was the kind of issue. It meant that if someone rocked up to a service, they were making a kind of double disclosure of domestic abuse in their sexual orientation and gender identity. And then the service probably had no idea what to do. You know, it probably didn't have any LGBT specialist tools. There probably weren't LGBT services they could refer to. That has changed. I mean, there are still huge problems, but we're in a completely different space in terms of awareness, I think. So that me for me is the really big, big thing which was happening in the early 2000s was this recognition of these relationships for the first time.

R 26:23

I just want to acknowledge that you know that we we definitely are experiencing some regional retrograde of issues in this regard, and that what that does to queer populations in places like the United States or in Turkey, in places where queer relationships are being targeted, is that it drives Africa, right? It drives that violence deeply underground and creates a tremendous amount of vulnerabilities. And so the silence around domestic abuse and queer relationships really deepens out of self-protection and fear of being demonized. And and you know, even recently we were at our Asia Pacific conference, and the child maltreatment research that came out was very clear that children who are queer, who are, who identify as non-binary, are highly abused at much greater rates, but also that within same-sex relationships and children who have experienced that abuse, that intimate partner abuse is really high. And this is where we really don't talk about domestic abuse as a learned behavior that is being passed on through teaching it, either institutionally or through per parenting with a tremendous amount of violence as coping mechanisms in intimate partnerships, and how those vulnerabilities specific to queer relationships, where we often don't have connection with our family, we don't have support, we can become highly isolated and have very few points of support that are that probably all relate to our partners or to intimate partnership, that that creates a tremendous amount of vulnerability. And right now in the United States, I just want to acknowledge that that is that is increasing, that anti-gay violence is increasing.

David Mandel 28:54

Can we dive into that a little deeper for a second? Because I think this is such an important and an uncomfortable topic on one level because of what both of you are saying. You know, at that same conference, Daryl, Dr. Darrell Higgins was presenting this research, really kind of identified something that we've seen in other statistics, right? Which I think was same-sex adults in same-sex relationships had some of the highest rates of domestic abuse. I think he showed a number that was like 78% or something. It was something astronomical.

R 29:27

It was really alarming.

David Mandel 29:29

Really alarming.

R 29:30

And I felt a physical reaction inside my body. I had to stand up and say, I want you to remember that these people are not violent because they're queer. They're violent because violence was perpetrated on them as children.

David Mandel 29:42

You know, so James, can you can you either debunk that sort of the that kind of you know prevalence rate across and then or sort of say, yeah, it is, and and talk about you know, your theories about your thinking about why it is that if it is. So can you can you give us that?

SPEAKER_00 29:58

Yeah, and it's a com it's a complicated picture. So I think you know, generally the the kind of kind of stats I would often talk about or others will will talk about is to say actually within you know, for the LGBT community as a whole, it's probably about the same as for heterosexual women. Okay, broadly speaking, but but the evidence would suggest within that that perhaps trans people are at higher rates of risk, but also that, for example, bisexual women are at uh

Prevalence Data Without Harmful Myths

SPEAKER_00 30:25

appear to be at heightened risk. And that's where we start to see some of these really important nuances. And there's two in particular. So one it's thinking about who the perpetrator is.

R 30:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 30:34

So a lot of studies don't necessarily disaggregate whether they're talking about the intimate part, an intimate partner or say a family member, or which intimate partner, right? And that's a really good example for bisexual women. So the statistic will be, oh my goodness, bisexual women are at much higher levels of risk, which somehow, you know, can be badly represented as being something to do with being bisexual, when actually often what's driving that is a threat from heterose former heterosexual male partners, right? You know, so it's a really which brings us back to gender, of course. But that's a different thing, right? So asking who the perpetrator is is really important. And often research doesn't do that, and what we get is these kind of conflated statistics. Yeah, yeah. And that can be the same with trans people. Like often we're perhaps talking about either previous relationships or perhaps we might be caught talking about family violence as well. The other thing to say is that LGBT research suffers from a consistent problem, which is is is small samples, which are often self-reported. Yeah. So, you know, when we have data, it's often coming from people who are reporting precisely because they're experiencing or have experienced domestic abuse. So it kind of inflates the figure potentially, or they're already in services. So again, it inflates the figure. So it's quite hard to have a kind of confident picture about what the actual prevalence is.

R 31:58

I think this is also a problem of how we view research and how we see causality and and particularly when we when when I come across assertions around data around queer communities, because I grew up in a place that was doing conversion therapy. They couch these these behavioral and other issues in terms of arising from homosexuality, from queerness, instead of really us diving down into the vulnerabilities and the violence perpetrated very consistently upon those children as being part of the causal nature of this. And I think that that's where I really want to draw a line in anybody's way of thinking when we talk about violence and queerness, that that queerness, homosexuality, non-binariness, transness does not cause violence. That it is violence that causes violence.

David Mandel 33:06

You know, it's it's it's this is a fascinating conversation. And it really, James, thanks for you know, you you're you're kind of picking apart the research. And again, I want to underline for the audience, you know, what you're saying about similar rates of of domestic abuse across all these populations, except with some variations in subgroups. And, you know, going back to the kind of the the hell of elevated risk for bisexual women, we could be framing the research question very differently. What's the rate of domestic violence for heterosexual men partnered with bisexual women? You know, would be a very different question.

R 33:43

Extremely high.

David Mandel 33:44

Well, but just it would be, but it'd be, you know, because it because I think it, and this is where one of the challenges, I think, across different communities where there's been issues of oppression, you know, there's a desire to sort of see experiences reflected, understand the oppression, understand the experiences and give give voice and validation to them. And and sometimes those run the risk of reaffirming negative stereotypes within a culture that is looking for those things, right? Wants, continues to oppress. And that that to kind of pivot that question to put that lens on, you know, men partnered with bisexual women and their attitudes, their behaviors, their struggles. It encapsulates in my mind a lot of these things because some people then will say, well, you're centering men's experience, heterosexual men's experience, by asking that question and going, Well, no, yes, not really. We're actually trying to we're trying to scrutinize their attitudes and beliefs and behaviors. I mean, this was part of the pushback on the men's panel that we did at the conference, actually. Yeah. But it just, I don't, you know, so you've stimulated some thinking in me, so thank you for that.

SPEAKER_00 34:53

No, no worries. And and I think it's an interesting point, isn't it? And it's a general challenge how we talk about those who use violence and cause harm, right? Because they're often absent from these conversations. So it's how do we how do we bring that into these conversations and the naming of perpetrators and actually have a bit of a more uh I mean, Ruth, you're talking about some of this, like a more sophisticated understanding of perhaps their history and how they've come to be abusive. And part of this also comes back to this idea of the public story, like the narrative about perpetrators is very simplistic. That the perpetrator probably capitalized. Goes back to what you were talking about, David, as well. Like that, of course, they're gonna be a bigger guy who's physically violent. The kind of idea people have in their head is often quite simplistic as well, about perpetrators and their their histories, their motivations, their behaviors. And it it I guess all of this, the common thread for me if in one way is to say, well, how do we recognize complexity and and also unique experience? That's that's what we need people to be able to do when they're confronted with a situation, is understand what's happening for this person in this moment. But that's quite tricky.

R 36:06

Yeah, no, it is. And especially when we get into issues of accountability, you know, people get a little bit anxious about that conversation, feeling like understanding the pathways towards violent behavior is some type of excuse for violent behavior, which just patently you all we reject. We can talk about the the contributory factors, we can talk about the causal factors, we can talk about the socioeconomic factors, we can talk about the body factors, the limbic factors, the behavioral conditioning factors that lead people to use coercion and violence in their relationships because they feel out of control or fearful. We don't excuse it, but understanding that that is part of our legacy, it is what we have all inherited to a certain degree, is just being honest, you know. So I want to move over to the Merrick stuff because I think that that's really important. And and you had done a lot of work on looking at Merrick referrals and seeing that LGBTQ survivors were being systematically missed in these high-risk processes. I'd like to hear just a little bit more about that.

unknown 37:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 37:21

Yeah. And and, you know, I guess for anyone who's not as familiar with Marricks in in England or the UK, Marric's multi-agency risk assessment conference, and it, you know, it's a multi-agency fora talking about the highest risk cases and then trying to kind of safety plan around those. And it's kind of victim focused, really. And there's a lot of attention on Marik about whether it's working, various kind of questions. But yeah, LGBT people have often been missing, and and we do get you know data on MARIC

Why High-Risk Systems Miss LGBTQ Survivors

SPEAKER_00 37:51

performance nationally, and some areas have very low referrals for LGBT folk, and that you know, that's not because LGBT folk don't live in those areas and aren't experiencing domestic abuse. I think a lot of it is to do with the fact that the MARIC is a kind of endpoint of a system, a system designed to identify high-risk victims. So it's kind of dependent on services being places that LGBT people go to, professionals in those services risk assessing, using a generic tool which isn't necessarily designed for LGBT people, and therefore not necessarily identifying whether they're high risk or not. And as a consequence, not making referrals to Marrick. So there's this kind of attrition almost. So you just people don't get through the door to Marrick to some extent. And the other side of that is once you're at Marrick, often there aren't specialist LGBT services. There's a handful across England and Wales. So often you're reliant on perhaps a domestic abuse service which might have an LGBT specialism within them, like an LGBT specialist worker, but but may not. So the kind of capacities they can could draw on in terms of LGBT response might be very limited, which can make things really tricky to navigate if you're you're trying to get kind of support someone using essentially a generic offer. And that that's often the reality. And we know from research from our domestic abuse commissioner, so kind of national role, she highlighted how for minoritized communities they they they often people are wanting what we call led by and for specialist services. So services led by and from the communities they they serve, and that actually when they're involved, people often have better outcomes because they feel more able to disclose the responses more kind of tailored to their need and so on.

R 39:40

Yeah, yeah. There's a lot of subtlety that goes into working with queer communities that, you know, I I do think that services need to get to a place where they're generally better, no matter the gender, no matter the intimate relationship, no matter the family construct, in being able to assess patterns of behaviors in order to determine risk for harm and lethality. And it is critical that practitioners that do not have that training nor that lens recognize that they have limitations and that their job is to be curious enough about the experience of the person to to maybe hear things in a different way. And and I and I I'm not always sure. I don't know if that confuses you or if that makes sense to you.

David Mandel 40:41

It makes perfect sense to me, and it and it actually leads into the question I was gonna ask James.

R 40:46

It's funny because I asked David that because he he like you are you are a practitioner who's a heterosexual man. Yeah. Like, does that make sense to you?

David Mandel 40:54

No, it makes perfect sense to me because I think so much of you know the the the assessment, the risk assessment process has two components, and it's actually really interesting. A lot of times it's focused on the questions we ask, but but it's less focused on, and I've spent a lot more time talking about this, which is how we listen and hear what we hear and interpret and understand it, right? And then that's often less emphasized. And I'm just wondering, James, if you could, you said something about generic risk assessment that isn't sensitive to risk factors that may be present in same-sex relationships and queer relationships. If you were going to redesign it to be more sensitive, what would be one or two changes you would you would make?

SPEAKER_00 41:41

Yeah, that's a that's a great question, actually. I mean, interestingly, so so the the tool we use in the UK is called the Dash Rick, the domestic uh abuse stalking harassment checklist. And there's a lot of scrutiny of that at the moment. It's quite old. And uh actually, you know, a group of LGBT services about 10 years ago now, possibly over, came together to develop something called the RAW checklist. And RAW is in ROAR as in Iron's RAW. Um and you know, what they were saying, well, look, if you if if everyone's using this generic checklist, here are the questions you'd ask on top of that for LGBT people. So, like, what are the kind of additional considerations that might be? So it might be things like whether both parties are out, for example, like where have they disclosed their sexual orientation or gender identity, and what might that tell you? It might be questions about things like experiential power, that's one idea that helps explain perhaps domestic some dynamics in domestic abuse where one partner is is is the one who is able to claim the kind of authority about what it is to be LGBT in a relationship. But I guess and and so that's really useful, but I guess for me, a lot of these things are saying, well, a lot of what you're thinking about in terms of coercive control still applies. It's just you need to kind of step back from that a bit. So if you're talking about fear, fear is really important. We need to think about fear, but in an LGBT context, that might be fear of someone outing you, right?

David Mandel 43:09

So you're not or trying to take your children because we're or you're not really defining you're not really gay because you slept with a woman and your relationships with women and but now you're with a man. Now you know, now you're the man and you're not really gay because I've never slept with a man with a woman. You mean and we see this with with ethnicity and religion. You know, you see people like who are like in the US who are Puerto Rican who grew up in Puerto Rico and those who live grew up in the States, and then they're being like, well, you're not really Puerto Rican, or for instance. You know, like there's this this there's this enforcement of hierarchy or identity or defined, like you're saying, experiential power. You're right. It's it's it's universal and it has its unique expressions in certain communities within certain because I'm leveraging, let me just say this, because in that moment, I'm I'm leveraging if I'm that person using that that that those arguments, those, those tactics, I'm leveraging something in society. I'm not I'm not making this up. I'm leveraging when I tell, and so again, go back to you know, sort of gender dynamics. If I tell a woman she's crazy, I'm leveraging cultural stereotypes.

SPEAKER_03 44:23

Right. Exactly.

David Mandel 44:25

That are that give me power that amplify those words. And I think that's what you're saying, right? Is is here within sensitivity to that.

R 44:33

Yeah. And I I I always think about what practitioners can do if they don't have the specialized training or they don't have those specialized tools, you know. And I can say positively that I wish that somebody had said to me, what what is it that you want me to know that I might have a hard time understanding, or you're afraid to tell me? And and that might open the door to a partnering conversation around some of these more deeply disturbing issues, particularly as it pertains maybe to trans people or to bisexual people who are often coerced and abused, and are afraid of having a conversation with a heterosexual practitioner who may not at all understand those dynamics, who may become a tool in the manipulation toolkit of our perpetrator, and who may have in the past experienced abuse from systems precisely because they were queer. And so don't trust you as a professional to not re-harm them. And I and I I really think that practitioners need to remember that we're not all starting from the same place. That if you are a heterosexual practitioner, there's a lot that you don't understand about the queer reality, about how people are treated, about how systems treat queer people, about how professionals treat queer people, about our fears, around our safety, around losing our custody of children, and and that many of us have experienced family separation as well. So really just being humble in that and being able to say there is a different experience happening here that I may not understand, but but asking the question from a from a curious and humble place, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 46:46

It's it's it's so important, isn't it? And I guess that's part of all of this is you know, it's connecting the individual to the structural, right? Which I think is what you're talking about, like individual experiences that they kind of make sense in a structural context. What you're talking about there is LGBT folk who who's either abuse is leveraged because we live in a homophobic society, or and in particular, you know, in particular trans people at the moment, or it it's not not just leveraged, it's the fact that often organizations and agencies are are really problematic. They're not necessarily a place of safety. Yeah. What are any number of reasons?

SPEAKER_03 47:24

Yeah.

David Mandel 47:24

Yeah. I mean, and I I think this is the layering of you know, this is and I think this is one of the struggles or what gets flattened. I think it purposefully, by the way, by a lot of people who talk about male victims in a certain way. I think there's other people who talk about male victims in a really sensitive, clear way. But I think there's some folks who really want to talk about male victimization disconnected from the larger social structures that give privileged men. And then men are, and I'm talking about heterosexual men, but men across diverse sexualities too, which is sort of that women are experiencing layered experiences of oppression and atmospheres and experiences of violence and harassment and dangers in different places, just like queer people are, right? So you're talking about gay bashing, or you're talking about, you know, sort of having experiences, like you said, of systems. You know, so the entrapment issue. This is why intersectionalities and coercive control are so important to me, because if you don't have an intersectional lens, then you cannot understand coercive control. That is really like so I'm really going to say that to people clearly because I don't think it's talked about enough. That an intersection, why course of control is such a powerful lens with this focus on entrapment and control is it opens the doorway to really this intersectional analysis of why somebody is trapped. So if I've got a family of origin that's homophobic, I don't have that as a resource to come out and say, I'm being abused by my partner because I'm now walking into another dangerous or harassing situation, right? Because I don't have my family support. I they're gonna take it as evidence there's something wrong with my sexuality. I mean, I've worked with families where like where the woman was being abused by her female partner, and she said, they're gonna make me pick between my my sexuality and my safety, and I'm not gonna let them take my sexuality away from me. I mean, it just and you know, if you don't get intersectionalities, you don't get that. You think she's in denial or she's picking the abuser over, you know, everything else. So I don't know.

R 49:44

It's just uh so I'm I'm gonna shift to looking at you looking specifically at LGBTQ communities and deaths, cases where where people did not survive that abuse. And and what what it tells us about us the system itself, that these deaths are going unreviewed.

SPEAKER_00 50:08

Yeah. And it's it's I mean, it's a real interesting and challenging area of work. So, you know, globally it's what we'd call domestic violence fatality review. Different countries do it, so the US, parts of the US do it, Canada, but the UK does as well. So we have what's called domestic homicide reviews, or now domestic abuse-related death reviews, they're being renamed. And in you know, in theory, every LGBT case, every domestic

Death Reviews And Stereotypes In Disguise

SPEAKER_00 50:34

abuse-related death should be reviewed in in England and Wales. The issue, I guess, is we're not sure that that's always the case. And it might be that people aren't out or people don't know about the nature of the relationship. So if someone is killed or dies by suicide, for example, if agencies didn't know they were LGBT or in a same-sex relationship, that might just never be flagged as a domestic abuse death. So that that's kind of one problem. There's also sometimes these questions of definitions like kind of what deaths count and you know, where we see the risk as coming from. So there was you know, that can be a challenge too. And even if these cases are reviewed, sometimes they're reviewed uh, and this is true actually for other kind of minority or minoritized communities where they can be r re reviewed in a really well crass way, right? So they that though that it's not taking an intersectional perspective, it it's kind of quite procedural, it's not really keeping that LGBT person centered in terms of their their kind of queerness, if for want of a better word. So you know, you can sometimes see these published, read these published reviews, and apart from the fact it mentions someone's sexuality right at the start, it doesn't really come back to that, right? You wouldn't know they were an LGBT person. Or it might make kind of all sorts of assumptions. So sometimes the language that is used is just inappropriate, right? Referring to someone as a homosexual or you know, dated medicalized language, or perhaps not thinking about the intersection between violence in the home and perhaps their experience of homophobia outside the home when the perpetrator may actually have a different role, right? They may be protective in that context outside the home. So you know, there's all these kind of challenges for how we uh centre the victim. And I think that's true in any domestic abuse-related death, and it takes particular forms then in, say, an LGBT case. But how do we really honour them in telling their story in its complexity and in a way that's meaningful and and that that doesn't hide from some of this complexity either?

R 52:47

Some of the challenges that I've seen in those death reviews is that there is an implicit assumption that being queer is a heightened risk factor for violence. Can you just talk a little bit about that assumption, please?

SPEAKER_00 53:05

Yeah, so and it happens in other communities, right? So women who are from black or or minoritized communities, the same thing happened. You could it's often called culturalization. So in that context, culture becomes the explanation. Oh, this woman was killed because she was British Indian, which meant she was of this faith or this kind of cultural context. It's a really kind of simplistic, problematic narrative. It's it's about playing off stereotypes and tropes, really, really, to explain the violence. The same can happen to LGBT folks, absolutely. So it might be that a rapport overfocuses on things like substance misuse in LGBT communities, because the kind of myth is that LGBT people all use drugs and alcohol, right? Or so so I guess the thing is that you you get this kind of very whatever the kind of simplistic stereotypes or tropes that might exist for that community, they become part of the explanation for the heightened risk. That that's kind of basically how it works, I think. So and it and and and of course that's problematic because it's not necessarily true. Um you can also see that's what might might happen in a professional context, right? That a professional's faced with someone and that becomes their interpretation. Oh, well, the the problem's gonna be the substance misuse.

SPEAKER_03 54:20

Right.

SPEAKER_00 54:20

Because that's what LGBT people are like, rather than a kind of stepping back from that and thinking, hang on, no wait, that's not helpful. You know, what's actually going on on here?

R 54:30

Yeah, I actually want to give a shout out to a woman by the name of Kath, Kathy Gilern, who's the mother of Aaron Galern, who I went to school with, and he disappeared in Austria in the 19 or the early 2000s. And he was a queer man who, when his disappearance happened, his homosexuality was used as a as an excuse to not investigate his going missing. And that is something that's really common as a response of law enforcement to the queer community. And and so this is something that's consistent, it's consistent in regions, different regions, that once somebody has disclosed that they're gay, that if violence is perpetrated upon them, that many times their disclosure, their gayness, their relationships are used as a way to not even investigate the violence done to them or their disappearance or their murder. And so we we have a long way to go to really push our systems and our professionals to stop seeing queerness, to stop seeing gayness as some type of deficit and some type of risk factor in and of itself.

David Mandel 56:02

You know, this leads me to a common theme for my thinking, which is sort of how do we remain sensitive to these dynamics of targeting of, you know, whether it's targeting an intimate partner violence or through larger social dynamics of oppression or you know, violence directed towards a group of people because of behavior, because of identity. And how do we acknowledge, validate, see that, and how do we not take a positionality of pathologizing that group of folks? Because what I see a lot of is is this sort of moving into this deficit pathology lens you're talking about, and assuming it's somehow associated with the person or the group versus being a product, you know, if it exists at all. Because I think there's some ways we just we just fabricate these these pathologies. We fabricate these deficits.

R 57:05

We draw we draw insane conclusions. That's right. We just kind of like we make it so a great example is recently I was looking at a a series of research that went into the claim that racialized and Latino children have more disabilities, more cognitive disabilities. And I went back through the research to find out what the definition of cognitive disability was. And it was anyone who displayed discomfort in institutional academic settings. That was a cognitive disability. Right. So if you're an alternative learner or you have linguistic barriers, you are immediately flagged as having a cognitive disability. So our definitions themselves were problematic.

David Mandel 57:55

And you could see, you could see, I'm gonna, I'm gonna you, and you're probably you're not gonna agree with me about this, right? You know, I could I know this already. But I, you know, you could see somebody, whether they're coming from a saviorist point of view or a true helpy saying, if

Moving Beyond Deficit Thinking In Practice

David Mandel 58:10

we can sort of see these, the struggles of this young person, then we can support them with compassion and empathy.

R 58:17

Yeah, well, but I don't agree that that's what's gonna happen.

David Mandel 58:20

No, but I'm not but that's not what happened. That does isn't what happened in a system that that kind of is structurally that way. And that's to me, is in some sense the nub of it, right? Which is you know, that kid is struggling in an environment that's not set up for them. That's that is as another language's dominant language that hasn't been sensitive to them. And yeah, they're uncomfortable and they're struggling, and that's real. Well, and reticent thing kind of disclose, but instead that becomes a label and a deficit and an identity and an excuse for further violence, right?

SPEAKER_03 58:52

Yeah.

David Mandel 58:52

So you know, so I don't know, James, if you've got this is kind of we're gonna be moving to wrapping up, but if you've got a thought about this very large topic.

SPEAKER_00 59:00

Well, and and I think it comes back to this kind of question about like what makes it hard for professionals and systems to see people and re like really see them and try and think about and respond to them as individuals with all this kind of richness and complexity. And I I think that it's a good way, you know, you've talked about this, like one, it's recognizing we we often come from a deficit place. I think that's how a lot of our systems are built. But two, that's often it's also often linked to kind of thresholds, right? And and kind of capacity and demand. So what we're constantly kind of doing is is pushing into a space where we're try we're just trying to manage things from getting worse. So it does it, it you know, it it it puts us into a position as professionals, even because I think most professionals turn up wanting to do a good job, but they they just don't have the time, the space, the resources to be able to be open in that way. Because actually they've got this caseload, their system doesn't work to allow them to do that, there's no specialist resource. So actually what they end up focusing on is really simplistic safety plans, safety plans which aren't tailored to actual victims' experience, or what's reasonable for them to do, or you know, and and and then they become the problem, you know, and that's the issue, isn't it? It sh it becomes victim blaming then because someone's not delivering what we expect them to to when it was unreasonable and unhelpful to ask in in the first place.

R 1:00:26

It wasn't the right, it wasn't the right thing to ask them in the first place. You know, this is this is uh such an important conversation, and I really hope that our listeners take away really tangible things that they can ask and do, even in in a deficit of understanding, even in maybe not understanding queer relationships, and maybe having a system that prioritizes very specific actions. But I would I would love to hear what you would want to tell practitioners about some core things that they can do to be supportive of queer people experiencing intimate partner or family violence.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:17

Yeah, I think for me there's there's two things, and and one's a bit more of a challenge to those practitioners, perhaps. But so I'll start with the the second one. And I think Ruth, you talked about this in, I'm sure in some way or other, but it is that that recognizing that they they kind of need to give space to someone to to to kind of ask them to share their knowledge or experience and and actually hear that. So, you know, what is it that you you want me to know? What is it that you're worried about? What is it that could you want to be different right now? What are you looking for from here? So, some of that I think is about that letting go a bit and and opening space for that person who's often sitting in front of you to be able to hopefully go, actually, I I I trust you enough to say this is what I I need, or you know, I think that's really important.

What Practitioners And Survivors Can Do

SPEAKER_00 1:02:07

And some of that's informed by really practical steps. So one of the things we often talk about here is the importance of monitoring, right? And monitoring sounds really boring when you intake someone asking them about their demographics, but actually that can make a really strong message if you ask about sexual orientation and gender identity. Well, in a way that's not embarrassing, it which doesn't suggest you're uncomfortable. Actually, maybe someone's going to be willing to kind of step into that space. Um so you know, I think there's that. The other point though, I think, you know, and I think this is true for any uh you know, any anyone really who wants to think about how they respond to kind of minority or minoritized communities, people have got some responsibility to to educate themselves, to to try and think through some of this before it happens. That I mean, that's often the challenge. We've we've talked about the difficulty of space and time and systems. So I know that's that's difficult, but just finding some information and just kind of trying to widen the lens that they bring, or or at least think about some of their assumptions that they're bringing about relationships, about relationship norms, about sexual orientation or gender identity. And you can't do that overnight. So it's just being open to some of that self-reflection that I think is often at the core of some of this.

R 1:03:29

Yeah. And and what would you say to survivors and victims that are going through a system that is not necessarily designed for them, may not even feel safe to them?

SPEAKER_00 1:03:46

Yeah, yeah. I I mean, f firstly know that it's that's not your fault, right? This is not about your failing, it's about the systems failing. So that that's really important. And then secondly, find your ally, you know, and and and that there are LGBT specialist services out there people can reach out to. They may not be in their area, right? That might be a national helpline, but getting that advice from an LGBT specialist can be really uh invaluable and and and getting that assistance to navigate that system if they if they need it is really important.

R 1:04:22

But yeah, yeah, and I was I was gonna ask one more question that I don't usually ask, but I think it's really important to ask. And that is, is that what would you say to those who are navigating the system who may be experiencing further harm or increased danger because the professional they're working with is not skilled up or is biased against them? What are their options? What can what would you say to them?

SPEAKER_00 1:04:52

Yeah, and it's really hard, isn't it? But like you, you know, first thing is they need to prioritize their safety, right? So it you know, not finding ways to kind of either not step into that space if they've got the option, um or or and if they have to, because sometimes these are kind of statutory interventions, right? Like actually, if someone's not doing their job, they need they need to call them out. And um, and that's finding out well, where can I make a complaint? Where is my ally to give me some advice to help me make a complaint? You know, I think that's really, really important. And and I guess the minimum you can be doing is keeping a record of some of that stuff, right? Because that that's going to be the issue, is is people will say, Well, did this really happen? How did it happen? Actually, if you're not sure, writing some of that stack the stuff down and keeping a record so that when you do challenge that, if you feel safe too, or or s or you can go to an ally for advice on that, you've you've got something to say, look, this is what's happened. Yeah. It's not okay.

David Mandel 1:05:53

Yeah, but it's tough. Yeah. Thank you.

R 1:05:57

James, thank you so much.

David Mandel 1:05:58

Yeah, so much. It's a good conversation. I was excited at the beginning and I think it it lived up to it. I don't know.

R 1:06:04

I know you I know you kind of think these are really these are really hard conversations to have, and they're so important to have, you know. So so I hope that that our listeners took away some tangible ways to talk to people in the queer community about intimate partner and and domestic violence, but also perhaps learned a little bit if you're not a queer person about the challenges that we face as queer people in getting help services and coming into contact with a system that is often adversarial or may make things work for us. And and and really for practitioners, just knowing and accepting that that's part of our reality when we step into interventions may help you to do a little bit better practice.

David Mandel 1:07:02

That's great. So you've been listening to Partner with Survivor.

R 1:07:07

Yeah.

David Mandel 1:07:07

And who are you? Who are you?

R 1:07:09

I'm still Ruth Ramundo, haven't changed yet. Who are you?

David Mandel 1:07:13

And please, if you're been listening, share this, follow, you know, review it on your favorite uh platform. We really want to get this message out. And we're nearing 200,000 episodes, which is amazing. We'll let you know when that happens. Yeah. Have been downloaded. And check us out at Safety Other Institute dot com and Academy.safety Other Institute dot com. And with that, we are out.