Podcast on Crimes Against Women
The Conference on Crimes Against Women (CCAW) is thrilled the announce the Podcast on Crimes Against Women (PCAW). Continuing with our fourth season, the PCAW releases new episodes every Monday. The PCAW serves as an extension of the information and topics presented at the annual Conference, providing in-depth dialogue, fresh perspectives, and relevant updates by experts in the fields of victim advocacy, criminal justice, medicine, and more. This podcast’s format hopes to create a space for topical conversations aimed to engage and educate community members on the issue of violence against women, how it impacts our daily lives, and how we can work together to create lasting cultural and systemic change.
Podcast on Crimes Against Women
From the Cycle Of Violence to Power And Control: What Survivors Teach Us
The statistics related to domestic violence are sobering, but the story behind them is even more complex—and too often misunderstood. In this episode, we dig into how popular frameworks for understanding domestic violence took hold and how survivors play a role in shaping those frameworks - and thereby enhancing our understanding of abuse.
Our guests, Melissa Scaia and Dr. Lisa Young Larance, bring decades of frontline practice, research, and program design to this conversation. Melissa explains how the Duluth Model emerged from listening sessions, and why anger management fails when entitlement—not emotion—is the root of abuse. Lisa introduces the “arrest web,” showing how coercive partners weaponize preferred arrest policies and police interviews, leading to survivors over confessing while abusers stay calm and quiet. We examine plea pressures, court silencing, criminalized survivors and the ripple effects of probation and child protection that can replicate intimate harm. We also discuss how oppression theory and intersectionality help to explain why women of color are arrested more and believed less, regardless of stand-your-ground or duty-to-retreat frameworks. Practical takeaways include better police questioning, expert-informed court processes, and agency support that moves beyond the victim–offender binary to truly increase safety and autonomy.
The subject matter of this podcast will address difficult topics, multiple forms of violence, and identity-based discrimination and harassment. We acknowledge that this content may be difficult and have listed specific content warnings in each episode description to help create a positive, safe experience for all listeners.
SPEAKER_00:In this country, 31 million crimes. 31 million crimes are reported every year. That is one every second. Out of that, every 24 minutes, there is a murder. Every five minutes, there is a rape, every two to five minutes, there is a sexual assault. Every nine seconds in this country, a woman is assaulted by someone who told her that he loved her, by someone who told her it was her fault, by someone who tries to tell the rest of us it's none of our business. And I'm proud to stand here today with each of you to call that perpetrator a liar.
SPEAKER_03:Welcome to the podcast on crimes against women. I'm Maria McMullen. Each year in October, we acknowledge Domestic Violence Awareness Month with critical conversations that illuminate abuse in its many forms. To continue those conversations and understand why and how domestic violence happens, today we highlight popular models and frameworks such as the cycle of violence, coercive control, and others and explore their origins, application, and challenges with insights from experts Melissa Skaya and Dr. Lisa Young Lawrence. Melissa Skaya has worked to address gender-based violence for over 25 years locally in Minnesota as well as nationally and globally. She works part-time at Domestic Abuse Project in Minneapolis. She works with the UN Women to provide training and technical assistance globally and provides training and technical assistance on working with criminalized survivors through domestic violence turning points. In her work, she brings a wealth of experience as the former director of international training at global rights for women, co-founder of Pathways to Family Peace, and Executive Director of Domestic Abuse Intervention Programs, also known as the Duluth Model. Before working in Duluth, she was the executive director of Advocates for Family Peace for 17 years, a local domestic violence advocacy program where she advocated for victims of domestic violence. She has also led and organized three coordinated community responses to address domestic violence in Minnesota. She has been a consulting trainer for many national training organizations on domestic violence and child abuse, including the Center for Court Innovation, the Battered Women's Justice Project, and National Council of Juvenile and Family Court judges. Dr. Lisa Young Lawrence is a researcher practitioner with a wide-ranging clinical community and prison-based practice experience. Her direct service work includes providing individual trauma-informed therapy, co-facilitating intervention groups, and program design and implementation. Dr. Young Lawrence is known globally as an anti-violence intervention pioneer who created foundational and innovative community and prison-based programming for diverse women with domestic and sexual violence survivorship histories who are brought to systems' attention for their use of non-fatal force. Her consulting work includes the New Mexico Coalition Against Domestic Violence, the United States Air Force's Family Advocacy Program, and Positive Shift in Victoria, Australia. Dr. Young Laurence's scholarship focuses primarily on understanding how systems involved women's institutional contact can both replicate intimate harm and facilitate positive change. Her book, Broken Women's Stories of Intimate and Institutional Harm, was published by the University of California Press in 2024. She is an assistant professor at Brynmore College's Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research. Melissa and Lisa, welcome to the show. Thank you. It's good to be with you, and we have so much to talk about, and I want to learn everything I possibly can from both of you. So let's get started by understanding what each of you do and the impact of your work. Melissa, we'll start with you. What do you do for the Domestic Abuse Project and how is their work instrumental to the DV movement?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, so sometimes it gets a little bit confusing here in Minnesota. I currently work for DAP, which is Domestic Abuse Project, but I also used to be the director of DAIP, which is Domestic Abuse Intervention Program in Duluth. But I'm currently at Minneapolis, and in Minneapolis right now, I am the CCR coordinator or the coordinated for coordinated community response facilitator. And then I also co-facilitate when needed a group for men who are battering women or using coercive control towards women, and then a group for women who use force. So I'm doing that part-time in Minneapolis, and then do training for lots of other places. But that's what I'm currently doing locally.
SPEAKER_03:That sounds like a lot. Lisa, you're also doing a lot in this space. Tell us what you do holistically as a clinician and consultant and how your work is also impactful in the domestic violence movement.
SPEAKER_04:I am currently an assistant professor of social work at the Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania. So I educate masters and doctoral level social workers about a range of issues, one of them being domestic violence. I'm a longtime anti-violence intervention practitioner as well. Built some of the first foundational programming to address this complex issue of women with domestic and sexual violence survivorship histories who then become systems identified as offenders. I continue to do that work through a range of research projects and consultancies.
SPEAKER_03:I know that there's so much that we can learn from both of you, but for today we chose to focus and explore the frameworks that are used to understand abuse, such as the cycle of violence. That's just one that we will be talking about because there are other models and we'll get to those too. But first, Melissa, I wanted to understand more about the cycle of violence model or framework, because it's well known or believed that abusers tend to behave in patterns when making the choice to abuse. And from observing those patterns, the theory emerged for the cycle of violence. And that theory was developed by Lenore Walker. Could you give us a traditional maybe definition of the cycle of violence and how it differs from the others, like the power and control wheel, um, and then maybe how they intersect as well.
SPEAKER_01:Sure. So in the late 1970s, Lenore Walker coined the term which was uh cycle of violence. So I want to just say that even though it may come off today that I'm criticizing it, I also want to give her credit at that time because I would say socially and politically, people weren't talking about it in terms of domestic violence, you know, or a very different time frame than the late 70s, early 80s, and all that time frame. So, you know, I want to just say that it was an important step in our movement. And what I love about the domestic violence movement is we've gone out to continually learn about things, right? And how things affect a broad range. So here's the easiest way to describe it is that my uh description is that first there's this tension-building phase, right? That survivor would be experiencing is what the theory says, maybe seeing some things in the abuser. And then there's what's called the violence or the explosion phase. Okay, so that's phase two, so it's it's done in a circle. And then the last phase is the honeymoon phase. Okay, so that's what people often uh describe as the cycle of violence. I want to say I was trained in it when I started in the mid-90s when I went to Anne-Marie Shelter in St. Cloud, Minnesota. I went and volunteered, and I I think I still even have it, and it was described to me. It made sense to me, you know, at that time. Um, but what we've really come to understand is a few things. And one of the big ones, and this comes from the work in Duluth, and this was at the time when Duluth was trying to figure out what's happening, is they were offering education groups for women all around Duluth. Okay, and so they would go out, do an education group with women, and they would teach this the cycle of violence. And women were showing up at those groups saying, I don't know that honeymoon phase in particular. That's the one phase lots of women were reacting to. And they said, no, no, no, no. I mean, and you know, we kind of jokingly, but also embarrassed by say, we said, no, no, no, just go home and look for it. It's there, you know, which is very oppressive of us. Yes, yeah, right? Like, no, no, no. We haven't come a long way. Yeah. Yes, we have. But this is how people get very attached to their theories, right? And so, I mean, I remember, no, no, no, just you'll you'll find it. Just go look for the small thing he does afterwards, right? To to apologize or to try and make it better. And women kept coming back and saying, no, uh, I do not have this. So finally we realize our oppressive ways and said, okay, we're gonna set aside that theory and others that we sort of say, and what we're gonna do is we're gonna spend this time. We wanna hear from you. So we know about the physical violence, right? And we know we've talked about the sexual violence, but we're just gonna document all the other things that your partners do to you. We want you to tell us about that, and we're gonna write them down, okay? And so that's what they did is they wrote down all the other things that women experienced, and that's how the power and control wheel came to be. And so some choices were made. It didn't include every category, right? But it included the ones that we heard the most commonly. So, a way to think about the power and control wheel is that the outside ring is really important because it includes physical and sexual violence. Okay, and then of course, there's all the spokes of the wheel. And then there's the center which says power and control. The reason why those three parts are important is because oftentimes I'll hear people say, Well, Melissa, you know, it says on there that name-calling is emotional abuse. And my partner, you know, called me a name. You know, are they abusive? I say, okay, well, I have a few questions for you, right? Are they using physical abuse? Are they threatening it, right? Are you living in fear also? Because it's you can't just take one of those things out of the spoke, right? So it's that that outside ring plus any combination of those tactics is what abusers end up with is power and control, right? So that's the representation of it. And when it was created at that time, um, Shirley Olberg and Coral McDonald, I want to make sure give them credit because they're the ones, Coral actually from Duluth is the one who created that, you know, a time before fancy computers and Canva and all those sorts of things made that. And even before the internet, and then programs said, Hey, could you fax me that or mail me that? And it started getting spread around. And I think it's also a really good representation that globally now survivors have attached to this, right? And so I do work globally for UN women. And the reason why the cycle of violence, of course, is problematic for us, is because one thing, exactly like you said, Maria, it it instills this thing of it's a pattern, right? You're gonna see these things, and you don't always see those things. That's one of the big fundamental problems with it, of course, is not just that there's a honeymoon phase, but also that uh there's this tension-building phase, right? In fact, I just talked to a woman today and she said, Mosa, sometimes I had no idea. Like he would just come and do things to me, and I had no idea, right? Like what I'd done. And I'm just like, what was that for? And so we want any of our graphic representations to represent the experience of as many women as possible, as many diverse, you know, women as possible. And so it's really important that we sort of think about this. And then I would just say the other thing is that it also started to imply that if you wanted to end the violence, you have to deal with the tension. And then people started creating anger management programs, right? And so they said, oh yeah, yeah, you just need to teach them to breathe, and saying that that was the cause. Now, we even at the very beginning thought that anger management would be the thing to solve it. And what we realized is that men were able to control their anger in lots of other places, but when it came to in their home and with their partners, right, they felt really justified and entitled to get their way. And so teaching them how to breathe, for example, through a moment wasn't gonna be the thing that was gonna help.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, that really isn't the solution in those particular cases. Is there anywhere that those two models might intersect? The cycle of violence and the power and control wheel?
SPEAKER_01:Well, I mean, first I want to say to make sure that people hear me clearly is that some survivors do experience this cycle. So I don't want to ever come across as saying that some survivors don't, right? Because some survivors do. But in terms of the intersection, and and this would be the difference. I think for me, I really struggle with the the word honeymoon also, because culturally it means a beautiful and amazing time. Where what we're talking about here is we're talking about relationships of dominance, right? So I'm putting my two hands up here, uh, where we have the abuser actually feels entitled to control their partner and think, okay, if I enter into a relationship, for example, with a woman, then someone needs to be in charge, and that's me. And I think the interesting thing about it too is there's been some research that recently came out from Professor Catherine Donovan in England, and she works in the LGBTQ community. And in that community, there was a bias for sure, and by the general public, that well, okay, there may be this dominance thing happening, you know, and male-female, but not in, you know, those real those relationships are different, right? And her research says that's not the case. The thinking was still somebody needs to be in charge. When you have two people in an intimate relationship, somebody needs to be in charge. So what I would say to you where part of the overlap comes, is that I do see behaviors by abusers, of course, because you know I work with them in groups and such, but during what the cycle of violence shows as that honeymoon phase can be for a couple different intents. And the my problem with that is that it gives this perception that it's it's an amazing time for a victim or a victim's gonna accept. When what we know, one of the ways to keep a relationship of dominance is to give acts of kindness or acts of care once in a while. That will also, you know, keep survivors there. And I'm not saying that some abusers don't do some of that sometimes in their genuine hearts. I I actually think that some of them do, like they feel bad about it, and they're like, okay, I want to do something, but I'm not gonna call that a honeymoon because, in part, they're not willing to give up the relationship of dominance, right, over their partner.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, I think you raise uh some really interesting points. And uh one of the other things I would add to that is what we've learned over time is even though domestic violence does not discriminate, it is not the same experience for each individual, and it's going to be very different according to the person and their circumstances and lots of other things. I just want to make mention quickly about what other types of abuse there actually are in that power and control wheel because it's not always physical violence, right? And so um if you could just give us an idea of of what else is in the wheel and what the other types of abuse are.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah. So one of the things to think about is that a lot of people often ask me, like, how is the power and control wheel different than what Evan Stark termed is coercive control? And here's the way I would describe it the power and control wheel literally comes from the voices of survivors, right? We literally took their words and put them within there. That's their words. A way to think about coercive control is to think that's how the abuser thinks, right? To think, okay, I'm gonna take, you're right, this tactic of isolation, that's gonna work. And so what Evan Stark did is really sort of help us understand and really elevated the idea, there's a whole bunch of things. So isolation is a really common one. Trying to get her to only be close to them in today's technological world, making her feel guilty if she won't turn on her location on her cell phone, for example, that's a big one these days. Also, having a young daughter, I learn about these things. But in today's community, that's an example of it. But isolating our partners as well and trying to trap them in a certain way and keep them away from others is big. Using children is another one that you'll see on there. It's so in relationships where there's children that especially when you have multiple children, for example, you'll often see that the abuser will favor one child over another as really an extension of themselves to keep this relationship of dominance of place like, hey, uh, by the way, you know, why don't you uh tell me what your mom did, you know, while I was gone? And, you know, if if if she talks to anyone, why don't you let me know? Oh, and then by the way, that bike that you've always wanted, I'm happy to go get that for you. And so that's not physical or sexual violence, right? But that's a coercive tactic using children to monitor their partners and to keep that relationship of dominance in place.
SPEAKER_03:That's so manipulative. It's a great example, though, because those are definitely things that uh we've heard from lots of people, lots of survivors. Um, now we touched on coercive control just briefly, and we're gonna come back to that because I want to switch gears for a minute and talk with Lisa. And listeners, bear with us. We're covering a lot of ground, but we're gonna come full circle here at the end. So here we go. Lisa, what is a criminalized survivor? And how has that term become more commonly used?
SPEAKER_04:The term criminalized survivor recognizes the experiences of women with domestic and sexual violence survivorship histories who then become systems involved. So legal systems involved for it may be through an inappropriate or wrongful arrest, it may be harm that they have caused. It's also uh connected to the harm that they've experienced from their partner and unresolved uh experiences really over the course of multiple relationships.
SPEAKER_03:How do those actions actually cause a survivor to be criminalized?
SPEAKER_04:I'm going to uh answer your question, but through the words of the women that I've worked with and also I've done research with. So the women that I've worked with and done research uh with have actually described their experience as being or feeling broken. And it is because of their system's contact, but also because of the intimate harm they've experienced from a coercively controlling and physically abusive person. In my work, I've brought attention to what I refer to as the arrest web, and it's a very intentional form of coercive control that manipulates mandatory preferred arrest procedures, manipulates the interview, the police questioning process, and really takes advantage of the gendered phenomenon of women with domestic violence survivorship histories disclosing what's happened at the incident while the coercively controlling partner remains very calm, cool, collected, and quiet when the police arrive. So coercive control can be used in so many different settings and manipulated in a way to where the truly coercively controlling person uh it's not evident to systems responders of who's doing what to whom.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, that's a very interesting article. I have read that uh article about the arrest web. That was published in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence, and we'll try to get a link out to people so that they can access that information. One of the things I found very interesting was how you wrote about police officers have a protocol on how and when and why they would arrest someone. And that may or may not include how they evaluate what else is going on prior to the incident, right?
SPEAKER_04:Absolutely. And I think it's it's critically important with when we think of arrest and situate it within the context of the US and that history of the battered women's movement and the real push to criminalize domestic violence and that has saved countless lives. Also, criminalizing domestic violence, police response has now been weaponized by coercively controlling partners against many women. And so police themselves, as systems partners, and many, of course, uh working diligently to keep people safe and do the best that they can in those moments, they are also part of this arrest web. They become entangled in the coercively controlling partner's efforts to have the survivor wrongfully arrested. I know that that is often unrecognized. Many times the blame is placed on the policy and the first responders rather than really understanding the power of the coercively controlling partner and the socialized disclosure for women who get uh involved in the system and trying to protect themselves and their families, their children. And also very afraid of the person who has that power and control, who is their abusive partner, who the police may come and go, but that person has the primary power in their relationship.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, you're so right about that. So that that brings us to the point where we're gonna talk a little bit about the laws that surround either defending yourself or not defending yourself and how how the law kind of treats people uh like women who are experiencing domestic violence because there are differences within the country where some states uphold the quote unquote stand your ground law and then other states uphold the quote unquote retreat law. So can you define what these laws mean as they relate to domestic violence and the implications for survivors who may have fought back? And I'd love to hear from both of you on this question.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, so I think I'll start on this one, just in terms of, and just say, of course, uh this is not providing legal advice, and I'm not a lawyer in terms of this, but you know, I I've thought about this a lot and worked, my best friend's a defense attorney, and spent quite a bit of time on this. And here's the reason why it's important, and for survivors, okay, is because when you're living under someone who's being coercive controlling, who's harming you, you're scared of, right? When you're living under that, what is very common to happen, of course, is that over time things start to feel justified to get back at to resist the person who's caused you harm, right? Now, some of those things end up being illegal and some of them are not. But when you're living under it, what feels justified doesn't mean it's legal. And this is what I want survivors to know. And I also want advocates, those who do this work. I also don't think enough advocates understand or partner with um defense attorneys about this enough. But here's my layperson's description of the difference, okay? Okay. So, for example, um, behind me, if you were to see me, there is a wall behind me, okay, and the door is in front of me. Now, if I was in an abusive relationship with a history of violence and my partner was standing in front of me and is coming at me or harms me, even in a retreat state, I have the right to defend and protect myself because there's no door that I can easily go to, right? Because remember, the door I have to go through my partner. However, let's say I turned around, right? So let's say the door was behind me, for example, my partner's coming at me, he does something to me, turns away and walks away, for example, and then I charge Adam, throw something at him. If I do that and I don't retreat, go out the door, right? Yes. In many retreat states, that'd be considered illegal because I have a legal obligation to retreat when I have that option. Okay. Now, the standard ground, the legal definitions of those are much more nuanced by state, but my general understanding is that regardless if there's a door or not, you can literally stand your ground, right? And like fight back. Okay. Now there's a whole bunch of sort of um things about whether it's legal in a retreat state or standard ground. So for example, there's uh characteristics about how much force you can use. Uh, so for example, about whether or not someone pushes me if I can take out a gun. And you know, my non-lawyerly opinion is you'd probably get in trouble, right? And we've seen that. And so there's this all these sorts of things about the nuance of it that have been tested in some courts. And what we've seen is that what happens too often is that women of color in particular, that they end up getting arrested a lot more, regardless if they're a standard ground state, and regardless if it's a retreat, and I don't have a place to go. But what I've seen in terms of the research, in my experience working with women of color, they're getting arrested a lot more than women who have any social or economic privilege. And this is a big, big problem that we've seen. And we've also seen this in standard ground laws, not just with domestic violence, but other times, right? You know, there's like a big Netflix documentary about one right now. So, you know, there's all these sorts of things, you know, that happen about standard ground states are different. But I what I would say is that I want survivors, you know, are not going to go out like, you know, it's not their obligation to go out and like, well, I think I should go out and study the law, you know, before I do this. I want them to have a general knowledge, but I want the system to change so that that's not a thing that they have to worry about. In the meantime, because that's still the reality, I at least want advocates or people who work with survivors to talk to them about it, right? And I also completely understand that when you're experiencing that, you're trying to protect yourself or your children, why you will use force back. And I think it's a mistake for us to over-moralize it and be like, well, if I I would never do that, right? And you need to make a better choice. It's not helpful. It is not helpful to survivors when we insert that language and talk about it in that way, when they're living under this person who is really, right, just seeking to dominate them. And this is just a really important aspect. And that the challenge is that interveners often too or too often look at an incident and they don't look at The history as well of the relationship.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, that's that's that is all that is all so helpful, and all of that context is very meaningful in this conversation. I want to get to Lisa and hear her thoughts on these laws because she is working with these criminalized survivors.
SPEAKER_04:I support exactly what Melissa is saying, and I think that to build on that when a woman is in this situation, she's thinking of usually first and foremost the safety of her children and then her safety. And she's going to do what she needs to do to get out and to remove herself from that situation. And not decontextualizing her experiences and removing an analysis of race, class, and culture in the US is detrimental to the lives of many women, and that's what results in them becoming criminalized.
SPEAKER_03:Now, when we look at these cases where survivors are being criminalized and they're being brought into uh charges are brought against them, they're in court, are there opportunities now or yet for attorneys to talk with them about their history with the individual who they may have used force upon, probably their abusive partner, and really take that into consideration? Or are we still in a space where that that's not happening? You're smiling. I don't know if that's good or bad. I I'm not.
SPEAKER_04:I was just talking with someone about this. Um, it's not good. With the women that I work with, so if we think about that moment where the police intervene and I'm speaking along a binary here in terms of her being harmed by him, that's my example. All right. And she has been abused by him and is closely controlled by him. Okay. And then if we add on layers of race, class, culture. The police intervene, and as I was bringing attention to that arrest web, following protocol, asking questions, she's not aware of when the questions start, how much time she has. She often, women have told me after, was just hoping that she would get to the police cruiser so she would feel safe, not understanding that she was arrested if she got to the police cruiser. And then this very gendered phenomenon of her detailing everything that she did wrong, because that's what's on the surface. The survivorship is the protective piece, which is like I it's not safe for me to talk about that right now. They're asking me if I did something, and I'm saying yes. And then the questions stop. And then the coercively controlled person gets their way because they've said nothing. She's done all the work in terms of taking responsibility. So now we take that dynamic and we take it to court and we take it to working with attorneys. Many women are told, in my experience, you don't want to take this to trial. It's going to cost you money, you don't have, you're going to have to be away from your kids longer. Typically, he then has the kids. She's out of the house because of this victim offender binary and how we treat people very differently according to how the system has identified them. And so she's discouraged from moving forward legally and encouraged to take a plea. But women have told me in this process, I didn't get to tell my story when the police came to the house. So I believed I'm just going to be able to now tell the full story when I go to court and when I get to talk to my attorney. They don't realize that they're going to likely have moments to talk to this public defender, and that they're going to be encouraged to take a plea bargain, which means not telling your story and being guaranteed a certain outcome. And even the language of a bargain, they think, well, okay, this is the direction they think this is best for me. They don't understand how the legal system works. And so it's the similar dynamic of what feels like betrayal and deception when they talk to attorneys, unfortunately, and when they go through the court process. And then the court feels hampered as well because women's saying, Yes, I just did it, let's get it over with. I just did a training at the Americ for the American Judges Association in Vancouver and spoke with over a hundred uh judges who are very frustrated around what we can do to support women when they come and they say, Yes, this is what happened, I did it, what do I do next? And we need to have advocates and domestic violence experts who are allowed to interrupt that process, welcomed into that process for assessment and thorough expert opinion. Otherwise, the legal system is betraying them and they feel deeply betrayed.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, and you kind of wrote a book about that, right? Uh the book Broken Women's Stories of Intimate and Institutional Harm and Repair. Tell us a little bit about what the book is about and how it relates to the criminalized survivor and what some key takeaways might be.
SPEAKER_04:Yes. The book is based on three years, more than three years of research, ethnographic research, which meant that I spent an extensive period of time with 33 women. I interviewed them in person, also went to court with them, child protection hearings, spent time in their homes, in the community, learning from their experiences of being arrested, going to court, being on probation, having interactions with child protection, and then being court-ordered to anti-violence intervention. The book takes a close look at the layered experience, the cumulative harm of probation, child protection, and anti-violence intervention. It also provides a way forward to understand that, of course, there are probation officers and child protection workers and anti-violence intervention groups that provide the framework and the support around healing and repair. But the system, the community-based legal system, oftentimes replicates the harm that the women have felt and experienced in their intimate relationships and early childhood through childhood abuse. So the takeaways from that are first of all, a deep analysis through the women's own words of what it's like to be on probation, what it's like to go for a drug test and feel sexually abused again by the urinalysis test, what it's like to have interactions with child protection workers who treated many of these women as they were failures as parents, even when there wasn't a formal investigation, and what it's like to have to go to a court-ordered group and spend time they didn't have and money they didn't have. But also what it's like to have the opportunity to meet similarly situated women in group and then create informal spaces where they supported each other. And in the case of many of these women, in touch with each other many years later, supporting each other and helping each other informally and formally. Because once the system's contact is over, the formal contact, meaning off probation, the child protection investigation's over, you finish your anti-violence intervention program, if you have a misdemeanor domestic violence conviction on your record, your ability to get a job that you're going to support you and your family is very, very difficult if not impossible. So the system's harms continue and they're continuing to support each other. So the takeaways are the final chapter is a call to action for people involved in the lives of women who are systems identified as offenders or criminalized survivors, and how we can assert our expertise. And going back to when I was talking about the court and attorneys, doing that advocacy and intervention, this is a pressing social justice issue. And although we refer to it often as the criminal justice system, the women that Melissa and I work with don't get the justice. They don't feel the justice part of it, they only feel the legal part of it. So I encourage people to learn from the women's experiences and the women's own words and how we can promote healing and repair and push back on oppressive systems.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, this is such important work that you both are doing. Now, Melissa, you've done some writing as well. You co-wrote Turning Points, an educational curriculum for women who use both legal and illegal violence against their partners. So this is really kind of an extension or just a parallel to the work that we were just talking about with Lisa. So while engaging in this research and speaking to survivors, what challenges were revealed and who could utilize the curriculum?
SPEAKER_01:So what we were seeing when I was working in Duluth for people who were working with men in anti-violence programs, you know, with abusers using coercive control, is that there was an increase of women who were getting arrested and they didn't know what to do with them. And what was literally happening is people were calling Duluth saying, so I'm trying to use your men's curriculum with women, and do you have something else? And we're like, okay, we can't keep getting these calls, right? So it's a little bit of this thing of this struggle about we don't want to create something that'll promote more, you know, criminalization of survivors, and what we know people are doing is really problematic, right? And so what we wanted to do is that we wanted to start by doing interviews and focus groups with women, just like you know, Lisa did for a book, but here to say, we need to find out about their lived experience and what it's like. And one of the big things I would say, like as a takeaway about turning points, is that a lot of the women come in to those groups and the initial assessment with the thinking of the abuser in their head, right? And they say, I just want you to know I'm the violent one, or we both use violence and I gotta work on it. And and we just saw this over and over. We said, okay, so what we realize is that the beginning of turning points needs to differentiate between these different types of domestic violence. That you have violence that's coercive and controlling and entitled, but you're gonna have a number of survivors who are gonna resist, right? They're gonna resist that, and that resistive force, we want to call it something else. And those are those with survivorship histories. So, what we wanted to understand then is that we wanted to really work with women when they came in, that the what the court told us about what happened, right, and what survivors were initially telling us, we needed, as Lisa says, to sift through the history and the meaning of all of that. Because abusers work so hard to put thinking into women's heads about what they've done and why, and we knew that would take time to unravel. And so we said, we're gonna really work with women at the very beginning of turning points. We're gonna do this self-assessment where they sort of think about what's the intent or motivation of what I've done, right? What's been the effect of what I've done? We want to understand those things and what's the meaning of what I've done in the whole relationship. So that's how we think about context, right? Is intent, effect, and meaning. And that takes time. And then at the end of nine different segments, we have the women do a self-assessment again. And what I can tell you, Maria, I've done this, it'll be 20 years in 2026. I have never had a woman come into that group and that first assessment say the same thing as the end of those nine sessions. So, what I mean by that is that after that process of being with other women in this space and better understanding why they've done what they've done and why their partner has done what they've done, they see it completely differently, right? So, to Lisa's point about the value of being in community, you know, with other women also is very, very helpful. And it's also another reason why, you know, for me, the cycle of violence has been problematic because it says all domestic violence is the same. When what we know with women who use force is that they're resisting what they're experiencing and they're protecting themselves. And we don't want to use the same language for those who are using coercive control and the same theory as those who are resisting. And a way to think about this, Maria, is I've often uh said to people, I've said, okay, if you for yourself, if you think about this woman you're working with, if she ends this relationship, goes into another relationship, are you concerned that she's gonna be violent, you know, in that new relationship? I've asked people who do assessments that I've asked women that they said, no, I I I wouldn't do that, right? That's what survivors say. And that's what interveners say. I say, okay, then we can't call it the same thing. We have to have different language. And that's why we feel so passionate about using words like women's use of force and resistance as the source for their violence, because we don't want to use the same language as those who are using coercive control. So when women go through that, they're really understanding it as something different for themselves, and that's liberation, and that's our goal for women to really be in a space where they're able to feel more liberated. And we don't want to replicate the abuser and too many interveners and groups just become the next person in her life telling her what to do.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, exactly, exactly. So we we are finally going to come full circle here because we started out talking about models and frameworks, and then we started diving into them, talking about different aspects within each framework, like coercive control. And then we talked about how coercive control can lead to criminalization of survivors, right, and some of the legislation around all of that. And now we are going to bring it all together. I'd love if you both could just comment finally on what models and theories should be considered. We've touched on them, but we should give just a little bit more information.
SPEAKER_01:So, what I would say is that there's there's three sort of places that we go to, which is oppression theory, right, to understand the social factors, that some women have different capacities and different lived experience. So, what that means is that when we live in a society, some of us have more power than others, right? In terms of in that society and more access to get help, more access to leave and move, for example. But also that power and control and coercive control, that this idea that there's a way to think about relationships and a general sort of way, is that men can enter into the world and in intimate partner relationships with the thinking of I get to get my way in this relationship with an intimate partner, and when I need to, I'm gonna use force to get it, right? And that is the setup. It's the thinking and the belief system that says I'm entitled to it. And so we have to understand that that that's culturally supported, right? For men to have that thinking, and we don't have enough models for equality, an equal relationship, because the other thing we want is uh the opposite, right? We want to give examples of the opposite, which is equality or equal and caring relationships. And even with the women that Lisa and I have worked with, I will tell you, Maria, that a lot of them think that equal relationships are only in the movies. A lot of them have never experienced it. A lot of them don't know people who are actually in them. And there's also not in today's day a lot of cultural examples of them. So we have to also work on in terms of how we talk about and think about equal and caring relationships for what we want and for men to be driven to want to give up, you know, some things in order to want that and the love and beauty that can bring for them too.
SPEAKER_03:Totally agree. That's an excellent point.
SPEAKER_04:Lisa I'd like to add to that, uh, particularly when we think of that lens of oppression theory with two different points. The first is work that Ashley Roussan and I did when we uh observed and wrote about women uh in the Renew Program, a program in Ann Arbor, Michigan, created years ago. And we described it as an entitled power. So the abusive, coercively controlling partner exercising authority, where the person who is being coercively controlled and was resisting that as seeking autonomy and a second as a secondary powerholder. And I think that that's really helpful for people to consider, particularly as we pull the lens out and think of all different identities of someone in a coercively controlling relationship who is a secondary powerholder, meaning they have been born into power and privilege. And then adding on to that, just as Melissa so beautifully put it, is again thinking of legal scholar Kimberly Crenshaw's terminology of intersectionality theory. So the bodies that we travel in shape how institutions respond to us. And so all of this happens from a systems perspective. And that's how we were talking about people who have racialized identities and how institutions often respond to them differently, meaning they're more likely to be arrested. And so really paying attention through that lens of oppression theory of primary power, secondary power, and what are the individuals' uh intersectional identities that shape how they move through different institutions and relationships.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, because none of this happens in a vacuum. It's all happening at the same time. And all those gears are moving, if you will, uh from systems and the intersections of poverty and race and domestic violence and so on. And once you get wrapped up in that system, it's very hard to get out of it.
SPEAKER_04:Yes, it is. And I think another thing that we haven't touched on, and it could take us in a different direction, but I just want to briefly note is the people who are intervening in the lives of survivors, particularly criminalized survivors, if they haven't done their own work, they can then continue the harm. Meaning if they're not checked into their own histories and done some healing, uh, and this happens in many different settings.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, it it's all can be very re-traumatizing for lots of people involved. Before I let you go, uh for both men and women who don't necessarily work in the violence against women's space, but who want to help women who they know or who are at risk of being in a violent relationship, what advice or resources would you like to offer?
SPEAKER_01:I would say that, you know, one of the spaces is the Better Women's Justice Project has really started to think about this. They have a whole center now that works on this and provide plenty of, you know, resources on it. So I encourage them. You can come to us at turningpoints at dvturningpoints.com. We try to put a number of resources to help people understand this. Um, you know, domestic violence coalitions and local agencies, I would say some are further along than others in terms of how they think about and talk about criminalized survivors. I'd say we're much better than we were even 10 years ago. Um, but I still hear stories about programs that, you know, if they have an arrest or they're the arrested person that their partner ends up coming there and they can't get help. But I would say that's gotten better for sure. So yeah, I would say local programs for sure. But nationally, I would say, you know, the Better Women's Justice Project. And then of course, there's a number of pockets across the US. Of course, there's work being done in New York with the Survivors Justice Act. There's a big group of people working on women who are in prison and have been sentenced and trying to prevent that. There's a number of people who are working on what I would call diversion programs and prosecutions. But generally, I would say there's not as much as just sort of regular services for victims as, you know, criminalized survivors, there's much less resource put in for those who are criminalized survivors or women who use force than women who have not been caught up in what Lisa so eloquently calls, you know, the web of the justice or the arrest web.
SPEAKER_04:And I I want to add to that as well that I hope that coalitions and uh countywide survivor support agencies can really broaden their perspective and work beyond this victim offender binary. Oftentimes I continue to hear over after 20 years that we don't do that work if a woman becomes systems involved or is a criminalized survivor. And so to think around that survivors survive and that looks different for different people, and how we can innovate and show up in people's lives in a way that uh is truly supportive.
SPEAKER_03:That's also helpful. Thank you both so much for talking with me for the important work that you do. It's very valuable, so thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks so much for listening. Until next time, stay safe. The 21st Annual Conference on Crimes Against Women will be held May 18th through the 21st, 2026, in Dallas, Texas. Learn more at conferencecaw.org and be the first to know about all conference details as well as the latest on the Institute for Coordinated Community Response, Annual Conference Summit, Beyond the Bounds, and the National Training Center on Crimes Against Women. When you follow us on social media at NationalC CAW.