This short paper describes the Safe and Together model, the context for its importance, select evaluation data and the standard elements of the Safe and Together training and technical assistance package for child welfare and its partners. To view click here.
by David Mandel
“In child welfare cases involving domestic violence, supervision plays a critical role in determining the quality and consistency of case practice. The expectations of supervisors and managers, as expressed through their questions and directives, determine workers’ priorities and areas of focus. Supervisors and managers make the critical decisions regarding case substantiation, transfer and removal. In domestic violence cases, it is the supervisor who decides whether a worker’s assessment of the domestic violence perpetrator’s threat to a child safety is complete. It is the supervisor who reviews the worker’s discussion with the survivor regarding safety planning and the children’s well-being. It is the supervisor who often decides whether a case will be opened and transferred. And managers are frequently involved in cases, providing feedback and direction.” (excerpted from Supervising Domestic Violence Cases: A Training for Child Welfare Supervisors and Managers by David Mandel)
Starting in June 2008, I’ve been delivering targeted day long trainings for CT’s Department of Children and Families’ supervisors and managers entitled “Supervising Domestic Violence Cases.” And as a follow up to the training, I surveyed the participants regarding changes in their supervisory practice and their perception of the training is changing outcomes for families. The results are promising.
- 66% of the respondents identified specific positive changes in their supervisory practice including (1) improved and increased utilization of the Domestic Violence Consultants; (2) greater understanding of the dynamics of coercive control and its impact on the family; (3) increased understanding of survivors’ strengths and safety planning; and (4) more specific questions and directives to workers.
- 62% indicated positive change in their workers’ practice as a result of their training in the Safe and Together model including 1) workers were more empathetic and supportive to domestic violence survivors; 2) improved assessment and information gathering and 3) improved utilization of the Domestic Violence Consultants.
- 50% of the respondents indicated positive changes in outcomes for families as a result of the training including 1) increased ability to maintain children safely in the home resulting in fewer out of home placements 2) referrals better tailored to the needs of the family 3) more support for domestic violence survivors and 4) greater accountability for the domestic violence perpetrator.
- 69% of the respondents indicated continued positive or improved utilization of the Domestic Violence Consultants. For example, one supervisor reported an 80% increase in referrals to their Area Office Domestic Violence Consultant and other supervisors indicated workers were better prepared for the consultation process.
To read the full report on the training and the survey click here.
Tomorrow, September 2, I will be a guest blogger for the Hartford Courant Series Overcoming Battered Lives. The focus of the blog post will be men and domestic violence. I will be responding to comments on the blog all day.
by David Mandel
I recently had a chapter published on Batterers and the Lives of Their Children in the Praeger Perspectives 4 Volume Series “Violence Againt Women in Families and Relationships” edited by Evan Stark and Eve Buzawa. My chapter appears in Volume Two “The Family Context” and focuses on the connections between batterer’s behavior and children from conception through adulthood. I also engage issues related to the desire of many battered women for their children to have safe contact with their fathers, the double standard we apply to mother and father’s behaviors and the importance of setting high expectations of change for batterers as fathers.
The entire series offers a comprehensive overview of the issue of violence against women in families and relationships. The volumes cover victimization and the community response, the family context, the criminal justice system and the law, and the media and cultural attitudes. The series includes chapters by Evan Stark on the Battered Mothers’ Dillemma, Joan S. Meier on the Misuse of Parental Alienation Syndrome in Custody Suits, Leigh Goodmark on Battered Women who Fight Back Againt their Abusers, Claire M. Renzetti on Intimate Partner Violence and Economic Disadvantage and Janice Ristock on Understanding Violence in Lesbian Relationships. Other chapters are by well known scholars and practitioners like Andrew Klein, Eve Buzawa, and Marianne Hester. The series is a tremendous resource for students, practitioners and academics. I hope you check it out. (Fair warning: The entire series is on sale new for $400 for the four volumes. If you decide not to purchase it, please recommend it to your local academic institution or library for their collection.)
Overcoming Battered Lives
Aug 25
The Hartford Courant recently started an on-going series of articles on domestic violence. Their in-depth look at domestic violence in CT can be accessed here. As part of this series, Kristen Selleck, one of the DCF domestic violence consultants trained in the Safe and Together model and a trainer for David Mandel & Associates LLC, is a guest blogger. Check her blog entries and the other blog postings that are part of this series here.
by David Mandel
Assaults against child welfare workers are generally rare but I recently came in contact with a case where the worker was assaulted by client during a visit. For agencies where workers are going into the home for any reason—child welfare, parent aide, in-home family support or other services—there is an unnecessary increase in the danger for case workers when we do not universally screen for domestic violence or fail to integrate existing information about coercive control, threats or acts of violence into our safety assessment. Even when information about coercive control and violence is available, we may be blind to connecting the dots regarding coercive control and violence because it is a “mental health” or a “physical abuse” case.
The “take away” message: Universal, thorough screening for coercive control and actions taken to harm the children can help identify safety issues for workers going into homes.
by David Mandel
The dynamics of domestic violence pose a series of challenges to child welfare workers. What is the adverse impact of a batterer’s behavior when the children haven’t been physically harmed? How do we identify the presence of domestic violence in families when the presenting issue is something else like substance abuse or mental health issues? How do we work with families when the batterer remains in the home or identify how the batterer may still be impacting the children’s safety and well-being when he is not living in the home? What’s the best treatment plan for families experiencing domestic violence? How do we determine if the situation in the family has changed enough to close a case or reunify the children with one or both parents? And how do to all this while not increasing the safety concerns for the family or the worker?
Looking at domestic violence from the perspective of child welfare is slightly different than domestic violence work from other perspectives. While everyone from the police to court personnel to victim advocates share a common concern for the safety and well-being of the adult and child victims of batterer’s behavior, child welfare workers are the only ones in the system who have a statutory responsibility for the safety and well being of children. And it’s this unique responsibility that demands an approach to domestic violence issues that places the children at the center of the response. By keeping the children’s perspective in focus, we can better tackle the challenges these cases represent to child welfare workers.
In Children Who See Too Much, Betsy McAlister Groves clearly and thoughtfully lays out what children need when they have been exposed to batterer’s violence. She says that children need 1) a supportive and nurturing parent/caregiver, 2) safety for themselves and their loved ones and 3) an opportunity to express themselves about what has happened to them. By keeping focused on how batterer’s behavior creates adverse impact for some children and what children need once they have experienced violence in the home, we can more effectively shape our responses to meet the needs of children exposed to batterer’s behavior. For example, knowing a supportive and nurturing parent is particularly important to children exposed to batterer’s behavior, we can ask assessment questions like “which parent is working towards keeping the children’s environment stable?” or “what is each parent doing to meet the developmental needs of their children?” In many families with domestic violence it is the non-offending parent or domestic violence survivor, not the batterer, who is taking day to day care of the children’s needs. And in many instances they are doing this despite the violence, assaults on their parenting and without significant support of the children’s other parent.
We can also use this same thought process to document the batterer’s limitations as a parent, and outline a case plan for him. For example, can the children talk to the batterer about the violence that he has perpetrated against them or their mother? While in many cases it will be obvious that the batterer is not willing or able to accept responsibility for his behavior, we would still need to be clear about our expectations for him. These would include being able to tell his children that he was wrong for his behavior and to listen to their feelings about what he did. Even when the batterer does not appear capable of this behavior it is crucial that the social worker document this limitation, articulate it as one of the batterer’s goals and transmit this expectation to any service provider who is working with the batterer. In this way we develop a measure that is useful in promoting success and documenting failure.
Finally children’s stability and well being is tied to the safety of those that they care about including siblings, the non-offending parent and sometimes even the batterer. Children, who are in families where batterers have created instability, fear and physical harm, do better when they are safe and together with their siblings and the non-offending parent. And while there can be some exceptions to this ideal e.g. the domestic violence survivor also physically abuses the children or is significantly compromised as parent by mental health or substance issues, the domestic violence survivor is often the parent who is providing the children with essential emotional support, nurturance and safety in the face of the batterer’s choice to be abusive. To be as effective as possible with these families, our assessment needs to look at the full spectrum of the survivor’s efforts to promote the safety and well being of the children. In identifying these efforts we can document strengths, validate to them to the survivor which can help her feel empowered in the face of the batterer’s emotional abuse and develop a plan that builds on those strengths.
For further information you can visit Children Witness to Violence Project at http://www.childwitnesstoviolence.org.
*This originally appeared as part of a newsletter I write for the Connecticut Department of Children and Families entitled Domestic Violence Matters. That newsletter is circulated to the entire Department as part of its best practice response to domestic violence. To read more about Connecticut’s Department of Children and Families Domestic Violence Consultation Initiative click here.
by David Mandel
Part of the Safe and Together model focuses on connecting batterer behavior to adverse impact on children. For those interested in participating in a discussion on children exposed to batterer’s behavior, Dr. Jeff Edleson, Dr. Claire Crooks and others are panelists this week (June 15-June 22) on Virtual Issues Discussion (VID) Group at the ISPCAN web site. If you click here, you’ll be able to view the papers associated with the VID and register to receive the posts and join in the discussion.
I highly encourage you to check out this discussion as I recently spent some time with Jeff at the “Greenbook” summit. He is a long time leader and researcher in the field of domestic violence and child maltreatment. After a trip to the Scandinavian countries, he was discussing how a human rights perspective on children exposed to domestic violence challenges us to look at the needs and desires of children from a different angle. This different lens of a human rights approach is important because it can lead us to consider different intervention and prevention strategies.
by David Mandel
The March/April 2009 Child Welfare League of America publication Children’s Voices cited a recent study conducted by the New York Administration for Children Services in conjunction with the Mount Sinai School of Medicine which found significant evidence of short and long post traumatic stress symptoms in child welfare workers in New York City. The study which asked workers workers to identify their most distressing work related event found that one week later 60% reported “clinically significant post traumatic stress disorder symptoms.” The study also found that half of that group “continued to experience clinically significant PTSD symptoms an average of 2.15 years later.”
This number doesn’t surprise me. I’ve seen the impact of trauma in close colleagues and friends working in child protection and I know the effect first hand. I’ve been part of many conversations about sleepless nights, weekends lost to fear and anxiety about cases and nightmares filled with violence. I’ve seen individual workers and entire systems traumatized by the death of a child. Child welfare workers have shared with me how their work has intruded into their most private thoughts and relationships.
Given these numbers and experiences, we need to be thinking about how we can shift the child welfare culture to be more responsive to the needs of workers. The CWLA newsletter described two models of how to respond to trauma exposure reaction and worker stress in a child welfare agency. The Administration for Children Services in New York developed the Resilience Alliance Project which provides 12 sessions of prevention intervention focused on building skills associated with optimism, mastery over negative emotion and in the area of self-care, and collaboration. Importantly the effort has targeted supervisors as well as workers, including a component to help supervisors integrate these skills into their supervisory practice.
Closer to home, Dr. Michael Schultz, a colleague of mine at Connecticut’s Department of Children and Families has been coordinating a series of efforts to support workers with , what he refers to as, worker related stress. Mike, along with others, recognizes that any effective effort to address the impact of the work needs to be broached in a sensitive manner. Workers are often resistant to discussing worker related stress or trauma exposure reaction for fear of being perceived as weak and unable to accomplish their work. These attitudes are often embedded in the child welfare culture and internalized by workers. (Laura van Dernoot Lipsky directly addresses this issue in her book Trauma Stewardship—see April 14 blog entry) The Department’s efforts to sensitively address this issue have included peer led Worker Support Teams, which reach out to workers who are involved in critical incidents, and day long training for workers in worker related stress. The Department’s commitment to child safety, organizational development and worker well-being come together in staff debriefings after critical incidents. These debriefings blend attentiveness to the impact of the traumatic event on staff, mutual support, organizational dynamics and the importance of learning lessons that may prevent future critical incidents.
If you want to read entire Children’s Voices article click here.
by David Mandel
On the eve of the national batterer intervention conference in Minneapolis this week, I’ve been thinking about the relationship between batterer intervention programs and the child welfare system. One of my serious fears as I began working with child welfare systems was that batterer accountability and intervention would be approached exclusively from a simplistic service oriented perspective. So one of the main focuses of the Safe and Together work has been on how child welfare thinks about, talks to, and develops plans to intervene with domestic violence perpetrators. I’ve focused on how perpetrator’s behavior is documented, and how their influence in the family is integrated into safety plans, our assessment of the survivor’s strengths and the treatment plans for children. The last thing I wanted was child welfare agencies assuming that if they added batterer intervention programs to their menu of services they were doing everything possible to hold batterers accountable.
That said I do think batterer intervention programs have a critical role to play in any child welfare system’s response to domestic violence. The following is an informal checklist for batterer intervention programs who might be interested in becoming more of a resource for their local child welfare agency:
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What is your familiarity with mission, policy, practice of your local child welfare agency? Most professionals outside child welfare have very little understanding of what shapes child welfare processes and decision making. Learning about those factors will help a batterer intervention program become a better collaborative partners with children welfare.
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How much does child welfare refer to your program? What does child welfare know about your program and what do you have to offer them to support their mission of child safety, permanency and well-being? It can helpful to review of your intake process, curriculum, and communication about progress and completion from the perspective of serving clients referred because of safety and risk concerns for children. This may point out places where you can enhance your program to address the ways batterer’s harm children directly and through their impact on the survivor.
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What do you know about how child welfare agencies in your area do or do not address batterers? Most professionals outside the child welfare system have limited knowledge about how that systems works. Taking the time to understand how your local child welfare system does or doesn’t intervene with batterers will help you help them with their mission. One of the best things you can do is set a meeting with your local child welfare administrators to find out about their current case practice relative to batterers. (You may find it useful to ask about their practices with fathers as well.)
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What do you know about how child welfare holds batterers accountable in other ways in addition to referring them to a BIP? Batterer intervention programs are first and foremost advocates for stopping batterers’ violence, not advocates for their own programs. Learning the child welfare system will help you recommend child welfare actions that hold batterers accountable but do not necessary involve a referral for treatment. Examples of other steps child welfare may take include recommending that he return the family car to the children’s mother or having him support his child’s mental health counseling.
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Does your program address how a batterer’s pattern of coercive control towards his partner impacts the children in the home? For a long time, batterer intervention programs have had education sessions on how children are impacted by domestic violence.* This needs to be expanded to address how children are used as weapons, how batterers undermine their partners’ parenting and how coercive control tactics focused on the survivor impact the children. For example, we need to be talking about how isolating and controlling a partner may impact children’s access to extended family and participation in activities in the community.
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How well prepared is your program to assess batterers as parents? What questions do you ask in your program assessment to determine a batterer’s parenting role and skills, co-parenting practices and his ability to support his children’s relationship with their mother? Batterer assessments for child welfare need a strong component regarding these and related areas.
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Is your referral/intake process set up to gather specific information from child welfare about a batterer’s pattern of coercive control and actions taken to harm the children? Since batterers thrive in an environment where there is limited information about their behavior patterns, a batterer intervention program needs to develop protocols for getting specific information from child welfare about a batterer’s pattern of coercive control and actions taken to harm the children. Child welfare often invests a lot of time and energy compiling this data from various sources. Batterer accountability, in form of more informed evaluations and feedback, will benefit when this information is shared with batterer intervention programs.
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Do your progress reports communicate specifics about a batterer’s participation including how much he acknowledges his behavior, how well he understands the impact on his family and steps he indicates he is taking to change? Effective batterer intervention programs seek to pro-actively share meaningful information with referral sources. A simple letter indicating completion can be a batterer’s ticket back into the home or unsupervised visits with his children. Progress and completion reports must provide more individualized, detailed information about a batterer’s involvement with their program particularly as it relates to children safety and well-being. (As always, batterer intervention reports should be understood as a small piece of any assessment of the batterer. They need to combined with information from survivors and their advocates, interviews with children and other collateral sources of information.)
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Is your program prepared to highlight the limitations of your work and encourage child welfare to partner with the survivor and continue their own assessment of the batterer’s change (or lack of change)? This point is so important it is worth making twice. Batterer intervention programs have a responsibility to educate child welfare about how to most effectively utilize their program to promote the safety and well-being of children. This means clearly identifying that a batterer’s participation in a program does not guarantee behavior change. The importance of understanding this is one of the reasons why the Safe and Together model places such a strong emphasis on the skills and competencies of child welfare workers. As a consumer of the batterer intervention service (because the service is something that feeds into the child welfare decision making process), child welfare workers need 1) accurate, meaningful and timely information about a batterer’s participation in a program and 2) the skills to evaluate potential change. These skills include developing meaningful behavior change goals as part of case plan and interviewing the batterer, family members and others about batterer behavior change.
* For early article about potential curriculum modules on a program for batterers as fathers, click here. For examples of how some batterer intervention programs have been beefing up their educational components on fatherhood go to Family Violence Prevention Fund, Emerge, or Caring Dads.