Safe and Together

Shifting the paradigm where domestic violence, child maltreatment and child welfare meet

Posts Tagged domestic violence

Batterer as fathers chapter published

Sep 1

Posted by David Mandel in Batterers as Fathers, Children Exposed to Batterer Behavior

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.)

The series is on sale at Amazon and through the publisher.

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Empathy for victims isn’t the answer (but it’s important)

Apr 21

Posted by David Mandel in Safe and Together Model

by David Mandel

During Safe and Together trainings,  I often hear some version of the following statement from child welfare workers:  “I can be empathetic to a victim to a point, and I don’t want to revictimize her but my bottom line is the safety of the children.”   The main implication is that empathy towards victims  is inherently in opposition to child safety.  Victim advocates often also focus on the importance of greater empathy on the part of child welfare, believing that greater empathy will lead to less punitive decisions.

I’ve found that the empathy framework is not the most useful construct when it comes to the intersection of child maltreatment, domestic violence and child welfare decision making. The most useful framework is how a comprehensive assessment of survivor’s strengths is essential to good child welfare decision making. It is an assessment of a survivor’s strengths based on the full spectrum of a survivor’s efforts to promote the safety and well-being of her children (the 3rd critical component in the Safe and Together model) that creates a foundation that leads to positive outcomes.   Social workers who can see a survivor’s efforts to buffer the children from the worst emotional impact of the violence, redirect a batterer away from children, placate a batterer, keep the children’s routine as normal as possible or calm him down all as part of her active efforts to protect the children are more likely to be successful in keeping children safe and in their own home than social workers who limit their assessment of protective capacity to “Did she call the police? Will she get a protection order? Is she going to end the relationship/leave?”

Why?  A social worker who has a more comprehensive view (the third critical component in the Safe and Together model) can:

  • Validate the survivor’s strengths.Validating her efforts can provide tremendous relief from the guilt, shame and blame she’s likely to be feeling.   This identifies the social worker as someone who understands the survivor’s efforts, won’t blame her for the batterer’s behaviors, and doesn’t believe she is a bad mother.
  • Gather more comprehensive information about child safety.  Validating survivor’s strengths is more likely to lead to disclosures and collaboration.
  • More efficiently develop more effective safety plans based on better information and an understanding of what a survivor has already tried.
  • Maintain more children in their homes based on more comprehensive assessment of protective factors.

One of the core principles in the Safe and Together model is that partnering with domestic violence survivors is the main way to keep children safe.   And this partnership starts with a social worker’s attitudes.  I tell social workers to always assume the survivor has been safety planning for themselves and their children before we show up to investigate.  This attitude helps them identify the ways she is actively engaged in trying to protect her children which is the foundation of that collaborative partnership.  Where social workers often trip themselves is when they start believing that seeing her strengths is the same as 1) saying that the batterer isn’t harming the children and 2) saying that we don’t have to communicate to the survivor our concerns about the children, work collaboratively with her to increase the safety of the children and in some extreme cases remove children.   And it is the erroneous belief that their choice is between victim empathy or child safety that leads to this lapse in thinking.

When it comes to child welfare agencies, victims don’t first and foremost need our empathy.  They need our educated assessment of their strengths, grounded in a recognition that actively working to keep children safe looks different in different households and communities.  Using a framework based on a comprehensive assessment of strengths versus greater empathy allows child welfare to remain compassionate even when the batterer’s behavior requires extreme emergeny actions.  For instance, even when the survivor has done as much as is possible for her to protect her children, the children may be at such risk for physical harm that a child welfare worker will need to say—”I see how hard you’ve worked to protect your children, and we’ve tried everything we can to intervene with him and we remain very concerned that your partner will hurt them.”  Skillful assessment of strengths leads to empathy for the victim and good decision-making related to child safety. The two are not in opposition.  In reality they flow from the same source.

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This work changes us (and we should be talking about it)

Apr 14

Posted by David Mandel in Trauma Exposure Reaction

by David Mandel

I  want to recommend a book that I just finished reading.  It’s  “Trauma Stewardship: An everyday guide to caring for self while caring for others” by Laura van Dernoot Lipsky with Connie Burk.     The book, which is about the impact of working with trauma, should be mandatory reading for anyone in the domestic violence and child welfare fields. I felt so strongly about this that I ordered a number of copies and gave them to the Domestic Violence Consultants who work in Connecticut’s Department of Children and Families.   When I gave them the books I told them, “We make sure you have computers and other things to do your job. This book is just as important a tool for you as those things.” (I’ve been also “seeding” this book among key colleagues hoping to promote more dialog.)

Why am I so enthused about this book? Because I found it profoundly useful for me as a person who has worked on issues of violence and abuse for over twenty years, as supervisor who is committed to attending to the health and well-being of the people who work for him, and as consultant who is committed to improving the response to domestic violence.  On a personal level, I found my own experience reflected back to me in Laura’s words.  I was supported by her identification that the ” conversation stopping”  nature of my work (telling people you work with domestic violence doesn’t usually lead to lots of follow up questions) is related to our society’s aversion to dealing with trauma.  I heard my own words to my staff reflected in her insistence that acknowledging our limitations is healthy and doesn’t mean we are abandoning our clients or not committed to our work.  Reading this book helped me reflect on the ways this work has changed me (a narrow focus on work, a loss of creativity in and out of work, exhaustion and withdrawal), and reminded me that I have the capacity to make positive changes in how I care for myself.

As supervisor I found support in her writings for intensifying my commitment to discussing with my staff and others their trauma exposure reaction. (Laura uses the term “trauma exposure reaction” instead of “vicarious trauma” or “secondary trauma.”)   Her naming of how we resist discussing our reactions to trauma in the lives of our clients because of our own fears of feeling weak or being labeled as weak by others (this can be very powerful dynamic within child welfare agencies) helped me raise the subject with my staff.

And as consultant interested in improving the response of our systems to children exposed to batterer’s behavior, I’ve become clearer that we need to create more space in our agencies and institutions to talk about how our trauma exposure is impacting us.   I don’t think we can make our agencies more trauma informed, or help clients heal from their traumas when we don’t have the language and skills to deal with our own reactions.   I don’t think child welfare supervisors can mentor new workers without being able to talk about how the exposure to traumatic material is effecting them. (Could there be  a connection between the high turnover rate in child welfare and the lack of institutional capacity to address new worker’s trauma exposure reaction? ) By looking at our own trauma exposure reactions, we help ourselves, go home healthier to our families, create healthier work environments and develop the compassion and skills we need to help families who have experienced trauma in many forms.

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Partnering with Survivors at the Core of Keeping Children Safe

Apr 11

Posted by David Mandel in Safe and Together Model

by David Mandel

A meaningful child welfare response to domestic violence needs to be articulated from the perspective of the safety and well-being of  children.  I’ve heard many child welfare workers say “I am empathetic to the survivor* and I don’t want to re-victimize her but…my bottom line is the safety and well-being of those children.”  Any training or initiative that hopes to influence the practice of child welfare in domestic violence cases needs to accept and even embrace this reality.   Statute, policy and culture all point in the same direction.  Our communities and legislatures have made it clear that child welfare agencies have been given a trust—intervene in families to protect children from their abusive or neglectful parents.

Acknowledging the legitimacy and importance of child welfare’s role in protecting our children forms a critical starting point of the Safe and Together model.   So when the question arises about how to relate to the adult survivor of domestic violence, the Safe and Together model starts with the principle:

#1: Keeping children safe and together with the survivor ( non-offending parent) is ideal from the perspective of the children.

Given the active role that most survivor’s play in promoting the physical safety and well being of their children, the stabilizing and healing role that non-offending parents play in regards to the trauma caused by the perpetrator and the traumatic impact of removal, any child centered intervention needs to have as this principle as a value guiding decision making. Following this, the next two principles provide further direction:

#2: A successful partnership with the non-offending parents is one of the best ways to keep the children safe.


#3: How we define how domestic violence survivors are “active” in protecting their children is directly related to child welfare’s willingness and ability to development meaningful partnerships with the survivors. A broader definition of “active” promotes collaborative safety planning that is based on the specific experience of the survivor.

The development of meaningful partnerships between child welfare and domestic violence survivors around the safety and well-being strongly hinge on child welfare’s ability to expand the yardstick it uses to measure the protective capacity of the domestic violence survivor (or non-offending parent).    We’ve defined protective survivors as the ones who either 1) leave/end the relationship 2) pursue a civil stay away order and/or 3) call law enforcement. Survivors who aren’t willing or able to pursue these options are assessed as:

  • Making bad choices
  • Having poor judgment
  • Not understanding the impact of the domestic violence on their children
  • Picking the perpetrator over the children

All of which boil down to, in child welfare parlance, as “failing to protect.”
So what’s wrong with this yardstick to measure the protective capacity of the non-offending parent (domestic violence survivor)?

#1: It wrongly focuses on living arrangements and relationship status versus the domestic violence perpetrator’s tactics and access to the children. Most domestic violence perpetrators continue to have access to their children even when a relationship ends, after an arrest or as part of civil court proceedings.  Our focus should be on how a perpetrator is harming or using the children versus whether the parents remain living together or in relationship.

#2: It ignores everything that a non-offending parent is doing day to day to actively reduce the impact of the domestic violence on her children. This includes talking to them about safety, helping them process their feelings, providing nurturance and stability in teeth of the domestic violence perpetrator’s disruptive and destabilizing behavior patterns, and developing plans that may shield them from significant portions of the abuse.    Much of ignorance in this area derives from our double standards regarding mothers and fathers.

#3: It assumes that the non-offending parent is in control of the violence versus the perpetrator. This is best seen in safety or case plans that developed by child welfare that ask the survivor to “not engage in any more violence.”

The yardstick is flawed because it is based on inaccurate assumptions which place unnecessary barriers to collaboration between child welfare and survivors.The impact of these myths is missed opportunities to partner with non-offending parents (survivors) who are sincerely and actively invested in the safety and well-being of their children. This in turn may lead to poor case planning and inefficiency as the child  welfare systems invests energy in developing and enforcing its own strategies for safety. And since these strategies are being developed without the input of the person most knowledgeable about the perpetrator’s behavior, they are often unnecessarily aggressive and disruptive to the family, trap the non-offending parent between the child welfare system and the perpetrator, and fail to meet the needs of the children.

*Throughout this blog I will use the term “survivor” and “non-offending parent” interchangeably. When  domestic violence is the focus of a child welfare intervention it is important to articulate that the survivor is the non-offending parent (except when  they engage in their own specific abusive or neglectful behaviors).  Inappropriately  labeling a domestic violence survivor as a perpetrator of child abuse and/or neglect can create an unnecessary obstacle to collaborative safety planning, push the survivor and perpetrator into an avoidable alliance against child protection. It can shift the focus off the domestic violence perpetrator and offer him another potential tool for gaining power over the survivor and impeding her efforts to protect the children.

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