2026 European Coercive Control & Children Conference Program

Join David Mandel, founder and CEO of the Safe & Together Institute, as he delivers a powerful keynote reflecting on two decades of global systems change.

From its start in one small jurisdiction in one country to becoming an internationally recognised movement for improving responses to domestic violence and child safety, the Safe & Together Model has changed the way hundreds of thousands of professionals act, think, and collaborate, impacting millions of children and helping to keep them safe and together with their protective parents.

This session will celebrate the collective achievements of the past 20 years—born from partnerships with practitioners, agencies, advocates, and survivors across more than a dozen countries. From research results to impacts on diverse sectors to a growing network of 500 Certified Trainers, David will share key milestones and results.

This keynote will not just be a retrospective. David will outline the future of the Institute, spotlighting the Institute’s growing commitment to local collaborations, digital transformation, and its continued thought leadership in areas like credible experts, men’s behaviour, trauma, and domestic abuse perpetration. Whether you’ve been with the movement since its inception or are just discovering it, this keynote is a chance to align with a future where children’s safety, survivor partnership, and accountability for perpetrators as parents are not just values but realised changes and the benchmark for global best practice.

This workshop will explore how perpetrators of domestic abuse use companion animals as a strategy of coercive control. It will examine how the concept of dual intentionality can be extended to family pets, the impact on children who witness or experience abuse alongside their companion animals, and why an animal-inclusive safeguarding framework is essential to a truly whole family and coordinated community response to effective abuse prevention and intervention.

This presentation outlines a proposal for a comprehensive national implementation model for embedding the Safe & Together approach across Scotland. The proposal presents a structured framework for country-wide delivery centred on four key components: a strategic lead, an administrative function, collaborative partnerships, and an enhanced trainer network, all scaffolded by a robust governance and support structure.

Participants will explore how national implementation infrastructure ensures fidelity to the model whilst adapting to local contexts, professional cultures, and existing multi-agency arrangements. The session examines the critical success factors of effective implementation at a variety of scales and invites participants to apply these to their own settings.

Attendees will leave with practical insights into scaling Safe & Together implementation, strengthening domestic abuse–informed practice at various scales, and creating the conditions for lasting system change that improves outcomes for children, supports non-offending parents, and holds perpetrators accountable.

This workshop will explore the interconnected goals of perpetrator visibility and accountability—what they mean in the context of domestic abuse practice, how they differ, and how each influences the other. It will examine the challenges practitioners and agencies face in pursuing and achieving them and how perpetrators exploit systemic gaps to maintain their invisibility and evade accountability.

The critical role of perpetrator data will also be highlighted, examining how current gaps in perpetrator data, exacerbated by an overreliance on criminal justice and victim data, undermine efforts to understand and respond to perpetration and impede progress towards greater visibility and accountability.

Finally, the workshop will present recommendations for practice, emphasising the need to strengthen interventions at every level. It will advocate for the introduction and utilisation of local and national perpetrator data to build a stronger evidence base, improve the coordination of responses, and enhance agency accountability across the sector.

This workshop will explore Safe & Together’s work in the family court. David Mandel will reflect on Australia's implementation of the Safe & Together Model, examining how Safe & Together principles have influenced family court assessments and outcomes.

Beth Altman, Head of Operations at Cafcass Cymru, will share their experience of applying the Model in Welsh family courts alongside early indicators of success.

The session will create space for discussion about the challenges and opportunities of embedding Safe & Together in family justice systems, with particular attention to how the Model supports more accurate assessments and decision-making.

This presentation will help colleagues:

• Understand how race and racism intersect with violence against women and girls in the UK context.

• Recognise barriers faced by minoritised women accessing VAWG services and justice.

• Identify how stereotypes and biases weaponise race to silence survivors and enable perpetrators.

• Explore practical strategies for anti-racist, intersectional responses to VAWG.

This workshop will explore the Safe & Together London Partnership's unique model of Implementation to effect systems change. It will focus on and share reflections from thematic action learning sets across a number of sites of tension and opportunity, including how to embed S&T in shifting contexts such as social care reforms.

Recent work on S&T and Family Group Decision-Making will be explored, alongside other outputs from action learning sets designed to work through blockages to implementation.

This workshop demonstrates how the Safe & Together Model enhances multi-agency practice across complex domestic abuse cases. The MARAC and Safe & Together Integration Project (M-STIP) is currently being piloted in two Scottish local authorities. The project aims to support areas in effectively utilising both the MARAC and Safe & Together models. This presentation draws on learning from M-STIP to demonstrate how these principles apply to any multi-agency meeting, team, or process, which brings professionals together to create better outcomes for families affected by domestic abuse perpetrators.

Using insights from the pilot, participants will examine how a perpetrator pattern–based lens strengthens risk assessment, decision-making, and information-sharing across professional boundaries. We will address common multi-agency challenges—including differing thresholds, professional cultures, and competing priorities—demonstrating how Safe & Together principles create greater alignment around child safety, perpetrator accountability, and non-offending parent support. Attendees will leave with transferable approaches to strengthen partnership working across their own multi-agency settings.

In this workshop, two papers will be presented. The first will focus on the development a Domestic Violence–Informed Practice Guidance for Tusla practitioners, incorporating the national approach to practice in the agency, Signs of Safety, and the evidence-base for working in a domestic violence–informed way. Paper one will detail the why this approach was taken, what we did, and the practice changes that are required to work in this way.

Paper two will focus on implementation—what we did and are still doing to support practitioners to work in this way. It will also detail the practice change we have seen and examples of this work.

Drawing on his lived experience as a child survivor and campaigner, David Challen explores the lasting impact of coercive control on families and the children left behind.

Reflecting on his mother Sally Challen’s landmark 2019 appeal, he examines what has changed since and invites professionals to consider a deeper understanding of coercive control’s impact on the whole family.