Be Brave Enough to Confront the Systemic Reality: A Survivor’s Call
By Ruth Reymundo Mandel, Chief Business Development Officer and Credible Expert, Safe & Together Institute
I have never seen a victim more endangered than one who was told their whole life: “The system will protect you and provide justice. The police will arbitrate domestic abuse fairly—call them when your liberties or safety are at risk. Child protection, law enforcement, carceral systems—they were made to protect victims, our children, and our well-being and safety. The legal system is fair and unbiased, and engaging with it is safe and will give you good outcomes. Trauma therapy will help you heal and be a net benefit to you. You will be respected by professionals and systems because you sought professional and system assistance because you and your children were harmed or put in danger. You will be seen as responsible and protective for doing so.”
Those beliefs are not only naïve and not grounded in system response and impact reality—they can also be deadly. Because when women and children step into those systems trusting those promises, too often the result is harm, punishment, separation, and renewed danger—if not early death.
If you are inside these systems—police, child welfare, courts, social services—I’m asking you: Be brave enough to name these real problems. Be brave enough to collaborate for and demand real solutions. Because the systems we built are deeply flawed—and the harm they cause is measurable and costly and spans generations.
The Cost of Believing the System Works
Across Australia, Europe, and Asia, we see the same pattern: Institutions designed to protect families from violence are themselves causing or compounding harm. Even though in each region there are policy, law, and precedent differences in the systems created to address crime and violence and mitigate harm, they are all built around the same model that arose out of European legal structures and social frameworks, which were adapted in the United States and spread globally as the gold standard for crime response and social care. And their costs and failures are not unpredictable or marginal; they are predictable, vast, costly, structural, and systemic. These practices facilitate such things as the widespread misidentification of victims as perpetrators; the minimization or erasure of perpetrator patterns and the impact on child safety, stability, and functioning; and a refusal to hold systems accountable for re-harming victims or colluding with abusers. These institutional practices not only fail to protect families but perpetuate a cycle of harm—shielding individuals with histories of violence and abuse, retaining them within systems of care, and in doing so, inflicting profound human, social, and economic loss.
Data show that children who come into contact with the child protection system are more likely to face increased health, social, developmental, and mental health challenges than their peers. These children are also more likely to come into early contact with the police, not because of increased criminality, but because of the system’s failure to provide safe, supportive, relationally connected environments. One longitudinal study found that children with high levels of childhood adversity—including out-of-home care—had a 4.54 times higher all-cause mortality risk by early adulthood. This current reality creates huge loss of human potential and economic costs in terms of public health and carceral systems and services. It is not working to the benefit of our budgets or our social well-being. Why do we keep doing it this way?
A national Australian study showed that children who had even a single contact with child-protection services before school entry showed substantially higher rates of developmental vulnerability at age 5 (about 65 % higher risk) compared with peers without such contact. These findings hold for lower-tier involvement (e.g., a report) not only for out-of-home care. This challenges any assumption that vulnerability is simply inherent to the child or family and suggests that system contact (and the response pathway) may play a key role in shaping developmental trajectories. The authors argue for early preventive responses and coordinated supports rather than punitive or compliance-driven interventions.
Furthermore, contact with systems like child protection or police does not end vulnerability—it often amplifies it. Law enforcement contact, especially for women who are unhoused, migrant, or disabled, increases the risk of criminalization, family separation, and human trafficking and sexual exploitation. In the United States, contact with law enforcement and the foster care system are among the highest predictors for human trafficking. In many trafficking cases, victims were recruited from within child welfare or juvenile justice placements. Foster and adoptive placements, assumed to be safe, are increasingly recognized as sites of labor exploitation, sexual and physical abuse, and human trafficking. My own Catholic religious institutional abusers were approved foster and adoptive care providers.
Law enforcement agencies routinely recruit and retain domestically and sexually violent officers, of which up to 40% have patterns or convictions of domestic violence, making every contact with these systems a potential danger for women and children. Systems are not accountable nor transparent around retention of those with patterns of criminality or violence. They spend public resources to protect and retain them. Similarly, child protection agencies lack rigorous oversight, with insufficient vetting and accountability for caseworkers and foster carers, and yet, I believe the dominant culture in social care remains toxically self-optimistic and defensive to any public discussion of these facts. It rejects these institutional realities, risk factors, and costs as inconvenient or personally threatening, painting any system critique as an attack on good people doing their best. In doing so, it silences victims and protects the system and abusers—not those it claims to serve.
System contact is not neutral. It is often dangerous, and the danger is rarely acknowledged as systemic. It is instead offloaded onto individuals and their flaws and failings. Victims are blamed for poor outcomes that were, in many cases, escalated or caused by systemic actions and failures. Or those who know the system is dangerous, who avoid it are punished for it. Every time we ask an already vulnerable person to engage with a system with known retention of abusers and practices that are harmful and biased, we are asking them to risk their liberties and safety and their children’s liberties and safety.
If systems were required to demonstrate real end user outcomes—reductions in recidivism over time, survivor-defined safety and satisfaction with interventions and services, long-term family stability, child well-being not just immediate physical safety—many would fail. If we measured the economic cost of misdirected interventions, of repeated removals, of lawsuits and liability arising from negligent harmful practices, the data would show massive costs and waste. And if we tracked the rate of perpetrator retention within police, military, judiciary, and social services, we would see that the system is not neutral—it protects itself and wastes a lot of resources to protect and retain those who use and abuse its power.
This is the data we must focus on—not just population rates of family violence and the individual impact of that violence but systemic responses: their failings, their biases, their economic inefficiency, and the real costs associated with system contact.
The System Is Not Neutral
When women tell you they don’t use the system, it’s not because they are uncooperative or negligent. It’s because the system has proven it is often unsafe, irrelevant, or actively harmful.
Critically, misidentification of victim-survivors as perpetrators is a growing systemic failure. In Victoria, a survey of 225 frontline family violence workers found that 83% had witnessed police misidentify a victim-survivor as the aggressor—often based on incomplete information or biased assumptions. Another analysis found that 12% of women listed as perpetrators were likely misidentified, with devastating consequences. (How many of those officers who misidentify are retained perpetrators? What is the net cost of that?)
In the United States, a country where slavery is still legal for those who are incarcerated, victim/perpetrator misidentification is a chronic problem, and incarceration for being unhoused is a real reality facing many victims of family violence, this is a life or death and loss of liberty reality.
When the system punishes rather than protects, when child removal, policing, or court actions become tools for abusers of family separation rather than safety, when human trafficking and sexual exploitation are known system-based realities that no one is willing to directly address, then engaging that system becomes a huge risk, not necessarily a remedy. And you may NOT blame victims for avoiding that dangerous real potential harm that comes with system contact.
What Would Real Accountability Look Like?
Here is what I demand from any system claiming to protect victims and families:
Baseline and follow-up measurement of outcomes: How many children remain safely with a protective parent or kin at six months and 12 months? How many perpetrators as parents re-offend? How many adult survivors report increased trauma, endangerment, or loss of housing, economic stability, and safety from system contact?
Transparency in hiring and retention: How many officers, judicial workers, caseworkers, and foster carers have prior complaints of domestic or sexual violence? Are they retained? Promoted? Accounted for? Assessed? Is your organization spending resources to defend and retain those with patterns of criminality or abuse of power? What are your organizational policies for legally supporting whistle-blowers or colleagues who report patterns of criminality and abuse? What are the risks your organization incurs to retain those with patterns of behaviors of abuse of power, sexual violence, and domestic abuse?
Survivor-led feedback loops: Victims know when the system harms them. Are their voices built into system design and audit?
If the impact data shows harm, then the system must change—or lose resources.
A Survivor’s Perspective on What Actually Helped
I never once believed the system was safe—or built for me. And that knowledge kept me safe. I safety-planned. I found informal networks. I understood the danger of entering a refuge with small children and the danger child protection posed to me and them when the focus was mother-blaming rather than father-focused and perpetrator-patterned.
I want the system to live up to its claims: to help victims of domestic and family violence—not hinder them. To provide child safety, stability, permanence, and well-being. To be unbiased rather than perpetuate bias. To support safety and personal liberty, not undermine both.
The Scale of Failure
The failure of systemic response to domestic and family violence is not just about the prevalence of abuse—it is about institutional neglect, fragmentation, and impunity. Despite substantial investment in services, agencies, and policy frameworks to address family and gender-based violence, many countries continue to report persistent rates of repeat victimization and ongoing inequities in survivor outcomes.
Research indicates that perpetrator accountability—particularly in their role as parents—remains inconsistent, and that systemic barriers linked to race, disability, migration status, and socioeconomic disadvantage continue to shape access to safety and justice.
These patterns suggest that while institutional infrastructure has expanded, structural inequalities and fragmented system responses still undermine equitable and sustained safety for many victim-survivors.
Accountability is often absent: Law enforcement agencies face few consequences for failing to act on known threats or for misidentifying victims as perpetrators. In the United State, law enforcement have no legal duty to provide safety to domestic violence victims. Yet, carceral systems control domestic abuse response spending and suck up vast amounts of resources and funding for domestic violence with little budgetary transparency, accountability for impact, or proof of effectiveness. Family courts routinely dismiss patterns of coercive control and grant custody or contact to abusive fathers. Mental health disclosures are used against survivors in custody disputes. Child protection often punishes survivors for the harm caused by the perpetrator, replicating the “failure to protect” logic that leaves children in danger.
Despite billions in funding, the systems themselves are rarely required to demonstrate improved safety, stability, self-determination, permanence, and well-being outcomes. Evaluations focus on activity counts—referrals made, trainings held—not on long-term safety, reduction in trauma, preservation of family unity, economic and housing stability, and satisfaction with interventions and services.
This is the true scale of failure: a sprawling system, resourced to protect, that instead too often re-traumatizes and separates, even harms, with little evidence of effectiveness for those it claims to assist.
Prove Your Impact—Or Stop Funding the Harm
If you are inside these systems—be brave enough to face the truth: Your hiring practices, the invisibility of perpetrator patterns, and the assumptions about safety and compliance are failing and harming families. Lack of system accountability, lack of measurable impact, and the true cost of contact with systems is a reality we must name bravely and face.
You must measure real impact. You must be accountable for outcomes, not just inputs.
And if your data shows harm, then you must:
Change the system
Divert resources to models that provide, safety, stability, self-determination, well-being, and permanence
Stop operating on the promises and dangerous mandates to have system contact when the evidence says that contact is dangerous and harmful
Not in our name. Not with our resources. Not anymore. Time to be brave. Name it, change it.
