Culture and Domestic Abuse: Bringing an Intersectional Lens to Child Welfare Practice

IntersectionalityChild Welfare
Written By Jessica Sisler

By Leah Vejzovic, LMSW, North America Regional Manager, Safe & Together Institute 

In June, I attended the 33rd APSAC Colloquium in New Orleans. The Association of Professionals Solving the Abuse of Children (APSAC) brings together professionals across child welfare, mental health, law, medicine, and advocacy, and this year’s theme was “Connecting. Solving. Bridging.” One particular workshop has stayed with me since.

The session, “Infusing History, Culture, and Research into Child Maltreatment Training,” was presented by Aileen Torres, Ph.D., Karyn Smarz, Ph.D., and Nicole Guevara, M.A. Dr. Torres is an associate professor in the Department of Psychology at William Paterson University and a licensed, board-certified clinical psychologist.

During the session, Dr. Torres referenced her book Child Abuse and Neglect: Culture, Research, and Theory (Cognella, 2026). The book looks at child maltreatment through cultural, research, and theoretical lenses. It covers historical perspectives, family diversity and parenting, and the systemic side of child protection, including reporting, investigation, and decision-making. It was written for child welfare, psychology, and social work courses, making it a natural fit for anyone thinking about how we prepare the child welfare workforce.

Three Pillars of Practice: History, Culture, and Research

Dr. Torres and her co-presenters framed effective child welfare practice around three pillars: history, culture, and research. Each one shapes how we understand a family and how a family experiences us.

On history, they emphasised that we cannot work well with families without understanding the history of the child welfare system itself. Families do not meet us as a blank slate. Many arrive carrying their own experiences with systems and the experiences of their parents, grandparents, and communities.

On culture, they made the case that historical and cultural context are essential to effective work with families. Culture shapes how families define safety, parenting, discipline, and help. If we do not understand that context, we can misread what we are seeing. The presenters also made a point I underlined in my notes: Cultural issues need to be covered throughout all child welfare training, not confined to a single course or workshop on the topic. When culture lives in one module, it can quietly send the message that culture is a separate subject, rather than something present in every case, every assessment, and every conversation with a family.

On research, they emphasised that research only makes a difference for families when it is translated and applied. Findings need to move out of journals and into the policies and practices that shape everyday casework, supervision, and decision-making in the field.

The Crosswalk: Intersectionalities in the Safe & Together Model

Listening to Dr. Torres, I kept hearing the same message we share in Safe & Together training about intersectionalities, a concept coined by Kimberle Crenshaw. In the Safe & Together Model, intersectionalities are about identity—culture, race, ethnicity, faith, immigration status, language, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability, and class—and how those identities shape a family’s experience of domestic abuse and of the systems that respond to it.

Intersectionalities are not meant to be a standalone piece of the assessment. They run through every one of the Model’s Critical Components: the perpetrator’s pattern of coercive control, the actions taken by the perpetrator to harm the child, the full spectrum of the survivor’s efforts to promote the child’s safety and wellbeing, and the adverse impact of the perpetrator’s behaviour on the child.

In other words, culture is not something we gather a little information on when we complete a family’s social history and then set aside. In domestic abuse cases, culture can shape every part of the picture. There are three places where I see this most clearly in practice.

1. Culture Can Be Leveraged as Part of the Perpetrator’s Pattern

Culture does not cause domestic abuse. Perpetrators choose their behaviour. But a perpetrator may use culture, faith, family expectations, or community standing as tools within their pattern of coercive control. He may describe his controlling behaviour as a cultural or religious expectation of a wife and mother. A perpetrator may threaten to shame their partner within the family or faith community if the survivor speaks to anyone. They may use a partner’s immigration status, language access, or fear of deportation to keep the survivor from reaching out. They may also present themselves to systems in ways that play on our own biases and assumptions about the survivor’s culture or community.

Perpetrators may also leverage their own culture or identity. A perpetrator may point to their experiences of racism or discrimination to gain sympathy, deflect responsibility, or guilt a partner into silence. For example, a Black perpetrator with a white partner may frame any help-seeking as a betrayal or remind the survivor that calling the police could put them in real danger. Because that fear is grounded in real history, it can be an especially powerful lever. When we map the perpetrator’s pattern, we need to ask how they have used culture and identity, both the survivor’s and their own, and we need to document it as their behavioural choice. Without that lens, we risk accepting the perpetrator’s framing, labelling control as “just how things are done in that family,” and missing a significant part of the pattern and its impact on the children.

2. Culture and History Shape a Survivor’s Sense of Safety in Seeking Help

This is where Dr. Torres’s pillar of history connects directly to our work with survivors. For many families, the history of child welfare and other systems is not abstract. It includes the forced removal of Indigenous children from their families and communities through boarding schools, foster care, and adoption; the overrepresentation of Black children in foster care; and immigration enforcement practices that have separated children from their parents. A survivor may carry that history, or their community’s memory of it, into every interaction with us.

So when a survivor is hesitant to engage with services, to call the police, or to share details with a caseworker, that hesitation may not mean the survivor is uncooperative or lacks protective capacity. It may be a very reasonable safety calculation, rooted in a long history of systems failures. Survivors may also possess strengths and engage in protective efforts we do not always recognise. This might include asking a respected elder or faith leader to intervene with the perpetrator, sending the children to stay with relatives when tension is building, keeping money or important documents with someone they trust, or turning to a culturally specific community organisation instead of the police or the courts. Part of partnering with the survivor as a default position is seeing and documenting the full spectrum of their efforts to keep their children safe, including the ones that happen outside of formal systems. It also honours them as the experts in their own lives and the safety plans we create with them.

3. Culture Shapes Our Ability to Partner With the Whole Family

If we are not aware of a family’s cultural norms and practices, it becomes much harder to work with the whole family. We may build case plans that do not fit their lives, like asking a survivor to cut ties with the extended family who are actually part of their safety network. We may misread parenting practices or miss the ways children are connected to their community, language, and traditions as sources of healing, belonging, and stability.

This applies to our work with perpetrators, too. Intervening with the perpetrator to reduce risk and harm to the child means engaging the perpetrator as a parent and holding them accountable for their choices. Understanding their cultural context can help us engage them more effectively. It can also help us recognise when culture is being used as part of their pattern, and name it clearly, without letting it become a reason to lower our expectations of that person as a parent.

Weaving Culture Through Training and Practice

Dr. Torres’s call to cover cultural issues throughout all child welfare training is one that lines up closely with how the Safe & Together Model approaches intersectionalities. They are not an add-on or a separate lesson. They are part of how we map the perpetrator’s pattern, how we recognise a survivor’s protective efforts, how we understand the impact on children, and how we honour the individual lived experiences of the families we work with.

A few questions I would invite practitioners and supervisors to sit with:

  • How might this perpetrator be using culture, faith, or community as part of their pattern of control?

  • What history might this survivor or their community have with systems like ours, and how might that shape their sense of safety with us?

  • What protective efforts might the survivor be making within their family or community that we have not yet documented?

  • Are we holding this perpetrator to the same expectations as a parent, regardless of how he frames his behaviour?

I am grateful to Dr. Torres, Dr. Smarz, and Nicole Guevara for a session that brought history, culture, and research together so clearly. If you work with children and families, I encourage you to look into Dr. Torres’s book, Child Abuse and Neglect: Culture, Research, and Theory, and to keep asking how culture shows up in every part of your work with families impacted by domestic abuse.

 Additional Resources

Jessica Sisler
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What Is Being Done to Them? Domestic Abuse, Mental Health & Perpetrator Patterns