“It Hadn’t Stopped. It Had Just Shifted.”: What a Survivor Taught Me About Systems and Safety

Perpetrator BehaviorFamily CourtSystems Change
Written By Jessica Sisler

ByLeah Vejzovic, LMSW, North America Regional Manager, Safe & Together Institute

A survivor once described her experience in family court in a way I haven’t been able to stop thinking about.

She said that as she sat in the courtroom, listening to the professionals around her discuss the domestic abuse in her case, she noticed something that no one else seemed to see: They were all talking about it as though it had stopped. As though the involvement of child welfare and the court had drawn a line—before and after—and that what was happening now, in the formal structure of a legal proceeding, was something different from what had happened at home.

It hadn’t stopped, she told me. It had just shifted. And it was alive and breathing in that courtroom. In the look he gave her from across the room. In the texts that arrived right before she was called, telling her what to say, what not to say, what would happen if she got it wrong. In the familiar tightening of control dressed up in a suit and a legal filing.

She was right. What she was experiencing has a name: post-separation abuse. And the systems around her had no framework for seeing it.

The Assumption Hidden Inside System Intervention

There is an assumption embedded in how many child welfare and family court systems operate—one that is rarely made explicit but shapes nearly every decision. It goes something like this: Our involvement here means the situation has changed. The abuse is a past event. We are now in a different phase.

This assumption is understandable. It reflects how many systems are structurally designed—around incidents, around discrete events, around the presence or absence of contact. If there has been no new report, no new incident, and no documented physical contact between the parties, the logic of an incident-based system suggests that things have stabilized. That the intervention has done something.

But for a survivor sitting in a courtroom receiving threatening texts before she testifies, nothing has stabilized. The coercive control hasn’t ended; it has found new terrain. What we now recognize as post-separation abuse is the continuation of a perpetrator’s pattern through whatever mechanisms remain available: the courtroom, the legal filings, the custody schedule, the professional evaluations. These are not neutral processes that exist outside the pattern of abuse. For a perpetrator who has spent years using every available mechanism to maintain dominance, they are an extension of it.

This is one of the most consequential ways that perpetrators manipulate systems—and one of the least recognized. They exploit the system’s own assumption that its presence equals safety.

What the Safe & Together Institute’s Research Confirms

The Safe & Together Institute’s position paper How Domestic Violence Perpetrators Manipulate Systems provides a framework for understanding exactly this dynamic. The paper describes Tier 1 systems—child protection, family courts, law enforcement—as the systems perpetrators most actively target, precisely because of the power those systems hold. “Tier 1 systems are misled and manipulated by perpetrators to act as tools of terror and agents of torture,” the paper states.

That language is strong. It is also precise. When a perpetrator uses the family court process to issue threats in the hour before a hearing, when he files repeated motions that force ongoing contact and deplete the survivor’s resources, when he reframes her protective behavior as parental alienation, when he falsely portrays himself as a the caring, supportive, and protective parent, he is not circumventing the system. He is using it. The court’s authority and formality become the container in which he continues to exercise control over the adult and child survivors.

The paper documents specific family court manipulation behaviors: fabricating parental alienation allegations, using motions as harassment, turning survivors’ protective efforts against them in court, and false representation of their parenting. Research it cites shows that false allegations to child protection increase when there is a custody case, and that the majority of those allegations are made by non-custodial parents—usually fathers. None of this is incidental. It is pattern behavior.

The Incident-Based Blind Spot

The survivor’s observation points to something the position paper also names: Incident-based approaches to domestic violence create fundamental blind spots. When a system asks “Has there been a new incident?” rather than “What is the ongoing pattern of behavior?”, it creates a gap that perpetrators can operate in comfortably.

A text message sent 90 seconds before a survivor walks into a courtroom is not an incident that will appear in a police report. A meaningful look across a room will not be documented in a case file. The financial strain of being forced through prolonged litigation—draining the resources needed to actually leave and stabilize—doesn’t register as abuse in any field on a standard assessment form. But each of these is post-separation abuse—a continuation of the same pattern of power and control that was present in the home. And it impacts the functioning of the family, often long after separation. The form has changed. The function hasn’t.

This is why the Safe & Together Model’s perpetrator pattern–based approach is so critical in these contexts. Mapping the pattern—including how it has shifted and adapted as the case has moved through systems—is what allows practitioners to see what incident-based assessment misses. How many filings has he made? When did they occur? What do they correlate with—her attempts to establish independence, her new employment, her new housing? What is the quality, intention, or character of their interactions in and around court proceedings? The answers to these questions tell a story that no single incident can.

The Children Are Living This Too

Post-separation abuse through systems manipulation is not an adult-only problem. Children are caught in it, and the impact on child and family functioning is real, cumulative, and frequently invisible to the systems that could address it.

The Safe & Together Institute’s position paper asks practitioners to map how perpetrators’ system manipulation impacts child and family functioning directly. The questions it poses are worth sitting with: How does harassing litigation drain household resources—resources that would otherwise go to meeting children’s basic needs? How does the chronic stress of repeated false allegations affect the survivor’s mental health and, by extension, her capacity to parent? How are children themselves harmed when they are drawn into court processes, when they are present for custody exchanges engineered to intimidate, when they are used as messengers or informants?

These are not secondary effects. They are the point. The Safe & Together Model names domestic violence perpetration as a parenting choice—and post-separation abuse through system involvement is an extension of that choice. Every frivolous motion filed, every threatening text sent before a court appearance, every allegation weaponized against the other parent is a behavior that creates harm for the children in that family. It destabilizes the household. It depletes the protective parent’s capacity. It exposes children to ongoing conflict and fear that does not end because a court date has been set.

Children who are living through post-separation abuse often present with anxiety, behavioral changes, and difficulty in school—symptoms that systems may attribute to the “high-conflict” nature of the parents’ relationship rather than to the perpetrator’s ongoing pattern of coercive and controlling behavior. When systems use the language of “high conflict” to describe what is more accurately understood as one parent’s continued abuse of another, they inadvertently position the children’s harm as the product of a mutual dynamic rather than a one-directional one. Mapping the pattern—and mapping its impact on each child—is what corrects that framing.

Mapping the Courtroom as a Site of Abuse

For practitioners and systems committed to genuine child safety, the survivor’s account should prompt a concrete question: Are we assessing what is actually happening in the space our intervention has created?

This means asking survivors directly—and with curiosity, not skepticism—what the experience of system involvement has been like for them. It means being alert to the signs that coercive control has migrated into new venues: the co-parenting app used to send harassing messages, the custody exchange engineered to create unwanted contact, the legal process weaponized to intimidate rather than resolve.

It also means being honest about what the Safe & Together Institute’s position paper names as a core system vulnerability: the mistaken belief that if child welfare or law enforcement has been involved, safety has been addressed. As the survivor in that courtroom understood better than anyone around her, presence in the system is not the same as protection from harm.

Seeing What the System Cannot Yet See

She came into that courtroom carrying information that the professionals in the room didn’t have access to—not because it was unavailable, but because no one had built the framework to receive it. She knew the abuse hadn’t stopped. She knew it was in the room with her.

Building systems that can see what she saw—that can recognize coercive control as a living pattern rather than a concluded event—is what it means to practice with genuine perpetrator accountability at the center. It is also, as the position paper makes clear, one of the most powerful ways we can make our systems harder to manipulate.

The abuse doesn’t stop when the court date is set. For too many survivors, it just learns the language of the room. 

Additional Resources

Jessica Sisler
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