Locked Up, Not Locked Out: How Abuse Continues From Behind Bars
By Jackie Wruck, SW, Asia Pacific Regional Manager, Safe & Together Institute
There’s a comforting assumption built into how we talk about domestic violence and the justice system: he got arrested, he’s in custody, the danger is over. It’s a tidy narrative—and it’s false.
Coercive control isn’t a single incident of violence. It’s a sustained pattern aimed at maintaining power over a partner and family, and patterns don’t require physical freedom to continue. Incarceration can interrupt a perpetrator’s proximity. It rarely interrupts his intent. When systems operate as if a locked door equals safety, they stop looking for the abuse that’s still happening—and survivors are left managing an ongoing threat that professionals have already stopped seeing.
How the Abuse Plays Out in Real Time
The phone becomes a weapon. Prison phone systems exist to preserve family contact, and perpetrators exploit that design. Imprisoned domestic violence offenders have been documented using prison phone systems to harass and control victims—from Queensland cases where offenders were placed on victims’ call lists undetected to two 2025 Western Australian cases where one man made 65 calls to his partner in 12 days using another prisoner’s account, and another concealed his victim’s identity on the system to dodge contact restrictions. A protection order on paper doesn’t stop a call from getting through.
Children become messengers and pressure points.Research by Bonomi and Martin documented jailhouse calls in which incarcerated men used their children to pressure partners into recanting or dropping charges. In one call, a father told his child: “Your mom is mean and evil. Tell her I said that. Ask your mom why she hates me. Ask her why she doesn’t love me, why she keeps puttin’ me in jail.” This also causes harm to the child.
Third parties carry out what he can’t do himself. Friends, family, or associates on the outside can be recruited—sometimes without fully realising what they’re part of—to conduct surveillance, deliver threats, or facilitate serious harm. Case material in the domestic violence field includes examples of men orchestrating assaults against a partner from prison, using a third party as the instrument.
Systems themselves get weaponised. From inside, perpetrators can still file vexatious motions in family court and make false reports to child protective services—tactics well-documented as “systems abuse” in Australian research. The Family Court has been found to deal with more vexatious litigants than any other Australian court, with researchers noting that “some vexatious litigants appear to be using the system as a vehicle for control and harassment” rather than legitimate grievance. Perpetrators feel emboldened when they sense systems are ineffective or bendable to their advantage.
Visits become another site of coercion. When a survivor visits an incarcerated partner, often with children, this is frequently misread by professionals as loyalty or poor judgement. In practice it’s often a survival strategy—placating him, assessing his mood, reducing the risk of retaliation now and after release.
The Impact on Child and Family Functioning
This is where the “he’s locked up, she’s safe” narrative does the most damage—because it obscures the actual harm still unfolding inside the household.
A perpetrator’s pattern doesn’t just threaten a partner, it directly shapes child and family functioning: how safe a child feels in their own home, how much they trust their own mother, and how the family organises itself around fear.
Consider one documented case: a father instructed his son to steal his mother’s money and keys, framing it as retrieving what was rightfully his. When the mother changed the locks for safety, the child didn’t believe her—he tested the new keys in the door himself, because his father had already undermined his trust in her. The mother, forced to change her phone number to escape harassment, was then afraid to share her new number with her own son—because she knew the father would use the child as a pipeline back to her.
That’s not a side effect of domestic violence. That is domestic violence—a father actively driving a wedge between a child and a protective parent, using the child as an instrument of ongoing control. And because incident-based thinking only asks “Did another act of physical violence occur?”, this kind of harm is routinely invisible to the professionals assessing the family’s safety.
The downstream effects are significant:
Children lose trust in the protective parent, not because she’s failed them, but because the perpetrator has actively created that mistrust.
Survivors are pushed into impossible positions—silence to protect the kids or resistance that gets mislabeled as “alienation” or non-cooperation.
Family functioning organises around managing an ongoing threat rather than around the children’s developmental needs.
Practitioners, missing the pattern, end up scrutinizing the mother’s choices (“Why is she still visiting him?”, “Why won’t she relocate?”) instead of the father’s behaviour that created the risk in the first place.
How the Safe & Together Model Creates Safety
The Safe & Together Model was built specifically to correct this blind spot. Rather than treating incidents of physical violence as the whole picture, it centres a perpetrator pattern–based approach—mapping what a perpetrator is actually doing, across every context available to him, including from inside a correctional facility.
The Model does this in a few concrete ways:
It reframes the core question. Instead of “Did another incident happen?”, practitioners are trained to ask: “What is this perpetrator’s pattern of coercive control and actions taken to harm the children—from whatever sources are available, including collateral contacts, jailhouse calls, and third-party reports?” That single reframe makes phone harassment, child triangulation, and system manipulation visible instead of invisible.
It connects perpetrator behaviour directly to family functioning. The Model asks not just “What did he do to his partner?” but “What was the specific impact of this behaviour on the children and the family as a whole?” That’s how a case like the stolen-keys example above gets correctly identified as parental harm and manipulation, rather than a background detail in an adult conflict.
It keeps accountability on the person creating the risk. By mapping the perpetrator’s pattern—including behaviour toward past partners, other children, and people outside the family—the Model stops survivors’ protective decisions (visiting him in prison, refusing to relocate near his family, resisting unsupervised contact) from being misread as bad judgement or alienation. Those decisions get assessed in the context of the actual risk he continues to pose.
It builds cross-system measures of accountability. Because perpetrators use multiple systems—courts, corrections, child protection—to extend their control, the Model trains practitioners across those systems to recognise manipulation for what it is: false allegations, vexatious motions, and harassment via the systems themselves. In Queensland, for example, Safe & Together–trained children’s legal services attorneys have used this framework to advocate with parole boards for parole conditions and with police for bail conditions that actually enhance the safety of children and the non-offending parent—closing the exact gap that lets abuse continue behind bars.
It produces measurable results. Independent evaluations have found real shifts once agencies adopt this framework. In Victoria, a multi-agency triage model built on the Safe & Together Model diverted almost 90% of police family violence reports involving children away from unnecessary statutory Child Protection intervention. And in New South Wales, a program using the Model’s documentation practices to keep the perpetrator’s pattern visible in every case file saw zero children removed from families who were current child protection clients while engaged with the service, alongside a significant drop in unsafe perpetrator contact. Evidence that correctly identifies the perpetrator’s pattern, rather than scrutinises the survivor, produces safer outcomes for children.
The Bottom Line
Incarceration can pause a perpetrator’s physical proximity. It doesn’t pause his intent, and it doesn’t automatically restore trust or stability to a family he’s spent months or years controlling. Until systems are trained to see the full pattern—phone harassment, child triangulation, third-party proxies, weaponised court filings—“he’s in prison” will keep getting mistaken for “she’s safe.” The Safe & Together Model exists to close exactly that gap: by keeping the lens fixed on what perpetrators are actually doing, and what it costs the children and family living with it.
Additional Resources
Blog: “It Hadn’t Stopped. It Had Just Shifted.”: What a Survivor Taught Me About Systems and Safety
Podcast: Season 2 Episode 14: How to Perpetrator-Proof Custody and Access Processes
Safe & Together Institute’s domestic abuse–informed trainings
Safe & Together Institute’s upcoming events
David Mandel’s book Stop Blaming Mothers and Ignoring Fathers: How to Transform the Way We Keep Children Safe from Domestic Violence
