Post-Separation Doesn’t Mean Post-Risk: Why Child Welfare Must Track Perpetrator Patterns After Separation

Family CourtChild Welfare
Written By Jessica Sisler

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

There’s a moment in many child welfare cases when the system collectively exhales. The survivor has left. The perpetrator is out of the home. The protection plan is in place. Case closed, or at least moving toward closure. I’ve seen it happen countless times—the palpable sense of relief among professionals when separation occurs. The prevailing assumption is that once the adults are apart, the children are safer.

But here’s what decades of research and practice tell us: Separation is not a safety milestone. For many adult and child survivors, it’s actually when risk escalates.

The Separation Myth

This false sense of security doesn’t come from nowhere. It’s rooted in how we’ve been trained to think about domestic violence. If we conceptualize abuse primarily as physical violence between adults, then physical separation logically reduces risk. The adults aren’t in the same space, so the violence can’t occur. Problem solved.

Except perpetrators of domestic violence don’t use one tactic—they use patterns of coercive control that adapt to circumstances. When physical proximity isn’t available, they find other pathways to maintain power and control. When direct access to their partner is limited, they often turn their focus toward the children. When in-person intimidation isn’t possible, they weaponize the very systems designed to protect families.

The Perpetrator Pattern Mapping Tool (PPMT) helps us see what single incidents miss. It’s designed to track not just what a perpetrator did but also the pattern of behavior over time and across contexts. Post-separation is not a separate chapter—it’s a continuation of the same pattern, often with increased intensity.

What Post-Separation Risk Actually Looks Like

Let me be specific about what we’re talking about. Post-separation perpetrator patterns can include:

  • Using children as messengers, spies, or weapons. This might look like interrogating children about their mother’s activities, sending threatening messages through the children, or coaching children to repeat specific narratives in therapy or court evaluations. It might involve scheduling parenting time in ways designed to disrupt the survivor’s work or childcare arrangements. It often includes purchasing children’s loyalty through excessive gifts or special treatment while simultaneously undermining their other parent.

  • Exploiting legal processes to maintain contact and control. Perpetrators file repeated motions requiring court appearances. They request custody evaluations and drag out proceedings. They violate protective orders in ways that are difficult to prove or that they know won’t be enforced. They use discovery requests to access the survivor’s financial records, therapy notes, or employment information. Every court date becomes an opportunity to see the survivor’s reaction, to assess whether their intimidation tactics are working, to send the message that they still have power.

  • Continuing financial abuse through support proceedings. Perpetrators quit jobs to avoid child support obligations. They hide assets or income. They fail to pay court-ordered support while simultaneously fighting for parenting time. They dispute every expense and delay every payment, forcing survivors to expend limited resources on enforcement actions.

  • Harassing survivors through parenting time exchanges. They show up late or not at all. They return children in soiled clothing or without necessary medications. They expose children to harmful conditions and dare the survivor to object, knowing it will lead to accusations that she’s being uncooperative or trying to interfere with his parenting time.

All of this harms children directly. Children experience the ongoing abuse, the instability, the anxiety of being caught between parents. They internalize messages about their mother’s worth. They learn that systems reward the parent willing to be more aggressive, not the parent focused on their well-being.

The Courtroom as Crime Scene

Family court proceedings deserve particular attention because this is where the gap between practitioner assumptions and lived reality becomes most dangerous. Judges, attorneys, and child welfare professionals often operate from an incident-based framework when they enter the courtroom. They’re looking for evidence of discrete acts of violence. Has he hit her recently? Has he violated the protection order? If the answer is no, the working assumption is often that the abuse has stopped.

Meanwhile, the survivor is sitting in that courtroom actively experiencing coercive control.

She may have received threatening texts that morning about what will happen if she “says the wrong thing” in court. She knows he’s tracking her location through the children’s phones. She’s aware that his attorney will use her trauma responses—her difficulty making eye contact, her tears, her struggle to articulate complex timelines—as evidence she’s unstable. She sees him make subtle gestures—a certain look, a specific movement—that communicate threats in ways that are invisible to everyone else in the courtroom but crystal clear to her.

The abuse hasn’t stopped. It has relocated to a venue where it’s harder to name and nearly impossible to prove using traditional evidence standards.

I want to be clear about something: I’m not suggesting that family courts are intentionally complicit in abuse. Most judges, attorneys, and court personnel are genuinely trying to make good decisions for children. But when we use an incident-based lens, we miss the pattern. We see a father requesting parenting time, not a perpetrator using legal processes to maintain power. We see conflict between parents, not a survivor trying to protect her children while navigating ongoing coercive control. We see a mother who seems anxious or angry, not someone demonstrating extraordinary resilience under sustained threat. Crucially, we miss opportunities to link abusive behavior to the impact on children and fully understand how intrinsically linked that behavior is to the welfare of the children and the family as a whole.

What Child Welfare’s Role Must Be

Child welfare has a critical function in these cases that we often abdicate once separation occurs: We must continue tracking and documenting perpetrator patterns. This means several concrete practice shifts:

  • We stay actively involved post-separation. We don’t close cases simply because parents are no longer living together. We monitor how the perpetrator is using parenting time, what behavior patterns are evident in exchanges, and how children are responding to ongoing exposure to the perpetrator’s tactics.

  • We document patterns, not incidents. When a perpetrator repeatedly cancels parenting time at the last minute, we don’t document five separate “scheduling conflicts.” We document a pattern of behavior that demonstrates prioritization of control over the children’s need for stability. When a perpetrator consistently returns children hungry or in dirty clothes, we don’t document isolated “poor judgment.” We document a pattern that shows disregard for the children’s basic needs while knowing it will create additional burden and conflict for the survivor.

  • We communicate our observations to family court. This is where child welfare’s ongoing contact with the family becomes invaluable. We see things that happen between court dates. We have access to information family court may never receive. When we observe patterns of perpetrator behavior that create instability and/or harm for children, we have an obligation to share that information in ways that family court can use. This requires us to use precise language, to focus on observable behavior and its impact on children, and to resist pressure to frame everything as “co-parenting conflict.”

  • We partner with survivors about court-related safety. We ask survivors directly about their experience of court proceedings. We validate when they describe feeling unsafe in courtrooms or during exchanges. We work with them to develop safety plans that account for court-mandated contact. We don’t assume that because a judge ordered parenting time, we have nothing more to assess or address.

  • We use tools designed for this work. The PPMT specifically prompts us to track perpetrator behavior over time and across contexts, including legal proceedings. The Continuum of Domestic Violence-Informed Practice helps us assess whether we’re operating from a proficient stance or inadvertently colluding with perpetrators by assuming separation equals safety. These aren’t optional enhancements—they’re essential to competent practice.

The Cost of Incident Thinking

When we operate from an incident-based framework post-separation, we make predictable errors. We miss escalating risk because we’re waiting for another physical assault. We interpret a survivor’s fear as overreaction because we don’t see current danger. We mistake perpetrator charm and cooperation with professionals as evidence of change. We confuse the absence of reportable incidents with the absence of harm.

Children pay the price for these errors. They continue to be impacted by a perpetrator’s coercive control tactics, just in different forms. They learn that the systems meant to protect them don’t understand what’s actually happening in their lives. They watch their protective parent become exhausted and demoralized by a process that seems designed to reward the parent willing to be most aggressive and litigious.

Survivors pay the price too. They remain tethered to perpetrators through children and court processes, often for years after leaving. They expend enormous energy and resources navigating systems that don't see or validate what they’re experiencing. They’re told they need to “move on” or “co-parent effectively” when what they’re actually doing is managing ongoing abuse under impossibly difficult circumstances.

A Different Standard

A perpetrator pattern–based approach requires us to maintain focus and rigor after separation. It demands that we resist the collective sigh of relief that comes when parents no longer live together or “break up.” It asks us to keep documenting, keep observing, keep centering children’s actual experience of safety rather than professionals’ theories about safety.

This is harder work than closing cases at separation. It requires sustained attention, careful documentation, and willingness to challenge systems that want simple answers. It means educating family court professionals about the difference between incident-based and pattern-based thinking. It means supporting survivors through processes that can feel retraumatizing and endless.

But it’s also the work that actually keeps children safe. Because when we track perpetrator patterns post-separation, we see risk before it escalates to crisis. We provide family courts with information they need to make informed decisions about parenting time and custody. We partner with survivors in ways that acknowledge the reality of their circumstances rather than gaslighting them about danger we’re unwilling to see.

Post-separation is not the end of domestic violence risk for children. For many families, it’s when perpetrator patterns become most dangerous and most difficult to address. Child welfare’s role doesn’t diminish after separation—it becomes more critical than ever.

Additional Resources

Jessica Sisler
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