The Goal Is Thriving, Not Just Surviving: Redefining Our Approach to Domestic Abuse

By David Mandel, CEO and Founder, Safe & Together Institute 

Rethinking and Redefining Our Safety-First Paradigm

Years ago, I read a child protection expert who said we had it all wrong when we prioritized physical safety before anything else. He said that we needed to prioritize well-being instead. His point: Physical safety needs attention, but as part of a pantheon of factors with the goal being improved quality of life, freedom from fear, attention to basic needs, and creating the conditions for a child to thrive, not just survive. He saw developing systems and their tools, risk matrices, and decision-making around physical safety as an impediment to effective, meaningful interventions for abused and neglected children.

Moving Beyond “Just Leave”

I think we need a similar fundamental shift—a redefining—in how we approach domestic abuse prevention and intervention. Currently, many of our systems are designed around physical violence and lethality prevention. As I write about in Stop Blaming Mothers and Ignoring Fathers: How to Transform the Way We Keep Children Safe from Domestic Violence, this is often reflected in professional myths that guide practice. In this paradigm, leaving the relationship—and often their own home—is treated as the “right: answer. It is often perceived as both the intervention and the goal (e.g., “If we get the survivor to leave, we will have fixed the issue.”) In the simplest version, separation equals safety, and safety is the goal.

Safety Is Necessary But Not Sufficient

Whether you approach domestic abuse from a hierarchy of needs framework or a human rights approach, physical safety is one of the more basic needs but doesn’t represent the full spectrum of what survivors need, and more importantly, deserve. If we limit our concept of success to physical safety, we are not paying attention to emotional connection, self-esteem, and achievement of personal goals.

Redefining Success: What Really Matters

So maybe we are getting things backward. Think about what our systems would look like if we articulated that our goals were:

• Safety: Physical and emotional security for adult and child survivors

• Well-being: Improved mental health, reduced stress, better daily functioning

• Autonomy: Increased ability to make independent choices about one’s life

• Stability: Maintained housing, employment, and children’s education

• Connection: Preserved relationships with family, friends, culture, and community

• Financial security: Access to resources and economic independence

The Real Cost of Displacement

Many of these represent critical necessities and basic human rights for adult and child survivors. For instance, a survivor may value the support of their connection to kin that comes with remaining in their own home and community. For some survivors, their home and the land they live on are part of their spiritual and cultural life. In another example, a special needs child may experience dramatic setbacks in care and health if they move. Stress levels may rise in other arenas of daily life. These impacts multiply across different domains of functioning—employment, education, housing, healthcare, finances, community, and more.

Alternative Pathways to Success

Leaving or ending the relationship might be one pathway to achieving these goals for some survivors. But for others, these outcomes might be better achieved through:

• The perpetrator leaving the home while maintaining financial responsibilities

• The perpetrator engaging in meaningful behavior change while living elsewhere

• Extended family and community supporting the survivor in maintaining stability

• Systems holding the perpetrator accountable while supporting survivor autonomy

• Cultural and religious communities provide support for an improved situation without requiring separation

Creating Systems-Level Change

Instead of leaving being the goal, we need to keep our focus on these fundamental outcomes that actually define truly better outcomes for adult and child survivors. This allows us to be better partners with survivors, more creative and effective in our interventions, more responsive to survivor needs and priorities, and more focused on perpetrator responsibility for change. Most importantly, it respects survivor autonomy by supporting their right to choose the path that best serves their family’s needs.

For example, risk tools and assessments often are focused heavily or exclusively on the risk of severe physical violence and lethality, making them ripe for an overhaul. Consider the following expanded checklist for risk assessment processes:

• Assess risk to stability and well-being, not just physical safety

• Consider cultural and community factors in risk assessment

• Focus on perpetrator patterns of behavior across all domains

• Support survivor autonomy in decision-making

• Create coordinated plans that maintain survivor stability

• Includes threats to children’s safety, stability, and well-being

The Right Time for A New Approach

At the bottom of this way of thinking is respecting the human rights of adult and child survivors—especially the right to decide the best course of action for themselves, the right to be safe in their own home, and the right to be listened to and respected by professionals and systems.

Shifting our systems in this direction is timely as it is consistent with the burgeoning attention to coercive control as the central defining aspect of domestic abuse. It also can be adapted to each system’s response, fundamentally shifting the way each sector responds to adult and child survivors and perpetrators.

Through this way of thinking we can become better partners to adult and child survivors.

How does your jurisdiction or agency’s risk assessment process and tools reflect this broader approach to domestic abuse? How could it be changed to make it more holistic and rights-based? What would be different in survivors’ experience of systems and their outcomes?