Start With Him: How Social Entrapment Changes What We See—and What We Miss
By Jackie Wruck, Asia Pacific Regional Manager, Safe & Together Institute
There is a story told about domestic violence survivors that goes something like this: She chose to stay; she didn’t cooperate with services; she is the problem. It is a story told by well-meaning professionals across child protection, courts, and mental health—and in most cases, it is the wrong story entirely. Because while we are asking why she didn’t act differently, we are often missing what he has been doing—over time, across systems, and in ways that shape her options long before we arrive.
The right story begins with him. With his choices. With his deliberate campaign to control, isolate, and trap. And crucially, with how he weaponises the very systems designed to protect her.
This is social entrapment in practice. It shows up as a set of conditions created by his choices, then is reinforced by system responses and wider structural inequities.
The Safe & Together Model helps make this visible. It doesn’t rely on more information; it changes how we interpret what’s already in front of us and how we record it. The shift is subtle but significant: we move from describing events to analysing behaviour and its impact over time.
What Is Social Entrapment?
Social entrapment is not a syndrome or a feeling. It is the objective reality facing many survivors of intimate partner violence, shaped by three forces working together:
The perpetrator’s coercive control — A pattern of isolation, financial abuse, surveillance, and threats that systematically narrows her freedom and options over time.
Institutional indifference — When police, courts, and child protection responses fail to recognise the pattern or, at times, compound the risk. This can look like discouraging help-seeking, minimising harm, or creating consequences for the survivor rather than addressing his behaviour.
Structural inequity — The wider conditions of poverty, racism, colonisation, and disability that deepen the trap. For Aboriginal and First Nations women in particular, fear of system involvement is not irrational; it reflects documented histories of harm.
The tragedy, as Tolmie et al. note, is that perpetrators’ patterns of coercive control are often not clearly documented until it is too late. The Safe & Together Model exists to make those patterns visible earlier—before harm escalates.
The Safe & Together Model in Practice
The Safe & Together Model, developed by David Mandel and outlined in Stop Blaming Mothers and Ignoring Fathers, shifts the assessment lens to where it belongs: the perpetrator’s behaviour and its impact on children and family functioning.
Rather than focusing on isolated incidents or perceived survivor deficits, the Model provides a structured way to identify patterns, understand harm, and make defensible decisions. Its five critical components work together to make social entrapment—and systems abuse—visible in everyday practice.
Map the Pattern, Not Just the Incident
Most systems are organised around incidents—what happened on a particular day, in a specific moment. The Model asks a different question: What has this person been doing over time? This means looking across the current relationship, previous relationships, and interactions with multiple systems.
For example, a man is issued a police protection order for grabbing his partner. An incident-based lens captures a single event. A pattern-based lens reveals something else: repeated, unsubstantiated reports to child protection timed around her attempts to leave; coercive debt in her name; and a prior assault conviction with a previous partner.
What emerges is not a one-off incident, but a deliberate pattern of coercive control—one that shapes risk, decision-making, and outcomes across systems.
Map the Impact on Children and Family Functioning
Perpetrator behaviour does not sit in isolation—it creates multiple, interconnected pathways to harm.
Children’s disrupted schooling, missed medical appointments, housing instability, and emotional distress are often recorded as separate issues. Without a perpetrator pattern–based lens, these impacts are frequently attributed to the survivor’s “capacity” or “choices.”
The Model brings these back together by asking: How has his behaviour caused or contributed to what we are seeing?
This might include:
Forced moves due to intimidation or financial control
Interference with routines, schooling, or healthcare
Creating distress in children that is then misattributed to the survivor
Mapping impact in this way reconnects outcomes to cause and strengthens both assessment and intervention.
Recognise Survivor Strengths and Reframe ‘Non-Compliance’
When systems miss the pattern, they often misinterpret the survivor. Labels like “non-compliant,” “resistant,” or “difficult to engage” frequently reflect a lack of understanding of the context she is navigating. In reality, many of these actions are informed, strategic responses to ongoing risk.
In Stop Blaming Mothers, Mandel describes Dana, whose partner fabricated drug allegations after assaulting her in front of the children. When a worker required a drug test, Dana refused—angry at being manipulated through the system. Her response was documented as resistance.
A Safe & Together–informed approach would ask:
Is this allegation supported by evidence?
Or does it align with his pattern of using systems against her?
Her refusal was not non-compliance. It was a rational response to coercive control.
Recognising survivor strengths shifts practice from surveillance to partnership and aligns assessment with lived reality.
Connect Systems to Close the Gaps
Perpetrators often rely on fragmentation between systems. Information sits in silos:
Child protection holds one part of the story
Courts hold another
Mental health or substance use services hold a third
Without connection, patterns remain invisible and manipulation is amplified.
For example:
A judge assumes child protection would have acted if risk were significant
A mental health report documents the survivor’s PTSD without naming its source
A perpetrator’s false allegation appears in court as an unresolved concern
The Model supports practitioners to connect these threads by asking:
Who initiated this concern?
When did it occur?
How does it align with known patterns of behaviour?
When systems align around perpetrator patterns, the narrative shifts—from isolated concerns to a coherent picture of risk.
Document to Tell the Right Story
Documentation is not neutral—it determines how cases are understood and what decisions follow. When perpetrator behaviour is absent from documentation, responsibility defaults to the survivor.
Compare:
Without a perpetrator pattern–based lens: “Ms. A is non-compliant with services, emotionally dysregulated, and has a history of child protection concerns.”
With the Safe & Together Model: “Ms. A is parenting under six years of sustained coercive control. Her apparent ‘non-compliance’ reflects the perpetrator’s documented pattern of monitoring her movements and escalating violence when she engages with services. All prior child protection concerns were initiated by him and found unsubstantiated. She has consistently sought support and demonstrated protective efforts toward her children.”
The first description produces one outcome. The second produces a very different one—this version allows us to clearly identify the source of harm, link actions to impact, and create a foundation for targeted, effective intervention.
Taken together, these components shift how we see, document, and respond to domestic violence in practice.
Why This Matters
Social entrapment and systems abuse are not rare exceptions. They are common features of domestic violence that hide in plain sight when practitioners are oriented toward the wrong person. The Safe & Together Model provides the structure, language, and tools to reorient—pivoting from the survivor’s perceived failings to the perpetrator’s documented choices.
Understanding how perpetrators operate within systems changes the quality of practice. It sharpens assessment, strengthens decision-making, and leads to more effective interventions for children and families.
But more than that, it challenges us to look at our systems differently. If perpetrators can use them to maintain control, then our role is not just to respond—it is to make that misuse visible and to design responses that cannot be easily manipulated.
Seeing the pattern earlier is not an added skill—it is the difference between documenting harm after the fact and intervening before it escalates.
Additional Resources
Online Course: Safe & Together: An Introduction to the Model
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
