When Systems Feel Unsafe: How Governmental Instability Affects Survivors’ Help-Seeking

Partnering With Survivors
Written By Jessica Sisler

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

I've been thinking a lot lately about a conversation I had with a colleague who works in child welfare. She told me about a survivor who had been working with her agency for months—making progress, engaging with services, following through on safety planning. Then suddenly, the survivor stopped returning calls. When they finally connected, the survivor was direct: "I don't know what's going to happen with all these changes. I can't risk it right now."

My colleague knew exactly what she meant. In the United States (and elsewhere) we're living in a time of profound uncertainty about government systems and services. Agencies are being restructured or eliminated. Policies that have been in place for years are suddenly in question. Federal departments are experiencing upheaval that trickles down to state and local programs. For those of us who work within these systems, it's disorienting and concerning. For survivors of domestic violence trying to decide whether to seek help, it can be paralyzing.

Why Predictability Matters for Survivors

Domestic violence, at its core, is about perpetrators using unpredictability as a weapon. They create environments where rules change without notice, where the same action might be met with approval one day and violence the next, where their partner has no way to reliably predict safety. This isn't accidental chaos—it's strategic. Unpredictability prevents their partner from developing effective responses or planning for safety. It maintains the perpetrator's power by ensuring their partner must constantly focus on managing the perpetrator's behavior rather than pursuing their own goals or autonomy. Perpetrators use whatever tools serve this purpose—physical violence, emotional abuse, financial control, legal manipulation—adapting their tactics to fit available opportunities.

When a survivor makes the decision to engage with helping systems—whether that's child welfare, domestic violence services, housing assistance, or legal advocacy—they're making a tremendous leap of faith. They're choosing to trust that these systems will be stable, consistent, and safe enough to warrant the risk of disclosure. They're counting on being able to predict, at least roughly, what will happen when they share their story and ask for help.

Now add systematic governmental instability into this equation. Survivors who might have been willing to engage with child welfare when they understood the rules and processes become understandably hesitant when those rules feel subject to change without notice. Survivors who were navigating immigration-related complications alongside their safety planning have to recalculate risk when immigration enforcement becomes more aggressive and less predictable. Survivors who were counting on educational stability for their children while they rebuilt their lives face new uncertainty when the Department of Education's future is unclear.

This isn't abstract policy concern. This is concrete, immediate risk assessment that survivors are doing every day.

The Compounding Effect of Multiple Uncertainties

For survivors already navigating complex circumstances, governmental instability doesn't create risk in isolation—it compounds existing vulnerabilities. Consider what a survivor might be weighing right now:

  • If she's undocumented or has family members who are undocumented, she's hearing about increased U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) activity and changing policies around which agencies share information with immigration authorities. She's watching news coverage of raids and deportations. She knows that one phone call to the wrong agency could put her entire family at risk. When child welfare gets involved, she has to assess: Will this agency share my information? Will reporting to court trigger immigration consequences? Can I trust what they tell me about confidentiality when the rules keep changing?

  • If she receives any form of public assistance—Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), Medicaid, housing vouchers—she's hearing about potential cuts, restructuring, or elimination of programs. She's trying to figure out how she'll support her children if the benefits she's counting on disappear. She's wondering whether seeking help from child welfare might jeopardize her eligibility for other crucial supports. The calculation becomes: Is the risk of losing everything worth the uncertain benefit of engaging with a system that might not even be able to help?

  • If her children have special educational needs or receive school-based services, she's concerned about changes to the Department of Education, special education funding, and school-based programs. She's worried about stability for her children who have already experienced so much disruption from the abuse. The question becomes: Will seeking help create more chaos for my kids when they need stability most?

These aren't hypothetical concerns. They reflect real risk assessments survivors are making based on information they're receiving about sweeping governmental changes. And here's what makes this particularly insidious: perpetrators know this too.

When Perpetrators Weaponize System Instability

Perpetrators of domestic violence are experts at identifying and exploiting vulnerability. They pay attention to what creates fear and uncertainty, and they use it. Right now, many perpetrators are weaponizing governmental instability as an additional tactic of coercive control.

This might look like a perpetrator telling his undocumented partner that the new administration will definitely deport her if she contacts child welfare, even if that's not accurate. It might involve threatening to report her to ICE himself if she tries to leave or seek help. He's counting on her uncertainty about what's actually true and what systems will actually do.

It might look like a perpetrator telling his partner that the domestic violence shelter she's thinking about going to won't have funding anymore, or that child welfare is going to start taking kids away from mothers who "can't provide" once benefits are cut. Again, whether this is accurate is almost beside the point—the goal is to increase her fear and isolation.

It might involve a perpetrator pointing to news coverage of governmental chaos and saying "See? Nobody's going to help you. You can't trust any of these agencies. You're on your own." He's leveraging real uncertainty to reinforce the coercive control message he's been sending all along: that she has no options, no allies, nowhere safe to turn.

For practitioners, this means we're not just competing with survivors' direct experiences of systems or their fear of perpetrators. We're also competing with perpetrators' deliberate misinformation campaigns designed to exploit a genuinely unstable moment.

What This Means for Practitioners

I want to be realistic about what we're facing. We cannot fix governmental instability. We cannot guarantee that policies won't change or that programs won't be cut. We cannot make survivors' fears about system reliability unfounded when those fears are, in many cases, entirely rational responses to observable chaos.

But we can acknowledge what's happening. We can be honest about uncertainty while being clear about what we do know and what we can control. We can provide the stability that survivors need even when the systems around us feel unstable.

This starts with recognizing that a survivor's hesitation to engage right now is not resistance—it's sophisticated risk assessment. When a survivor tells us she's concerned about what might happen if she involves child welfare or law enforcement given everything happening with government agencies, we need to validate that concern rather than dismissing it or trying to prematurely reassure. Her calculation of risk is probably more accurate than our assumptions about safety.

It continues with being transparent about what we know and don't know. If a survivor asks whether child welfare shares information with ICE, we need to give her accurate information about current policy while acknowledging that we can't predict future policy changes. If she asks whether the domestic violence services she's receiving will still be funded next year, we need to be honest about what we know while helping her develop backup plans. Survivors have already experienced too much gaslighting from perpetrators—they don't need practitioners to minimize legitimate uncertainty.

It requires us to focus on what we can control: our own practice, our own consistency, our own trustworthiness. This includes examining our own biases and how our upbringing and experiences shape how we see survivors. When we've always experienced government systems as helpful or neutral, we may struggle to understand why a survivor doesn't share that experience. When our own background hasn't included navigating systems while undocumented or under threat, we might inadvertently minimize legitimate concerns as "anxiety" or "resistance." We need to continuously check whether our own lens is causing us to question a survivor's judgment rather than recognizing their sophisticated risk assessment. Even when we can't guarantee system stability, we can guarantee that we will be transparent, that we will partner with survivors, that we will do our absolute best to keep them informed about changes that affect them, and that we will interrogate our own assumptions before we question theirs. We can be the stable presence within an unstable system.

The Safe & Together Model as Anchoring Practice

This is where perpetrator pattern-based practice becomes not just good practice but essential practice during unstable times. The Safe & Together Model's core principles—partnering with survivors, keeping children safe and together with their protective parent, and holding perpetrators accountable—provide a framework that remains sound regardless of what's happening at the federal level.

When we are truly partnering with survivors, we're already doing the work that builds trust during uncertain times. We're already asking survivors what they need, respecting their expertise about their own safety, and being transparent about limitations and risks. We're not operating from a place of "just trust the system" but from a place of genuine partnership that acknowledges survivors' real concerns and sophisticated risk assessment.

When we use tools like the Perpetrator Pattern Mapping Tool, we're documenting facts about perpetrator behavior rather than relying on subjective assessments or assumptions about family dynamics. This becomes particularly important when policies are in flux—our documentation of specific perpetrator patterns, specific harm to children, and specific safety threats provides an anchoring point that's less subject to interpretive changes than more general assessments.

When we apply the principle of holding perpetrators accountable, we're maintaining focus on the person actually creating risk rather than scrutinizing the survivor's decisions about help-seeking. This matters enormously right now. When survivors are hesitant to engage with systems because of legitimate fear about governmental instability, we don't respond by questioning their protective capacity. We respond by documenting and addressing the perpetrator's tactics, including any ways he's exploiting system uncertainty to maintain control.

The Model's framework helps us maintain consistent, evidence-informed practice even when systems around us feel chaotic. It provides clear guidance about what survivors need from us—partnership, transparency, respect for their risk assessment—and what children need from us—accurate understanding of who's creating risk and unwavering focus on that person's behavior rather than on their protective parent's help-seeking decisions.

Building Trust in Unstable Times

Let me be clear about something: I'm not suggesting that good practice alone solves the problem of governmental instability. Survivors' fears about system reliability are often well-founded. Changes to immigration enforcement, cuts to social programs, or elimination of educational protections create real, material consequences that we cannot mitigate through practice improvements alone.

But what we can do—what we must do—is refuse to add to survivors' risk by being unstable practitioners within unstable systems. We can be honest about what we know and don't know. We can validate survivors' legitimate concerns rather than dismissing them as "anxiety" or "resistance." We can partner with survivors to develop safety plans that account for multiple scenarios, including changes to system availability or reliability. We can be transparent about information sharing and help survivors make informed decisions about engagement.

We can also be vocal within our own systems about the impact of instability on the families we serve. When we see survivors disengaging because they don't trust governmental systems right now, that's data our agencies and policymakers need to understand. When we observe perpetrators exploiting system chaos as an additional tool of coercive control, that's information that should inform how we think about system stability and predictability and how we build scaffolding for the system to make it as perpetrator-proof as possible.

Most importantly, we can remember that every interaction we have with a survivor is an opportunity to either reinforce or contradict the message that systems are trustworthy. When we show up consistently, when we follow through on what we say we'll do, when we're honest about limitations and transparent about risks, when we truly partner rather than direct, we provide evidence that helps counter the perpetrator's message and the system's instability.

We cannot control governmental chaos. But we can control whether we add to it or whether we become a point of stability within it. That choice matters profoundly to the survivors trying to decide whether engaging with our systems is worth the risk.

Additional Resources

Jessica Sisler
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From Crisis to Connection: How Safe & Together Can Support a Shift in Child Protection Practice