When the System Gets in the Way: Naming Systemic Resistance in DFV Practice—and What Becomes Possible on the Other Side of It

Systems Change
Written By Jessica Sisler

By Jackie Wruck, Asia Pacific Regional Manager, Safe & Together Institute

You’ve done the training. You’ve come back to work with fresh eyes. And pretty quickly, something starts to feel off.

The court documentation still doesn’t say what he did. The mother is being sent to a parenting program, while no one seems to be asking anything of him. You try to document the perpetrator’s pattern, and it doesn’t quite fit the template. You raise it in supervision and the conversation circles back to her—her choices, her insight, what she is and most often isn’t doing to keep the children safe.

If this sounds familiar, you’re not imagining it. And there’s nothing wrong with you. What you’re experiencing has a name: systemic resistance.

It Goes Deeper Than Any One Person

Systemic resistance isn’t about a difficult colleague or one slow-to-change agency. It’s what happens when the whole way a system thinks—the forms it uses, the questions it asks, the things it considers worth documenting—has been built around assumptions that simply don’t hold up. Assumptions like: the mother’s choices are what we most need to understand, the perpetrator is secondary, and DFV is a crisis between two adults rather than a pattern of harm with lasting consequences for children.

For decades, cases could make it all the way through a child protection process with a single line about domestic violence—“the family has a history of domestic violence”—and nothing more. No account of what the perpetrator actually did. No picture of how his behaviour affected the children. No recognition of what the non-offending parent had been doing to protect her family all along. For a worker who has just spent four days learning to see exactly those things, working inside a system that wasn’t built to look for them is genuinely disorienting and disheartening.

This isn’t just a practice problem; it’s a structural one. Rose, Mertens, and Balint make an important distinction between genuine structural change and what they call “systems reform”: adding more services, improving referral pathways, colocation of support—all without touching the underlying logic about who is responsible for the harm. The result is a system that looks improved on the surface, while still holding survivors to a higher standard of behaviour than perpetrators.

A major Australian study by Chung et al found that most perpetrators never come to the attention of any service at all—and that in agencies that do engage with them, responses are fragmented: weak links between organisations, limited information sharing, and workers across health, housing, mental health, and AOD services who regularly see perpetrators as clients but have no framework for what they’re looking at. Their recommendation was clear: All human services workers who interact with perpetrators—not just DFV specialists—need appropriate training.

What the Gap Actually Costs

The real cost of systemic resistance lands on families. When assessment focuses on the mother’s behaviour rather than the perpetrator’s pattern, children can end up separated from the parent who has been working hardest to keep them safe. Cases drag on because workers are gathering the wrong information. Survivors come into a system already exhausted by coercive control and find they need to prove their worth as a protective parent to workers who don’t yet have the tools to see it.

There’s a financial cost too. In 2023-24, Australia had $10.2 billion in total recurrent expenditure on family support services, intensive family support services, protective intervention services, and care services (out-of-home care and other supported placements), a 6.6% increase from 2022-23.

What Changes When Everyone’s Looking at the Same Thing

The Safe & Together Model gives practitioners a way to gather the right information, write it down clearly, and communicate it across agencies in language that works whether you’re in child protection, family violence services, health, housing, mental health, or legal settings. It centres on three things: naming what the perpetrator did, recognising the protective parent’s efforts as real and deliberate, and tracing how his specific behaviour has affected each individual child.

One of the biggest barriers to keeping families safe, Chung et al found, is that agencies aren’t connected—working from different frameworks, sharing little information, often unaware of what the other is doing. A shared practice language directly addresses this. When workers from different agencies can look at the same case and see the same picture, collaboration becomes possible in ways it simply wasn’t before.

“When we have a case where we have a high-harm, high-risk perpetrator, we bring it to the table to everybody who’s speaking the same language. We arrive at the same risk assessment … It’s so conducive to a better working relationship. It helps build trust between the agencies.” —Emma S., Specialist Family Violence Adviser, Australia (Mandel, 2024)

In Queensland, children’s legal services attorneys working within this framework began doing things that hadn’t happened before—applying for domestic violence protection orders in child protection cases, advocating with parole boards about bail and parole conditions specific to children’s safety, and redacting case file evidence that might place a non-offending parent at risk (Mandel, 2024).

What Happens When Enough People Refuse to Accept the Gap

When practitioners come together around a shared framework—one that keeps the perpetrator’s behaviour clearly in view and treats the protective parent as an asset—things change. Not by miracle. Because good practice, applied consistently by people with the right tools, produces predictable results.

In Scotland, a team leader attended just the morning of a Safe & Together Model Overview Training then went straight into a case conference that afternoon. Prior to that day, she had already made her decision: The child would go on the protection register, and the mother would be held accountable. After one morning with the framework, she changed her mind—insisting her team gather information on the perpetrator’s pattern of behaviour before any decision was made. Her colleagues said it was unheard of (Mandel, 2024).

In Victoria, a two-year multiagency triage pilot using the Safe & Together Model as its shared framework diverted almost 90% of child welfare DFV referrals away from statutory child protection and into more collaborative, community-based responses. One worker described what had shifted: “There has been a huge shift from the available protective factors for adult survivors to the perpetrator parental deficits.” The framework changed not just what workers did but what they thought to look for.

In Florida, a regional child protection agency that sustained Safe & Together training saw a 50% drop in child removals related to domestic violence. The agency kept going because it hadn’t expected results that significant—and couldn’t afford to stop (Mandel, 2024).

And from a family court perspective, one practitioner who had taken Safe & Together Model Core Training submitted documentation of a perpetrator’s pattern of behaviour to a judge, who then reversed her custody decision, returned the children to the protective parent, and apologised to the mother for the earlier order. Someone who heard the story called it a miracle. David Mandel’s response is worth holding onto: It wasn’t a miracle. It was the predictable result of a practitioner with the right framework, the right skills, and the support to name clearly what was happening in that family (Mandel, 2024).

That outcome is possible wherever those three things exist. The gap between what we know and what many systems support isn’t closing itself, and no one practitioner can close it alone. But it is closing, case by case, team by team, wherever people come together around a shared commitment to seeing families clearly.

That work is already happening. You are part of it.

References

Mandel, D. (2024). Stop blaming mothers and ignoring fathers: How to transform the way we keep children safe from domestic violence. Safe & Together Institute Press.

Additional Resources

Jessica Sisler
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