When “Trauma-Informed” Means Pathologizing Victim Responses to Harm and Ignoring Perpetrators’ Harmful Behaviors
By Ruth Reymundo Mandel, Chief Business Development Officer and Credible Expert, Safe & Together Institute
Recently, I sat through a professional presentation where the speaker, introduced as a “trauma-informed expert on coercive control,” described the brains of abuse survivors as “broken.” That word—broken—landed like a slap. Not because it was new. But because it revealed just how far many professionals and institutions have strayed from the true intent of being trauma-informed.
Calling survivors’ brains “broken” isn’t trauma-informed—and it isn’t even sound neuroscience. Survivors’ brains reflect adaptive responses to sustained harm, not permanent damage or personal defect. Mislabeling resilience as pathology reinforces shame, not healing.
Over the past decade, “trauma-informed” has become a catchphrase. It appears in agency mission statements, conference titles, and child protection training modules. It’s used to imply care, compassion, and responsiveness to harm. But too often, it’s become a hollow label—a badge claimed by systems that, in practice, still fixate on victims and blame them by default in addition to pathologizing and pressuring victims of domestic and child abuse to do all the work of safety and healing.
Let’s be clear: Describing a survivor’s brain as “broken” is not trauma-informed—it’s a modern twist on victim-blaming. It cloaks itself in neuroscience while reinforcing the idea that the harm lies within the survivor, not in the perpetrator’s behavior or the system’s failure to respond effectively.
Being trauma-informed is not about sounding therapeutic. It’s about structural truth. It requires us to:
See how systems compound trauma by threatening survivors by focusing on their responses to trauma and threatening them with child and rights removal.
Name how professionals, courts, and agencies shift the burden of safety and healing from harm onto the person being harmed.
Stop excusing, minimizing, or ignoring the actions of the person causing the harm—especially when that person remains a parent, partner, or authority figure in a child’s life.
Instead, what we too often see is a hollow and dangerous performance of empathy directed solely at the survivor. Agencies note survivors’ “dysregulation” mandate services, which then form the backbone of documentation that blames or harms them directly. Survivors who do engage in system-recommended interventions are often made more vulnerable because they sought treatment for their trauma—when their perpetrators often don’t because they don’t believe they have a problem. The very action of seeking assistance for harm is used as weapon by the system itself and by the perpetrator to regain power and control over her and their children.
Professionals and systems routinely fail to identify and document the perpetrator’s violence, harm, and coercive control. They don’t map his pattern. They don’t mandate his participation in meaningful behavioral change programs or hold him accountable in any ongoing, structured way. Instead, the system fixates on the survivor—labeling her as “affected by trauma” and using that label to justify intrusive interventions: mandating services, scrutinizing her responses to continued abuse, questioning her credibility, removing her rights, and even separating her from her children. All the while, the perpetrator—who avoids any mental health or rehabilitative engagement for his violent, coercive behavior—appears “clean” in official records simply because he hasn’t sought help. His silence reads as stability; her survival reads as instability.
When trauma-informed means professionals and systems fixate on the victim and their natural biological responses to trauma—while ignoring the perpetrator and the conditions causing those responses—it becomes a tool to shift responsibility, justify removing their rights and children, and sanction harm. That is not trauma-informed care. That is weaponized jargon in a system fixated on victims while chronically and dangerously ignoring perpetrators. That is a rebranded form of institutional betrayal.
If your “trauma-informed” practice centers victim responses to abuse as pathology and as a deficit to be managed, you are not just missing the point—you are doing active harm.
Trauma-informed means asking, “What happened to you?”—but it also demands asking, “Who did this? Who created this harm, and how are we holding them accountable?”
As a survivor and a professional, I want a world where we stop treating trauma-informed care as a checkbox or a mood. Where being trauma-informed means recognizing the resilience and protective efforts of survivors. Where it means refusing to separate a child from the very parent who has shielded them in impossible circumstances. Where it means identifying patterns of abuse—not symptoms of trauma—and designing interventions that go after the source, not the survivor.
Until then, I’ll keep saying it plainly: If your trauma-informed practice focuses on managing the victim and their responses to harm, instead of naming and confronting the actions of the perpetrator, you’re not trauma-informed. You’re trauma-causing, trauma-complicit. And survivors deserve better.
Additional Resources
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
