When We Make Her Leave: The Inequities of Displacement-Based Responses
By Ruth Reymundo Mandel, Chief Business Development Officer and Co-Owner, Safe & Together Institute
When a family is experiencing domestic abuse, our systems often default to a seemingly simple solution: The victim and children must leave.
This displacement-based response, while well-intentioned, creates a cascade of harms and vulnerabilities that can persist for years. Not only does it represent a stark departure from how we treat victims of any other crime, but it dangerously ignores how abuse often escalates during and after separation. By treating displacement as our primary intervention strategy, we’ve normalized a false narrative that distance alone resolves domestic abuse. This mindset has toxic ripple effects: Victims face blame for “not leaving,” while perpetrators remain invisible and unaccountable as parents. While emergency shelters and refuges provide crucial sanctuary for those in immediate danger, relying on displacement as our main response to domestic abuse is neither sustainable nor effective. Research shows that forcing victims and children to flee creates new long-term vulnerabilities while failing to address the root cause of abuse: the person choosing violence.
The Gender Exception
Consider this: If someone commits burglary, we don’t tell the homeowner to leave. If someone commits assault in a workplace, we don’t tell the victim to find a new job. If someone stalks another person in their neighborhood, we don’t tell the victim they must move. Yet when it comes to domestic abuse, primarily experienced by women at the hands of male partners, we have normalized an inverted response where victims must flee while perpetrators often retain their homes, property rights, and community connections.
This exceptional approach reveals deep-seated gender biases in how our legal and social systems view women’s property rights, parental responsibilities, and right to safety. The roots lie in historical views of women as property themselves rather than property owners, of marriage as male ownership rather than partnership, and of mothers as solely responsible for children’s well-being while fathers face minimal accountability.
The Hidden Costs of Displacement
When we require a mother and her children to flee their home due to domestic abuse, they face a cascade of disruptions that would be unthinkable for victims of any other crime. This displacement often creates further vulnerabilities that can be easily leveraged by a perpetrator. Research from the National Institute of Health reveals the devastating impact this has on children’s development. In one striking case study, a six-year-old boy who had been forced to relocate three times in two years showed significant regression in both language skills and social development despite having met all developmental milestones before the displacements began.
The study documented how children in refuge face triple the risk of delayed gross-motor development compared to their peers. As one researcher noted: “The constant upheaval and stress of displacement often manifests physically in young children, affecting their ability to develop basic motor skills that are crucial for healthy development.”
Perhaps most troublingly, the research found that children in refuge have a 48% rate of mental illness—dramatically higher than the baseline rate of 10–28% in the general population, which also reflects the impact of the perpetrator. This stark difference highlights the intense vulnerability of this population to further trauma from displacement.
Meanwhile, the person causing harm, usually the father, often remains in the family home, facing minimal consequences for their choices. This scenario enables perpetrators to further manipulate, control, and take advantage of their victims in many different ways, from economic abuse to legal abuse in family courts claiming parental alienation. It reinforces a troubling message: Those experiencing abuse must sacrifice their stability, property rights, employment, and their children’s educational and emotional stability, while those creating harm maintain their privileges and stay in the home with access to the family’s financial resources.
The Gender Bias at the Heart of Our Response
This displacement-focused approach stems from deeply rooted gender biases in how we view parenting. We hold mothers to impossibly high standards while maintaining remarkably low expectations for fathers. When children show signs of trauma from domestic abuse, we scrutinize the mother’s choices rather than examining how the perpetrator’s behavior as a parent created the harm. We expect mothers to sacrifice everything for their children’s safety while barely acknowledging fathers’ responsibilities as parents to their children’s wellbeing and safety.
Male perpetrators’ parental rights are often privileged over female victims’ safety needs, even over their property rights. Men’s economic stability is protected, while women are expected to risk financial ruin. Fathers’ access to children is prioritized, while mothers are blamed for disrupting it through flight. Men’s community standing often remains intact, while women face isolation, stigma, blame, and further abuse.
A Better Path Forward
The Safe & Together Model offers a transformative alternative that challenges these gender-based assumptions and centers on perpetrator accountability and family stability. Instead of focusing on victim displacement, this approach examines how perpetrator choices affect family functioning through multiple pathways. It looks beyond individual incidents of violence to understand patterns of coercive control and their impact on children’s daily lives.
This shift requires fundamentally changing how professionals engage with families. Rather than demanding mothers leave their homes, practitioners partner with them to understand and support their existing protective strategies. Instead of avoiding perpetrators, workers are skilled in engaging them as parents, setting clear expectations for behavior change, and monitoring compliance. Documentation focuses on specific perpetrator choices and their impacts rather than victim-blaming narratives.
Creating Meaningful Change
Transforming our response to domestic abuse requires aligning it with how we treat other crimes, where perpetrators face restrictions and consequences while victims receive support to maintain stability and access to their rights and resources. Policies must prioritize perpetrator accountability over victim displacement. Practice frameworks need to support family stability while addressing safety. Behavioral change programs should be voluntary, not just court-mandated, relationship and parental development programs should be widespread in schools, and our interventions must widen out to include programs like the Breathing Space in Western Australia, an out-of-home behavioral change program for male perpetrators of violence against women, or Caring Dads, an internationally available behavior change program for violent fathers.
Most importantly, we must challenge the assumption that displacement equals safety. Real safety comes from holding perpetrators accountable as parents, assessing the need to flee based on the perpetrators’ patterns and the likelihood of lateral violence via information gathered by partnering with the survivor, supporting survivor-led protective strategies, supporting victims’ financial independence and housing stability, and maintaining children’s vital connections whenever possible. Only then can we create interventions that truly serve adult and child victims’ best interests while promoting safety, stability, healing, and accountability.
This transformation requires confronting deep-seated gender biases, developing new skills, and reimagining how we concretely support families experiencing domestic abuse. By moving beyond displacement-based responses, we can build interventions that protect children while supporting their relationships with protective parents and creating real accountability for those parents who choose to cause harm.
The Safe & Together Model shows us this change is possible. Now, it’s up to us to make it a reality.