KEYNOTE: Trauma-informed is not the same as domestic violence-informed
While awareness of trauma and its impact continues to increase, trauma-informed initiatives are often decontextualized from the dynamics of coercive control. Mental health and addiction professionals are often ill-prepared by their education and training to integrate coercive control into their assessments. Organizations that are striving to be trauma-informed are not always committed to becoming domestic violence-informed. Domestic violence survivors are often harmed by these missing elements. In this keynote, David Mandel, Executive Director and Founder of the Safe & Together Institute will outline how practitioners and organizations may have blind spots regarding how current coercive control dynamics may be impacting survivors’ mental health and addiction treatment. David will also speak to how structural sexism, racism and colonisation dynamics are often ignored in mainstream mental health and addiction paradigms to the detriment of clients from oppressed communities.

KEYNOTE: Applying a Perpetrator Pattern-Based Approach to Child Custody and Access Matters
Domestic violence allegations are extremely common in family court, yet many courts still struggle to sort out the impact of the perpetrators’ behaviors on the children and identify the protective efforts of survivors. Perpetrators’ allegations of parental alienation, substance misuse and mental health issues often take precedence over the harm caused to children by their own domestic violence behaviors.  Drawing on work in family court settings in the United States and Australia, David Mandel, Executive Director and Founder of the Safe & Together Institute will explore how the Model can help decision-making in custody and access cases. David will highlight how this approach can keep the focus on the perpetrator’s harm to children, the protective parenting of the survivor and how the collaborative parenting lens can be used to increase perpetrator accountability.