Season 7 Episode 3: How Systems Become Tools of Coercive Control and What Professionals Must Change: An Interview with Valerie Frost
About This Episode
Ruth and David sit down with advocate and analyst Valerie Frost to explore how systems built to protect families can become tools of coercive control—and how to change that trajectory with better listening, precise language, and survivor-centered practice. Valerie traces the everyday realities of child welfare, family court, schools, and law enforcement, showing where checklists fail, how jargon shuts doors, and why knowledge inequity forces survivors to learn a foreign language just to get help.
David, Ruth, and Valerie dig into visible versus invisible harm and why non-physical abuse or coercive control often gets dismissed or misread, leaving anxiety and hypervigilance weaponized against the survivor. From “customer service” logic for public systems to the risks of records, they examine how police calls and protection orders can be turned against survivors, and how both over-engagement with systems and system hesitancy get blamed. The conversation moves from critique to action: validating protective parenting, centering context over compliance, and anchoring assessments in the perpetrator’s pattern rather than the survivor’s reactions.
Valerie shares practical tools—build a dated log, control your narrative with consistent documentation, protect your basics like sleep and hydration—and argues for policy shifts that mandate recognition of coercive control, limit unnecessary information sharing, and reward restraint over surveillance. They also talk about showing up whole: professionals who are survivors, survivors who lead, and creating rooms where the end user defines engagement.
The takeaway is simple and demanding: Systems don’t need more policies as much as they need better listening; survivors have already mapped where harm happens.
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Additional Resources
Online Course: Partnering with Survivors
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