Domestic Violence Survivors’ Reflections on Applying the Safe & Together Model in Their Role as Parent Partners

This brief serves as a small window into how the Safe & Together Model, as its being implemented all over the world, is impacting the experience of domestic violence survivors who are involved with child protection systems. A few years ago, the Iowa Department of Human Services embarked on Safe & Together Model training for regional teams of case workers, domestic violence advocates, and Parent Partners. Many of the Parent Partners were domestic violence survivors, which offered a unique opportunity to ask them about their experience with the Model and how it affected the current work with domestic violence survivors involved with child welfare. It also provided survivors with a chance to comment, retrospectively, on their experience with child welfare as a client. We learned Parent Partners felt the Safe & Together Model was extremely beneficial for adult survivors and their families; it aided the employees of DHS; and it should be available to all child welfare employees.