Ensuring the Voice of the Child Is Heard and the Child’s Best Interests Are Considered in Domestic Abuse Cases

Authored by David Mandel, CEO and founder of the Safe & Together Institute, this paper examines how the Safe & Together™ Model supports two of the most cited provisions of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child: Article 3, the best interests of the child, and Article 12, the child’s right to be heard in matters affecting them. The paper argues that a literal interpretation of “the voice of the child,” simply interviewing children about their preferences, has significant limitations in domestic abuse cases, and proposes the Model’s perpetrator pattern–based, “whole of family” approach as a more complete way for child protection workers, family courts, and children’s lawyers to understand and represent a child’s experience.

Several limits emerge when professionals rely only on direct interviews: some children are too young or non-verbal to be interviewed; fear of consequences, such as a parent’s punishment or incarceration, can suppress honest sharing; a domestic violence perpetrator may manipulate or shape a child’s stated views, leading a child to voice the perpetrator’s perspective as their own; and children often have no direct awareness of a perpetrator’s behaviours that happen outside their view, such as sabotaging a survivor’s employment or manipulating systems like police or child protection reports. The paper also warns that cases can be wrongly rejected or prematurely closed when a child hasn’t directly witnessed abuse, allowing perpetrators to remain invisible.

The paper maps the Model’s three core principles—keeping the child safe and together with the non-offending parent, partnering with the non-offending parent, and intervening with the perpetrator—against UNCRC Articles 8, 9, 15, 19, 24, and 27. It also introduces the Model’s Multiple Pathways to Harm framework, which traces how a perpetrator’s pattern of coercive control affects a partner’s parenting, the family’s material circumstances, and the child directly, as a way to capture a child’s experience beyond what they can articulate in an interview. The paper closes with sample domestic violence–informed questions professionals can use with collateral contacts and directly with children to surface this fuller picture.