How Domestic Violence Perpetrators Manipulate Systems—And How to Stop Them
Safe & Together Institute founder David Mandel, Anna Mitchell, and Ruth Stearns Mandel wrote this paper to map the specific tactics domestic violence perpetrators use to manipulate child protection agencies, family courts, and law enforcement—and to give practitioners five concrete steps for closing the gaps those tactics exploit.
The paper divides the professional response to domestic violence into two tiers. Tier 1 systems—courts, police, and child protection—make direct decisions about custody, safety, and accountability. Tier 2 systems—mental health providers, attorneys, and evaluators—produce assessments and recommendations that feed into those Tier 1 decisions. Because a perpetrator only needs to influence one link in that chain to shape the outcome, the authors argue that manipulation risk has to be assessed across the whole system, not just within a single agency. The paper also notes that manipulation tactics aren’t confined to any one gender and cautions practitioners against using this framework to reinforce stereotypes about who perpetrates abuse.
Three tactics recur throughout the paper’s case examples:
Filing false allegations against the survivor, often mirroring or preempting the survivor’s own disclosures
Exploiting known survivor vulnerabilities—mental health history, immigration status, substance use, or prior trauma—to undermine her credibility
Trading on professional status, charm, or community standing to win the trust of Tier 1 and Tier 2 decision-makers
For each system, the authors identify specific openings perpetrators exploit and give paired examples of manipulation behaviours practitioners are likely to see in practice—for instance, a perpetrator presenting as the more “reasonable” or “cooperative” parent to a caseworker or using legal filings to drain a survivor’s resources and time in family court. Law enforcement and criminal court face their own version of this dynamic, particularly around dual-arrest situations and the perpetrator positioning himself as the primary reporter.
The paper closes with five steps practitioners and agencies can apply:
Map the perpetrator’s manipulation of systems
Map the perpetrator’s manipulation onto child and family functioning
Map the survivor’s strengths and efforts to resist
Make connections across systems and avoid siloed responses
Recognise the importance of documentation