Worker Safety and Domestic Violence in Child Welfare Systems

David Mandel, CEO and founder of the Safe & Together Institute, argues that child welfare agencies can’t become domestic violence–informed without directly addressing workers’ own physical and emotional safety fears. Drawing on case consultations and the Australian “Invisible Practices” research project, he traces how unaddressed worker fear feeds victim-blaming, perpetrator avoidance, and gives abusive parents room to manipulate the system.

Unaddressed worker fear correlates with a “failure to protect” pattern: case planning centers on the survivor rather than the perpetrator, children are removed when safer options exist, and there’s little to no documentation of the perpetrator’s behaviour or its impact. Mandel points to a specific consequence in the U.S. system: perpetrators who are never visited by a worker can later claim in court they were denied “reasonable efforts,” using a worker’s avoidance to get children placed back in their care—even when their own behaviour caused the removal.

Mandel groups what drives a worker’s safety assessment into three areas: their own prior experience with violence, fear that something they do (or don’t do) will lead the perpetrator to hurt the family, and straightforward fear of being personally targeted. He also flags an intersectional layer often left out of the conversation—workers may face compounded risk based on their own gender, race, sexual orientation, or other demographics, particularly with perpetrators who hold broader prejudiced or violent attitudes beyond their immediate family.

The paper proposes five questions supervisors should build into every domestic violence case, from what’s known about a perpetrator’s pattern with outside interveners (police, prior child welfare involvement, family who tried to intervene) to whether a worker has safety concerns tied to their own demographics.