A coercive control law can be groundbreaking and still leave survivors asking, “Why doesn’t life feel safer?”

David and Ruth are joined by Dr. Marsha Scott, CEO of Scottish Women’s Aid, to talk about Scotland’s hard-won reforms and the uncomfortable truth behind them: Legal change is only the beginning, and implementation is where domestic abuse reform succeeds or fails.

They dig into what makes Scotland’s coercive control framework so influential, including its course of conduct focus and why impact matters more than trying to read a perpetrator’s “intent.” Dr. Scott shares what the law has changed in public understanding and what has not changed yet in courts, sentencing, and survivor trust. Ruth, David, and Dr. Scott also get practical about what closes the implementation gap: infrastructure, better evidence, skilled supervision, and real accountability when systems keep defaulting to old habits.

Then they turn to family court, child protection, and child contact decision-making, where children’s rights can get lost and where poor documentation can make the perpetrator disappear while the survivor is judged through a deficit lens. They talk about reports, mental health models, and what it takes to pivot practice toward perpetrator patterns as parenting behaviours with measurable harm to kids.

If you care about coercive control, children’s safety, and systems change that actually sticks, hit subscribe, share the episode with a colleague, and leave us a review on your favorite podcast platform.

Send us Fan Mail

Now available! Mapping the Perpetrator’s Pattern: A Practitioner’s Tool for Improving Assessment, Intervention, and Outcomes The web-based Perpetrator Pattern Mapping Tool is a virtual practice tool for improving assessment, intervention, and outcomes through a perpetrator pattern-based approach. The tool allows practitioners to apply the Model’s critical concepts and principles to their current case load in real

Check out David Mandel's new book Stop Blaming Mothers and Ignoring Fathers: How to Transform the Way We Keep Children Safe from Domestic Violence.

Visit the Safe & Together Institute website.

Start taking Safe & Together Institute courses.

Check out Safe & Together Institute upcoming events.

If your picture of domestic abuse is still “bigger person equals perpetrator,” that assumption can derail safety planning in minutes, especially in same-sex relationships and LGBTQ families.

In this episode, Ruth and David sit down with Dr. James Rowlands, sociologist and founder of the Dyn Project, to explore what actually helps practitioners identify abuse more accurately: tracking patterns of coercive control, listening for fear and entrapment, and documenting real behaviours instead of relying on identity-based assumptions.

Ruth, David, and Dr. Rowlands unpack the tension many professionals feel between maintaining a gender-based violence lens, recognising gendered double standards, and being inclusive of queer survivors and male victims. While “gender-neutral” approaches can sound fair, they can also flatten power dynamics, erase social context, and obscure the role gender norms play in abusive relationships.

Together, they examine the “public story” that often steers professionals toward proxies like size, presentation, or stereotypes instead of evidence-based assessment. They also discuss how abuse tactics can look different in LGBTQ relationships, where outing, community stigma, and questions around “who counts as queer” can become tools of coercion and control.

The conversation gets practical, too. David, Ruth, and Dr. Rowlands explore why LGBTQ survivors are often missed in MARAC referrals, how generic risk checklists fail without LGBTQ-specific prompts, and what domestic homicide and death reviews can get wrong when queerness is treated as the explanation rather than focusing on perpetrator behaviour and systemic failures.

They close with concrete questions practitioners can ask to build trust with survivors, along with guidance for navigating biased or unsafe professional responses.

Subscribe, share this with a colleague or friend, and leave a review so more people can find these tools. What’s one assumption you’ve seen cause harm in a domestic abuse response?

Send us Fan Mail

Now available! Mapping the Perpetrator’s Pattern: A Practitioner’s Tool for Improving Assessment, Intervention, and Outcomes The web-based Perpetrator Pattern Mapping Tool is a virtual practice tool for improving assessment, intervention, and outcomes through a perpetrator pattern-based approach. The tool allows practitioners to apply the Model’s critical concepts and principles to their current case load in real

Check out David Mandel's new book Stop Blaming Mothers and Ignoring Fathers: How to Transform the Way We Keep Children Safe from Domestic Violence.

Visit the Safe & Together Institute website.

Start taking Safe & Together Institute courses.

Check out Safe & Together Institute upcoming events.

Systems don’t just “break” on their own. They do what they were designed to do, and too often that means extracting money, labor, and dignity while claiming to keep us safe.

In this episode, David and Ruth sit down with Trisha McOrmond, a Red River Métis systems thinker, to explore what it means to navigate belonging when it’s been fractured by family separation, colonisation, and institutions. They talk about the tension of feeling responsible to advocate, serve, and tell the truth without speaking for an entire community. They dig into why speaking from “I” and lived experience isn’t selfish, it’s accountable, and how the “royal we” can obscure harm in leadership, training, and professional spaces.

Trisha shares what decolonising thinking means to her: shifting from a scarcity worldview—where you “arrive here wanting” and must prove your worth—to a relational one, where you “arrive here wanted,” and community organises around care, children, elders, and basic needs. That shift reshapes how we understand capitalism, business as service, and the subtle ways institutions protect capital, property, and liability over people.

They also connect these ideas to domestic violence and child welfare systems. David, Ruth, and Trisha explore how deficit-based frameworks get weaponised against victims and targeted communities, how DARVO shows up at scale, and why asking “what will make this better?” can sometimes open doors that “what will make you safer?” closes.

If you care about systems change, targeted communities, First Nations perspectives, institutional trust, and building safety through relationships, this conversation is for you.

Subscribe, share this with someone doing hard systems work, and leave a review so more people can find the show.

Send us Fan Mail

Now available! Mapping the Perpetrator’s Pattern: A Practitioner’s Tool for Improving Assessment, Intervention, and Outcomes The web-based Perpetrator Pattern Mapping Tool is a virtual practice tool for improving assessment, intervention, and outcomes through a perpetrator pattern-based approach. The tool allows practitioners to apply the Model’s critical concepts and principles to their current case load in real

Check out David Mandel's new book Stop Blaming Mothers and Ignoring Fathers: How to Transform the Way We Keep Children Safe from Domestic Violence.

Visit the Safe & Together Institute website.

Start taking Safe & Together Institute courses.

Check out Safe & Together Institute upcoming events.