Lundy Bancroft Webinar: Two Informative Sessions

all right hello everyone and welcome to today's presentation featuring lundy bancroft my name is ashley rumschlock and i am the ceo of teresa's fund and domestic shelters.org i am joined today by our team so rachel myers our digital services specialist and hannah craig our senior content strategist and creator the two will be monitoring our q a and chat today just a few housekeeping items before we get started we will have live closed captionings for today's presentation and we will send out a transcript within a week to turn on the the tran excuse me the closed captioning click the more in the menu bar and select show subtitles we are using zoom today so you're in listen only mode your camera and your microphone are turned off um very important today we have a very very full house we are expecting uh over a thousand people to join in today right now we're over 930 of you have joined already um so we really want to make sure to stress that if you have a question please put that in the q a box so you can find that q a box in the menu bar uh just click the q a button and type your question there chat should be used for communicating between attendees letting us know if there's any technical difficulties things of that nature so just just a reminder of that and we will send out a certificate the transcript and we are recording today's webinar as well as additional resources within a week of the presentation and just a quick reminder for anyone who may not be familiar with domestic shelters.org we are a free online resource for domestic violence victims and survivors as well as domestic violence professionals we have a searchable database of domestic violence programs all over the us and canada as well as tons and tons of content that you can use to share with your clients community members and team members as well as custom data reports we also offer free wish lists for us shelters which allow people from anywhere in the world to ship you items like diapers and laundry detergent all the things that you need to serve serve your clients and then we also offer a few facebook groups so i know that rachel is going to drop some links in the chat so if any of those peak your interest feel free to click those to learn more uh also a reminder that all of our webinars we have 25 so far have been archived on our website so just go to domesticshelters.org again a link will be in the chat so you can see all the webinars and just email us at info domestic shelters.org if you need a certificate of attendance all right one second here get myself caught back up and okay all right so our next webinar will be next thursday may 19th building bridges with law enforcement and that is the third installment in our series with e-bodyguard uh we'll put a link to that in the chat so feel free to register for that we'd love to have you there and there's that email address address again info domestic shelters.org if there's anything you have any questions about all right and just wanted to pause obviously and give a huge huge thank you to cap60 for making this event possible so cap60 is the number one software solution for victim services agencies by using their fully encrypted system you can easily input and access each client's sensitive information when it comes to reporting seamlessly report all client demographics services unduplicated content client counts and other key metrics to satisfy funder requirements some of the additional perks of cap60 solution include victim and offender tracking a centralized intake process shelter in transitional housing automation outreach and volunteer management hotline call tracking counseling and legal silos and all funder reports including vawa voca vipspa and the cas casp or tunic caper report uh stick around after the webinar if you're interested in learning more about cap60 they'll be doing a short demo so thanks again to cap60 all right so quick rundown of today's schedule and then we'll dive right in so we do have two sessions today so it's a little different than our normal webinars uh we're going to go until 2 30 eastern time 11 30 pacific with our first session uh why does he do that the profile and tactics of men who abuse women we'll take a short five-minute break for stretches and restroom breaks all that and then we'll dive back in at 2 30 p.m eastern 11 30 a.m pacific with healing and recovery in children exposed to domestic violence so um with that um i have no doubt that many of you have learned kind of leaned on lundy's book why does he do that as you've navigated through your your time as a domestic violence professional so i know we were all very excited to hear hear from him today so um let's go ahead and welcome lundy bancroft so uh thank you everybody and it's an honor to get to speak to this audience that's so heavily people from the domestic violence world that's really wonderful for me i don't that's not my typical opportunity i mean there usually some you know some people in my audience who are domestic violence people but not a whole audience like this and certainly not an audience this size so so it's an honor for me that you folks are out and it's it's wonderful to get to talk to a whole collection of what i can assume are are overwhelmingly really like-minded people so that's that's that's a treat for me and and i'm always glad when people take an interest in understanding what the offender is about and throughout the the decades that i've been in the field they're people who react i think understandably like oh i don't i don't want to learn about the offender like you know hell with him like i want to help the women i want to help the children and i'm 100 behind that sentiment the the reason i say yeah but we do need to learn about the offender is that our misunderstandings about him can lead us to make some mistakes well-intentioned mistakes but mistakes nonetheless in our efforts to help women and children and conversely the better that we understand the offender the better we understand what's going on with the woman and what's going on with the kids and what their challenges are and what their confusions are and why they're blaming themselves so much and why they're blaming each other so much and why they're so traumatized it's like you know particularly how why they're so like in such a psychological state and uh and then and oh and also why they sometimes will do some things that we really wish they wouldn't do and where it's very tempting to get get critical or at least feel critical and the more we understand about the abuser the less we're likely to fall in to those kinds of mistakes so i think it's really really valuable to everyone to understand a lot about him even though yeah of course we'd much rather not really have to think about him i'm with you i'm i'm entirely with you on that so i'm going to be talking about the the abuser as a partner but i'm also going to be talking about how he affects kids in the home because partly because the second half of today is going to be about children's recovery and and so i need to set the stage for that to understand what children are dealing with and the kind of again very widespread assumption is that what children are dealing with when they have an abuser in the home is how traumatic it is for those kids when the abuser is assaulting mom and that's traumatic there's no question about it but unfortunately tragically that's only the beginning of what they're dealing with from having the abuser in the home there are huge implications for all kinds of things for the kids and all kinds of ways that they're getting psychologically injured from having him in their lives and that he could like never lay a hand on their mother again he could never threaten her again and he would still be continuing to do all kinds of psychological harm to the kids in all kinds of ways and you'll be hearing as we go along through the program some of the frustrations that i feel with what's going on in the custody course which has been one of my big soap boxes for 20 years now and and one of the many things that gets me so upset about what the custody courts are doing is their assumption that the the exposure to actual acts of violence by the abuser is the only concern for the kids and therefore if the couple is split up and he's not really got much access anymore to assault mom then you know why are we worried about the kids and and moms are not only fighting judges but they're so often fighting their own attorneys who are saying he's the father he needs time with his kids the kids need their father like why are you so worried about visitation and the so one of my goals is that through this program today you'll understand that she's got plenty to worry about post-separation because he's still the same person he's been all the time and the issue is the children's exposure to him not just their exposure to his acts of violence so i'm going to be i'm going to be weaving those the the understandings about him as a partner in others how he's treating the woman and how he's affecting all kinds of family dynamics in the home and how closely interwoven those issues are as soon as there are children in the home it's different when there's no kids there and then you have a different set of still obviously extremely problematic dynamics but a different but a different set of dynamics so the uh to begin with i'm going to talk about a a a kind of definition of domestic violence and and i i know people panic sometimes and they go oh he's going to give us domestic violence 101 we've already had that eight times we don't need domestic violence 101. and don't worry that's not what i'm doing the the reason i start with a definition is just because i'm saying an abuser this and an abuser that and and sometimes i will use the term batterer just out of habit i'm trying to move away from the use of that term the not because i think it's a bad term but because i think it acts as a barrier to services for women who think well he's not a batterer and i'm not a battered woman whatever her image is of who that would be and uh so i want to be clear when i'm talking about the abuser i am talking about someone where there's an element of deliberately putting her in physical fear i even though i'm not using the term batter in other words i'm really talking about someone who would fit my definition of a batter so he is someone who's a bully in the home this is a pattern of coercive control and and i'm gonna be explaining more about what i mean by course of control that term means slightly different things to different people but he's what it the the sort of simplest way of saying what it means is it means when you stand up to him things get worse not better now it doesn't it doesn't help somehow to stand up to him more it also doesn't help to stand up to him less like neither of those will make any difference and he has all kinds of strategies beyond the violence much more the other strategies actually than the violence for taking over power over her life and taking her life out of her hands so day-to-day life with the abuser is primarily about verbal abuse and other kinds of psychological assault tearing her down demeaning her destroying her self-confidence uh destroying her self-esteem that's much more what day-to-day life is like and that it's not day-to-day life is not about violence physical violence it is very often about other aspects of sexual mistreatment against sexual humiliation sexual coercion sexual contact that she didn't want and on and on all kinds of ways of taking her her rights away to integrity in her body and her her rights to make decisions about what's to happen to her body and then economic abuse ripping her off economically in all kinds of ways which is partly about exploiting her labor but it's also about literally taking money from her and getting her in debt and destroying her credit and and borrowing money from her and never paying it back and promising this and promising that that that that he never comes through on and it's all these forms of of mental and economic abuse and sexual mistreatment that are that are the much more prevalent forms of daily life the violence is like the physical violence and the threats of physical violence are really the tip of the iceberg that's what's most visible that's what the legal system is most involved in the legal system should also be involved in the sexual assaults but it's very reluctant historically to get involved in an intimate partner sexual assault and very hard to get those to be prosecuted it's improving a little bit in our times but not a ton but the the violence and the threats of violence do matter the because obviously they're so traumatizing and painful and scary when they happen but also because they leverage everything else that he's doing so this is a concept i like to underline for people is that the abuser's verbal abuse his name calling all you know all that other stuff that i've just listed off to you is its effect the effect of all that mental abuse is dramatically deepened by the fact that he is periodically scary he doesn't have to ever touch her in fact to fit my definition of the domestic batterer he doesn't have to ever lay a hand on her what he has to do is convince her that that could happen any minute and he may do that by raising fists he may do that by saying don't you dare mess with me you don't want to see what's going to happen he can do that by punching walls there's a lot of different ways to get the message to her i am capable of physically hurting you and as soon as that's the message i am capable of physically hurting you then he's a domestic batterer by my definition i'm just going to use the term abuser today but i'm talking about the domestic battery you will occasionally talk to a woman who says oh no he's not violent to me he's only verbally abusive or he's just mean he's just cruel and i encourage you to ask more questions because that's rarely true it does happen i have found a few true cases of the pure psychological purely psychological abuser and he's bad but he's also really rare there's almost always deliberate use of putting her physically in fear or sexually assaulting her which is violent when you have all these other forms of abuse going on in the relationship it's like there's research whoops somebody's okay we got it the there's research showing that the best predictor of which men will be violent to women is their level of verbal abuse so so this is something we need to be alert with alert for with our daughters for example and other people we care about in our lives saying oh well he's only verbally abusive and this is a that's a moment when we want to say do you know that statistically that's the best predictor of who which men will be physically violent towards women is their level of verbal abuse and the so there is usually an element of physical violence she hasn't defined it as violence because he hasn't outright punched her with a closed fist or he hasn't hurt you know hurt her in a way that required medical attention but when you start asking about slaps shoving her pinning her you know what he calls restraining her which is pinning her locking her in rooms and also just other kinds of really scary behaviors like deliberately towering over her like he's about to to hit her you're gonna find that it's that almost always there is some element of deliberately putting her in fear that is present so one other thing i like to emphasize about this definition is that we are generally not asking enough questions of women about sexual assault and when women disclose sexual assault we are generally not asking enough follow-up questions it's an uncomfortable subject and so we tend to shy away a little bit and say to her oh that's terrible which is good we do need to say that but then not ask a bunch of other things and it's not in most cases it's not her discomfort that's keeping her from talking in more detail about the sexual assaults it's her perception of our discomfort that's causing her from talking more she usually would like to tell what happened and so when she tells us about a physical assault we're going to tend to say oh tell me more about that like what was the physical assault like what did he actually do what happened right before it you know how did it end and what did he do or say afterwards and where were the children and what did they see or hear and we want to be in the habit of asking all those same questions when she reports a sexual assault well so what was the sexual assault what did he actually do what happened before it what happened after it and how were you after it and how what was he saying or doing after it and where were the kids and what did they what did they see or hear and this is very important because again there's research on this question and there's research that shows that children if there are children in the home they are just as likely to witness any sexual assaults that happen towards mine as they are to witness any physical assaults that happen towards mom i was surprised when i found this study because i just assumed that somehow the sexual assaults were something the children were less more likely to like to happen behind closed doors and they were less likely to know about and researchers have found that that's that that's not at all true the children do hear and see and are well aware of the sexual assaults just as they are aware of you know what we more traditionally call physical violence uh this awareness also came into my personal life because one of my best friends about 10 years ago started telling me that he had grown up he and his sister had grown up having to hear these horrible rapes of their mother by their stepfather and so that that that personal experience helped help wake me up to to the nature of what children are going through at those moments so the when i came into the field 30 years ago we could say oh you know abusers are kind of a mystery like we don't really know exactly what's going on with them they're not a mystery anymore they haven't been a mystery for decades now we know very very well but what they're all about and how they function and uh so you folks i know since you're in domestic violence are aware this guy is a super he's a controller in the home and what the term coercive control primarily means to me it means a lot of different things but what it primarily means to me is when you stand up to him the control is going to get better not work i mean it's going to get worse not better so if she says i hate it when you ask me so many questions about where i've been he's not going to ask fewer questions about where she's been he's going to ask her more and he's going to start to show up places where where she is to check up on her whatever control she objects to he will try to increase it and that has huge practical implications because it means that it makes no sense for people to say to a woman well you know why do you let him do that or you know you you allowed him to do that all those years and you folks since you're in the field are probably not very often are not very likely to say that but friends and relatives of hers so commonly have but what's what i think we also need to be aware of is how often she will say that about herself she will say oh you know i just let him do that and and that's an important place for us to step in and say that's not how that's not how i see it i don't think you let him do that i think he made you pay such a high price anytime you objected that it got harder and harder and riskier and riskier to object that's not the same thing as allowing somebody to do something at the same time standing up to him less won't help the abuser is going to live his script the abuser lives a script that's not in any way determined by his partner's behavior his partner's behavior is an excuse she may be an easy person to get along with she may be a difficult obnoxious person that a lot of people don't like her either that's got nothing to do with how he's going to behave he the abuser lives his own script he's the same whether he's with a an easier woman or a more difficult woman all right this is again very frustrating in the custody courts and in a lot of other contexts where people will say oh well these two just really set each other off like that's got nothing to do with domestic abuse you don't you don't you don't set the abuser off he he's he's going to go off when he chooses to go off because that's what he's all about that's that's that's how partner relationships work for him she often will have been told by the same people in her life to stand up to him more and to stand up to him less like her own friends and relatives may be telling her one day uh you got to not let him treat you like that and another day i'll be saying you just you really pushed his buttons and like he got so violent once before when you did that and you just did it again like you must be like trying to set him off or you must be stupid like to do something like that and so it's crazy making for her and the the so the message that we want to give to her is he's going to do what he's going to do and the you're not going to be able to control it for more than you know a few days she can manage him for a few days and she needs to sometimes to try for her own safety but it's not realistic to think that she's going to be able to manage him for more than a few days or maybe at most a few weeks and then he's going to do what he's going to do she can sometimes postpone it a little bit that's the best she can do and she so desperately needs to be absolved of the feeling that she's causing him to do what he does he's sending her that message all the time you're making me do this and unfortunately there are a lot of other elements in the society that are reinforcing his message that she's setting him off in these ways the the custody courts now are fully joining into that well you know she was really provocative she was really setting him off in a number of ways and so so we need to be unequivocal so so please use that term i encourage you to use steal liberally from anything i said today and and certainly that term about the abuser lives his own script i really encourage you to take on it's helpful to her to to understand that he's scary obviously he i don't think there's a lot i need to say to this audience about how scary he is this is an audience that understands that the the main point that i want to emphasize about this for today is that the the the research shows that the effects of being put in fear accumulate over time so the greater number of years that she's been exposed to this and the greater number of years that the children have been exposed to him scaring mom and maybe sometimes scaring them as well the the the traumatic effects are accumulating they're building up more and more over time and the research about kids for example shows that that the longer they've been seeing this stuff the more injured they are i don't know if any of you if for folks who have a particular interest in children you sometimes will see research that says that young children are affected by this more than older children but that's a study of how they were affected by a particular event so that's not those studies aren't going to show how they're affected by the accumulation there are other studies that look at like yeah but what if this has been going on for a really long time and those studies show the longer it's been going on the more problems people are having emotionally behaviorally and so forth and then the abuser isolates the woman and of course what isolates her is going to isolate her kids by extension and he doesn't have to do it on purpose although many abusers do isolate the woman on purpose that's a way to get more power over her and the abuser is really into power in his intimate relationships and his partner relationships but he doesn't even have to do it on purpose because the very fact of abusing her isolates her it makes her afraid to talk to people it makes her afraid to reach out it makes her embarrassed to tell people what's real about what's happening in her home and as soon as you're not telling people what's real that's putting up that's pretty creating distance between you and other people and that distance will grow over time and the isolation really increases his power and on some level he knows it he's drawn the abuser is drawn to the way that her isolation increases his power and so i encourage folks to think of the woman's isolation as our number one enemy i mean obviously the abuser is really our enemy but with respect to the effects he's having that isolation is our number one obstacle it's what's most in the way of her having any chance of starting to fight to get her rights back and and that's what we want we want to help her recover as many of her rights as she can over time and in and she's we're going to help her ideally use tons of different strategies for how she might do that including if she's interested in leaving him we're going to help her try to leave him but that's that's only one path of many that she can consider as ways to try to recover some or all of her rights but the isolation is going to be the biggest obstacle all the time so we want to always be strategizing about how can we break down her isolation what steps can she take safely or or or at a reasonable risk let's say to break down that isolation and and for us to remain conscious of it and help her remain conscious of it that that isolation is very very toxic for a person and and will do increasing harm over time one other comment about control which is about control in a completely different sense which is that the abuser claims that he's not a controller but that the opposite that if anything that his partner's a controller and that he loses control of himself that he just goes berserk and it's just it's just not true i was i was skeptical when i first came into the field i thought of course they lose control yes they do but i had to let that go over my first couple years of working with abusers my early mentors told me that wasn't what was happening but i thought oh that's just their that's just their dogma they're saying abusers don't lose control they obviously lose control but i was just faced with so many situations in my early couple years in the field where you have to think oh yeah he really knows what he's doing and gee he suddenly just yeah he was so berserk except the second there were police at the door he's cool as a cucumber and calling the police officers sir and madam and of course she's bouncing off the wall so he's sort of pointing at her saying look you know officers like this is the crazy lady i have to deal with and like how out of control is that or he smashes stuff up all over the house this is one of the most popular things among the domestic abusers to go on these rampages of throwing and breaking things all over the house but he never damages anything that's important to him things that are important to her are likely to get damaged things that are important to the kids are almost guaranteed to get damaged but how does he manage to never damage anything that's important to him because he's not nearly as out of control as he looks there's just so much more method to the madness than there appears to be and it really works in his interest actually when people think of him as crazy that actually that actually helps him because it makes him seem not responsible for his actions and it makes him seem like a very troubled tortured individual this was my view of abusers when i came into the field actually i assumed they were very very tortured individuals and i discovered they weren't any more tortured than than any other man or woman on earth uh we're all finding life pretty difficult in our times they're not there's no there's actually quite a bit of research showing that abusers aren't really suffering any more than anybody else's so which leads to the next point which is so then where did the problem come from it's not caused by his suffering it's caused by his sense of entitlement in other words this is a abusiveness male abuse difference towards females which is all unqualified to talk about male abusiveness towards females is a learner a product of learned behavior and learned attitudes and values that he learns unfortunately not only at home but learns from major media and learns from other key male role models and sports coaches and his peers as teens in fact research shows his peers as teens are one of his key influences of how he becomes an abuser anti-female messages he gets from pornography with pornography is just so full of outright hatred of women and he he believes in his right to uh require females particularly if they're involved in a relationship with him to require them to do things for him and so abuse ultimately is about enforcement it's about his perception a that she owes him all kinds of things that she doesn't owe him which is also almost a definition of entitlement to feel that you're owed things that you're not owed but if in some ways just as important and actually really ultimately more important he believes he has the right to enforce that service that he has the right to to hurt her usually not physically usually mentally but physically if necessary in his mind to enforce his demand that she must do for him what he demands must be done the then also that concept of enforcement i think is useful when you're running into questions of religion and tradition because you will sometimes have people say to you well how do you know he's abusive like how do you know it isn't just that these are his religious beliefs or how do you know this isn't just the kind of tradition that he comes from because he's from a more traditional family or he's from a more traditional sex roles kind of culture and the answer is does he enforce if as soon as there's enforcement that's not tradition that's abuse as soon as there's enforcement that's not religion that's abuse the his the abuser's level of entitlement is a big part of why getting abusers to change is so extraordinarily difficult because he deeply believes in his right to be behaving the way he's behaving and early in a relationship he'll make a lot of apologies oh i'm so sorry and he'll promise to change and he may continue to do that throughout the relationship or a lot of abusers stop even bothering to promise to change and stop even bothering to apologize but on a really deep level he doesn't believe there's anything wrong with what he did if he did he would stop it he really believes ultimately that les as i say she made him do it and that if she were doing better by him then he wouldn't be behaving in those kinds of ways and he's getting those messages across to the kids they're getting the message that mom isn't doing enough for dad and that he that that that we're causing him mom is causing him to behave the way he's behaving and we're causing him we the kids are causing him to behave the way he's behaving and a lot of the trauma that the children are suffering from they're suffering from because of the ways that they're internalizing this notion that mom is actually responsible for dad or step dad's actions and to uh to some extent they the kids are responsible for dads or step dad's actions uh parenting in this context is really really difficult you you know how are you gonna raise children while you're being completely bullied including one of the things he's most bullying her about is about how she can raise the children he's overruling her decisions about what the rules will be what the punishments will be when the kids can eat what they can eat where she can take them and and because of his level of entitlement he's constantly demanding that she has to attend to him when she needs to be attending to the kids she's being drawn away from the kids all the time to attend to him and again it's easy to criticize her for that but watch what happens to everyone in the family if she doesn't if he's demanding attention and he she if if he's demanding that she stop attending to the children in order to attend to him and she refuses she says no i have to stay focused on the kids right now she's going to pay for that and the kids are going to pay for that it's going to be worse than if then if she gave in to him so this is a whole set of dynamics that's very hard often to explain to child protective services because child protective services will look at this dynamic but they don't understand what they're seeing with exceptions i mean there's some good people and some good offices out there but by and large they don't understand what they're seeing and just leap into criticizing mom well she should be doing this she should be doing this she should be doing this as if she weren't being abused you know well yeah she could probably do all those things if she weren't being abused try doing those things while you're being abused like they'll say well she really needs to assert her maternal authority what she how is she going to do that how do you propose that this woman assert her maternal authority when there's a man in the house who unhesitatingly will threaten to hurt her whenever he feels like it and who routinely tells the kids not to pay attention to her oh you don't have to listen to mom oh she's an idiot she doesn't know what she's talking about etc how she's supposed to reassert her maternal authority the abuser believes that he's the victim that's one of the things that a very high level of entitlement will do is it'll cause you to start to believe that you're the victim and when you're actually the aggressor and that's very confusing for the kids and it's very confusing for mom and so the you'll rarely work with a woman who doesn't struggle with guilt about ways that she feels she has caused his difficulties not just his behavior but yes she's always struggling with feeling that she's caused his behavior but also that somehow she's harmed him or done unfair things to him in other ways because that's he's constantly laying that on her or he's often is and the kids struggle with those things too this is a guy that comes off very well in public there are some exceptions but typically he comes off very well in public so confusing for her so confusing for the kids i mean he's saying there's nothing wrong with me you make me this way and then the woman and the children see him getting along fine with friends and relatives they see how popular he is down at the tennis club they see how you know or how popular he is wherever he works or whatever and they're going to think oh yeah it must be something we're doing because look everybody else can get along and he's highly manipulative and they put a lot of energy into manipulating systems and for folks who work in domestic violence this is a a frequent source of frustration i'm sure you folks deal with this where you're so frustrated by issues and how police are responding or and how the custody courts are responding or how cps is responding or in how this woman's own friends and relatives are responding because he's just lying and mr slick and and does favors for people in the whole routine it's very very frustrating but we we need to make it our mission to keep spreading these understandings into communities because we can raise the level of awareness in a community of these issues through our community education projects and it does make a difference i mean this i came into the field more than 30 years ago 32 or something years ago and community values have changed the the response from systems unfortunately has often not improved that much it varies but largely has not improved the custody courts are worse now than they were 30 years ago but but community values have changed it's just that all these other systems are just farther and farther behind what community values are you can influence community values and it's so worth doing it does make a difference and then when i say at the end of this slide that his behavior is driven by deep long-held attitudes this is just another message that we really need to get out there in our communities these guys do not change because they wake up one morning feeling bad about what they did and the it's very hard to get community members and i'm talking about friends relatives professionals everybody to let go of this idea that well now he's really feels bad about what he did i don't think he's going to go back and do it it's like you have to understand that a man doesn't abuse women unless he has absorbed a really really toxic set of attitudes controlling and entitled ways of operating and hateful ways of operating over a period of years this is not going to go away except through a very intense deep process of change and the research shows very clearly that it has to include consequences that in the absence of consequences close to zero percent of abusers change the best abuser program can't for example accomplish much of anything with an abuser who hasn't experienced any legal consequences or other serious kind doesn't have to be a legal consequence but some really significant consequences for his actions like he's been rejected by his own family because of how he treats women or he's lost jobs because of how he treats women he has to something really has to have happened that he didn't like what it did to him or or they will not change ed gandolf's research ed gandolf g-o-n-d-o-l-f has been you know for decades the top researcher on batter program abuser programs and when they work and when they don't and his research has been very clear that you that it's you cannot do this work effectively in the absence of strong consequences for the abuser the abuser sees his partner as less intelligent less competent less logical i mean he just talks about her like she's something disgusting and you will hear tremendous anger from both sides you'll hear tremendous anger from the abuser and you hear tremendous anger from the abused woman and people say oh they're both really angry at each other it's like yeah but where do you hear the contempt the contempt comes almost entirely from the abuser side and there's the anger doesn't tell us anything it's the contempt that's so revealing huge implications for kids because it means they're growing up in an atmosphere of constant trashing of their mother and they're learning to look down upon her they're learning to demean her they're learning to laugh at her and they're learning to assault her and the research shows that all these things do in fact play out for example kids whose are stepped out as an abuser have much higher rates of assaulting their moms and of assaulting their siblings than other children do a couple quick points then i want to see if we've accumulated any questions but one is this system works and so we need to avoid thinking of this as like a dysfunction i mean of course it's of course by my values by your values it's a dysfunction but when we think of dysfunctional behavior we think of something that's harming the person doing it not just harming other people and the abuser is actually doing almost no harm to himself unless he gets arrested an abuser can abuse for 10 years or 20 years or 30 years or 40 years still be popular at work still be in good physical health still be in good economic shape like his financial life is still going fine abusers don't hit bottom the way you know if you know that term hitting bottom about how an alcoholic or a drug addict will eventually hit bottom or other kinds of addicts will hit bottom the abuser's partner and his you know his wife and or girlfriend and their children they're gonna hit bottom he's not gonna because being an abuser is not that bad i don't think it's good for you but it's not that bad for you it's not it doesn't do him you know 150th of the harm that it does to the people who are his targets for him he thinks it works good hey i get my way they cater to me i get sex when i want sex i get to not contribute nearly my share to the work of the house and to the work of raising children and yet i still get to make everybody else think oh he's the greatest dad like hey this is working pretty good for me i end up with the money going to what i care about instead of the money going to what she cares about or what the kids care about she's scared to break up with me because i can win custody at the custody courts uh so she's pretty much stuck here for good yeah yeah sounds good so to his in in my book why does he do that i wrote a section called 10 reasons to stay the same where i listed off all the benefits that they get we've got to stop feeling sorry for these guys i'm not saying we have to be cruel to them you don't you don't get someone to stop being abusive by abusing them but we have to set limits and impose consequences and we have to stop feeling sorry for them it's so enabling to them when we feel sorry for them this is a system that's working for them from there from what they want you know it might not get abusing people might not get you what you want but it does get the abuser what he wants because that's what he wants he wants that kind of relationship okay let's pause there for a moment and just see if we've if we if there's uh questions from the in the q a let's take questions for a few minutes if there's some there perfect yes we do have lots of questions and i'll kind of try to distill them down into a few key themes here um and one thing that you did touch on so i just want to kind of acknowledge because i know it's going to come up again and again you mentioned you know your qualification is talking about uh males abusing females and so obviously you know just kind of trying to put that out there for everyone to hear again that you know what you're talking about today is about males abusing females you know is there anything you want to talk about in terms of females amusing males or should we just kind of breeze past that since it's not or i'll say i'll make a couple quick comments just that first of all the the dynamics that i'm describing are largely applicable to men who are abusing their male partners gay male abusers and to women who are abusing their female partners in other words to a lesbian abuser uh no it's not going to be perfect in every respect don't take everything i say and just expect it to totally fit but you're going to see a lot of the same dynamics when you have a violent or scary female against a non-violent male uh i know she's not he's not an abuser she's really the destructive one in that relationship it's not going to fit this template it's actually going to have it's not going to be a good scene but it's going to have a very different set of dynamics so don't try to put this onto that your that situation is going to play out in some very different ways got it okay good to understand um what about uh you know some you kind of mentioned a lot of the misconceptions about domestic violence and what causes it no it's not anger it's not their inability to control their emotions um one one thing that i i don't recall touching on uh but so correct me if i'm wrong is the idea of drug or alcohol abuse issues and how that is often directed as the blame for why they're abusive can you speak to that so the the the short version is a substance abuse problem cannot turn a non-abusive man into an abuser i mean when you think about all these dynamics that i'm talking about like all this verbal abuse and all this sexual mistreatment and all this undermining of her as a parent like how how would a substance magically cause this whole constellation of behaviors and attitudes it can't do it but there are things a substance abuse problem can do it can make a man who is an abuser much more dangerous in other words the risk to kill really increases if he's a substance abuser and it can make sure that he doesn't change so something even even something that isn't the cause of the problem can be glue in the works that makes sure the problem stays if you understand the distinction i'm making and when he's got an active substance abuse problem the the chances that he's going to change go from small to zero and and what the research actually tells us is that jail is the most effective change agent for abusers i hate to say that because i hate jail and i'm generally not a promoter of jail i think jails are horribly inhumane sick institutions but this is what the research tells us is that jail is actually more effective than abuser programs and getting abusers to stop their violence towards women and then even a really high quality abuser program and so the you know the the the consequences are are huge to to you know what brings about the change but the research shows that even jail doesn't work if he's if his substance abuse problem is not being attended to so what i say is we're both underestimating the importance of substance abuse and we're overestimating the importance of social use we're overestimating it when we say that's what's making him this way that's not what's making him this way but we're underestimating it when we're not recognizing how much it can contribute to dangerousness and how much it makes sure that nothing else we do we try will work yeah no that makes sense um in this kind of segues into another question that came in um you know you kind of mentioned uh the idea that jail is one of the most effective things you know that the research is showing um but can you talk about you know do you actually believe that domestic violence intervention programs work um and if so you know how do we get these programs uh to understand you know what you want what you understand about abusers so uh i rely heavily on edgandoff's work not only about his own studies but he also writes extensively in his books about other people's studies and the it's it's it's it's clear i believe it's clear from his work that a well-run abuser program makes some difference if other key elements are in place and what his reach charles research tells us to have been a very strong decisive legal system response notice he has to have gotten a message from the legal system we're taking this really seriously so for example if the legal system has said to him if you complete the abuser program the charges will go away that you're going to get continued out of finding this is you know what's called diversion you do the the you do the abuser program but your charges are going to go away the abuser program is a complete waste of time it will accomplish zero in fact the abuser program where i did most of my career emerge in cambridge after a while we simply stopped accepting diverted clients they were such a waste of our time because he's gotten the opposite message from the legal system you get diverted you've gotten the message that what you've done is not serious diversion is for the less serious crimes you're getting diversion you're telling him this is one of the less serious crimes and so then in addition to the to gandalf's finding that the strength of the legal system response is crucial to whether the abuser program can be effective or not he found a couple of other things the guy's substance abuse problems have got to be addressed uh he needs to get in the abuser program fast that if he's permitted to stall and delay till a long time after the last assault its effectiveness drops off rapidly the longer it's been since his last assault and the program has to be confrontational it cannot be like a an abuser support group or a therapist this is not therapy it has to be in an environment where abusers are being told you are responsible for your actions you are choosing your actions and you are responsible for the damage that you're doing and the the the program should be educational but it can't just be pure class like a drunk driving glass it has to be class mixed with really putting guys feet to the fire to call them out on what they're doing to hold them accountable when those things fall into place gandalf's research shows that the abuser program is worth a try that it does have some impact very good and thanks for sharing that so i'm going to turn it back over to you to kind of dive back in make sure that you have time to cover everything but we do have more questions so when whenever it's good time for a break we'll dive in with some more great thank you and you you may sometimes see folks that i that i don't cover every single thing on this on the slides and you'll have access to the slides afterwards the the the uh you know i choose to a certain extent i end up choosing certain highlights based on what we have time for today and and what i feel like you know depends on the particular audience and so forth what i think is going to be most useful to you the although some of this stuff i know you're already convinced of anyhow and what i'm more hoping to do with some of the things i'm saying is to equip you i'm hoping that i'm equipping you with arguments that you then can use when you're out talking to a police department or you're out talking to a civic group or you're giving a presentation to a hospital staff or whatever it is it's been so helpful to me when people have framed concepts in certain ways for me so i'm hoping that it's helpful to you when i give you these frames that that that you then can pass on the to this day it is still widely believed including by key people who i wish knew better that domestic violence is a product of poverty and lack of education and that a man who was better educated and in better economic condition is less likely to be an abuser this belief is completely false it's backed up by next to nothing and the it's it allows the kind of well-heeled slicker whiter abuser to have a much better chance at skating and it puts him in a great position to take custody of the children away from the woman because it's like oh he wouldn't be an abuser look you know he's got a phd or he's you know he's head of the local amnesty international or whatever it is these are actually all real things from cases of mine and the economic stress is not making him into an abuser economic stress may contribute to making an abuser have one of his incidents but then that in that incident didn't happen then it would have just happened at another time the economic stress didn't turn him into an abuser and then the evidence is again quite clear and again actually this is med gondol's research also although this isn't about matter programs is that most abusers do not have diagnosable mental health conditions not even personality disorder one thing you hear all the time from people say well yeah maybe he doesn't have this or that but he's obviously got a personality disorder not necessarily in fact a minority it's well established in by gondo's study that a minority of even violent abusers physically violent abusers a minority have personality disorder the problem is that a very high level of entitlement will lead to behaviors that look a lot like personality disorder but that are rooted in a completely different set of causes and i've written about this extensively in my my blog which is just at lundy bancroft.com you can you can read a bunch of posts that i've written to try to explain why abusiveness can look so much like personality disorder and why it's important to understand the distinction between the two although ultimately it's not that important for the victim by the way for the abused woman because personality disorder does not respond to therapy so if she can figure out ah he is personality disordered how has that helped her all that has really told her is she's in an even more uh he's in a situation that's even less likely to move at all than if he were a pure abuser but even the pure abuser as we know is very unlikely to change the abuser who's also personality disorder is then goes down even another notch on his likelihood to change we accomplish almost nothing with our clients who are truly personality disordered but they're a very small percentage of our clients that reminds me of another thing it's not a completely different subject but i'm just going to say now so that i don't forget because the the the the i try to address the questions that abused women most ask me and that's one of them what if is it a personality disorder and what if it is a personality disorder and and that's the answer is it doesn't really have any real practical implications for decisions that she needs to make it's the there's nothing yeah the only therapy that's proven effective for personality disorder is dialectical behavior therapy good luck getting an abuser to go to dialectical behavior therapy for all kinds of reasons he's not going to agree to do that i have once in my 30-year career succeeded in getting an abuser who was personality disordered to do dialectical behavior therapy actually i didn't really do it either it was other other people who managed to get to do it it's next to impossible to get him to do dialectical behavior theory so other key questions that she asked to come to mind are how do i know if his apologies are sincere or not and how do i know if his promises to change are sincere or not and sad to say but the answer to both of those questions is it doesn't matter i hate to say it but there are abusers who make sincere apologies and they're abusers who make fake apologies and both of those go to exactly the same place nowhere they both go nowhere they're abusers who make sincere promises to change and they're abusers who make fake promises to change and they both go nowhere so so encourage her not to struggle with that question because that's not the question that matters the only question that matters is what kind of steps is he willing to take is he willing to go to an abuser program is he willing to let you move out for a few months and not text you 10 times a day and call you five times a day in other words is he willing to actually let you take a few months off from the relationship and let you not have contact with him is he willing to stop threatening you that he's going to take custody of the kids if you leave him etc etc those those are the things that matter not like oh does he does he make real apologies or you know does he promise to change uh so i've already addressed the substance abuse question the the only thing i'll say about mental health because i've already said a number of things about mental health is that there is one mental health category that does really matter and that's suicidality the abuser who is suicidal is dangerous he's not just to himself he is dangerous to others because abusers with very rare exceptions do not commit suicide abusers commit murder suicide if he decides to kill himself he's going to try to kill her first and according to the research about one time in five he's also going to try to kill one or more of her children and he on less commonly he will try to kill other people who he perceives as contributing to her having left him and that particularly means her new partner is at risk like her new husband or her new boyfriend those those people sometimes those men sometimes get killed by the abuser uh and then even less commonly but but out there i've heard of attacks on her relatives or attack on her attorney if he you know basically whoever he blames since he doesn't believe that the woman would choose to leave him then it's whoever made her made her leave him so i made i made some comments earlier about how it's really hard to parent kids in this context i think abused women do a remarkable job under the circumstances not everybody obviously but i mean to a great extent they do better than i could have done living under the conditions that these women are living under and we really need to look at what they're doing well and not just collect information about what they're what they're not handling well and we really need to understand the constant obstacles that he's putting up to her being able to have the kind of family that she'd like to have so i've already made some reference to the ways that he undermines her authority he also interferes in all kinds of other ways with her ability to be there for her kids he's angry so she can't give the kids dinner no because he's angry at one of the kids or whatever or he's angry at her so she can't read them their bedtime story i mean he just gets in the way in all kinds of ways that hurt those kids emotionally and that hurt her and that hurt her bond with the kids one thing that i wrote about in a book of mine called the batterer's parent is that the single most common complaint that i've gotten over the years from abused women about how the abuser affects her as a parent it's about the abuser not letting her pick up a crying infant i've heard that one over and over and over and over again that one breaks my heart it also makes me furious i mean imagine the impact on both mother and infant when the abuser says you can't pick the baby up the baby's crying and you i mean it's heartbreak you can't you can't pick the baby up the research shows that the abuser's interference with her parenting begins while she's still pregnant that abusers are more likely than non-abusive men to uh force a woman to carry a baby to term when she wanted to have an abortion or to force a woman to have an abortion when she wanted to have the baby he may intervene on either side to take away her reproductive rights and there's this litany of ways that he gets in the way of her parenting then he may try to hurt her through the children being cruel to the children as a way of being cruel to her because he knows that's what will hurt her the most threatening that if she ever leaves him he'll take he'll go for custody and that's a threat she has to take really seriously because abusers are winning right and left the my new book by the way i don't know if folks have heard about it and i'll try to remember to mention it later but my new book which is a novel it's called in custody is largely an effort to write an expose but in a kind of entertaining romantic you know somewhat humorous mystery story that then turns increasingly serious to blow the whistle on what the custody courts are doing um in to to women and kids and so but that's a threat she has to take very seriously because she's in our time she's starting to have heard how well abusers are doing at courts and and then abusers are really good splitters remember i said this is a guy who who his outlook on intimate relationship and his outlook on family is about power he's not necessarily a power monger on other fronts in his life but on the home front he's into power that's like power parenting power partnering like that that's that's how he wants to do things and i said you know he's into enforcement as i've said and so if you're into power one of the ways to increase your power is to get everybody in the family fighting against everybody else so families where there's an abuser tend to become quite factionalized very critical of each other very negative at each to about each other and often quite abusive to each other and so wherever we can we want to play a role in helping people attend to the ways that they're being turned against each other and in the in the second part i'll be talking quite a bit about well one of my central messages one of my things i'm always saying is if when we want to talk about healing in a family where there's been a domestic abuser we can't just think in the terms of in terms of the healing of individuals we have to think in terms of the healing of relationships because abusers do so much harm to mother child relationships and they do so much harm to sibling relationships so we need to look at what role can we play in helping those relationships heal we can't just sort of divide people up into separate boxes and think how are we going to help each of these people separately heal and that that needs to happen also but we've got to attend to how he's divided people turn them against each other got them blaming each other for his behavior and so forth and how he's lied to them to turn i mean just all so many different ways that the abuser creates these divisions i wrote about that in the matter as parent then in the book that i wrote four moms called when dad hurts mom that i wrote to to give mom some much more not just information but a lot more ideas about how to actually help their kids because none of the stuff that's out there unfortunately on on children's exposure domestic violence tells moms anything about what to do okay so talking about that you've already heard a number of my points about how destructive the custody courts of the common art times and our times i really believe the custody courts have become the most powerful societal enabler of domestic violence and child abuse and and they're they're everybody involved in the custody courts is making money absolutely hand over fist it's unbelievable the money that's being made it gets gets worse every year now one of the myths that they work very hard to promote people who work in the in the divorce courts is well you know he he may abuse her but that doesn't mean that he's a bad father yes actually it does mean that he's a bad father abusing children's mother is one of the worst things you can do to your kids there are studies now they started almost 30 years ago there's 25 years ago their studies now piled as high as the ceiling showing how bad it is for kids when you abuse their mother even if you don't abuse the kids that's terrible fathering so it's simply literally impossible to abuse children's mother and be a good father you're doing one of the worst things a father can do for the well-being of his children and then i say on top of that what's the likelihood when someone's doing something that's that destructive for kids that that's the only thing that he's doing destructive for kids when a parent is capable of being that callous about how things harm children then they're almost guaranteed to be doing other things that harm children and sure enough you look at the research and it turns out it's true batter is far more likely than non-battering men to be physical and sexual abusers of children in the home with respect to physical abuse about half of domestic batterers physically abuse one or more children in the home and there have been many studies of this some two dozen or something studies of this but the the one of the earlier studies i felt like we hardly needed any more studies after that there was a murray strauss study that had a sample size of over 6 000 that is from a research standpoint that is a huge sample and his study found 49 of batterers frequently hitting children in the home versus percent of non-battering men it was exactly seven times as likely for the batterer as the non-batterer to be a physical abuser of children they now there's also a lot of research there's not two dozen studies but there's uh eight or nine studies that i know of that also show that the batter is much more likely than the non-battery man to be an incest perpetrator and these studies show a similar statistic something about like six to six and a half times as likely as a non-battery man to be an incest perpetrator now this connection is less intuitive to people because people think when they hear about physical abuse they think oh well he's a violent guy i'm not surprised if he's violence with the kids but incest what's incest got to do with it well way back near the beginning on one of my slides actually didn't go into it at the time but on one of my slides that said that one of the key driving forces in domestic violence is the abuser's attitude that his partner is an owned object that she is a thing that belongs to him now if you have a mentality that your partner is an owned object that she's a thing that belongs to you that's not necessarily going to spill onto other people in your life but if it does spill somewhere where is it going to spill first who's the next most likely people that you're going to define as your owned objects children in the home and that's how the abuser the domestic abuser thinks very commonly about kids in the home he depersonalizes them he tunes out their pain and he just thinks of him as as his more of his stuff even her kids if even when he's not the father he still thinks that he has the right to just completely rule and control that they in some sense still belong to him that he has the right to do what he wishes to do and so the overlap is not exactly about violence the overlap is about exploitativeness it's about the the the core of the abuser being about my right to take over somebody else's life regardless of what harm it does to them and use their life for my purposes there is no evidence that these risks go down after a couple splits up why would they so women are constantly being told well the solution is you should leave him except she leaves him he now is going to have a very extensive program of visitation through the custody courts they always give extensive programs of visitation now they don't always give it immediately sometimes he's delayed a little bit if he has a history of domestic violence perpetration but just some months literally that's what i'm saying that that that's the act what i'm saying is the accurate truth a delay of either zero he gets immediately really extensive hesitation or in some months within some months he will have an extensive program of visitation and he's the same guy as i said that he was before and he's still the same risk to abuse the kids that he was before much greater than a non-abusive man i'll say just a couple more things and then i want to see other what other questions we may have accumulated but uh there's other problems in the abuser as a parent but one thing is with what you know i've used this term that i borrowed from somebody else counter-parenting but i've already i've already given you all kinds of examples of counter-parenting all the ways that he's getting in the way of her as a parent and just trying to do whatever will foul her up as a parent and that behavior gets worse post-separation that doesn't get better but he also tends to be a real dictatorial my way or the highway sort of do exactly what you're told in no back talk style of parent which is not good for kids and yet remarkably he also manages to mix the opposite of being overly permissive and reckless and that's a trick because parents who have parenting problems are usually either tipping in the overly authoritarian direction or they're tipping in the overly permissive direction when you know we're trying to be down the middle which is what really good parenting is down the middle it's neither my way or the highway nor do whatever you want he manages to mix the the worst of both worlds so he's like no no backtrack you do what i'm told you're going to be sorry no you can't go to that birthday party because i'm mad whatever he'll like his the punishments he gives the consequences he gives will be so out of proportion to what the child did wrong it'll be just crushing to the child but then he'll also be like oh no that's fine if she's riding her bike without a helmet or that's fine if you know there's obvious evidence that my kids are having sex when they're too young to be having sex or they're getting home drunk or whatever that's fine especially post-separation because post-separation he wants to be the cool parent and so he just starts to pay no attention to all kinds of obvious signs of risk to the kids at the same time he can do fine while he's being watched going back to what i said about these guys are not out of control of themselves even though they want us to think that they are that means like when a custody evaluator or a child abuse investigator observes him for an hour an hour and a half they're so often going to come back saying oh lovely parent the children were really happy to be with him they were laughing together they were hopping up happily on his lap sure they were because they hadn't seen him in a while and they miss him and because they know from years of experience that when other people are around is when to have a good time with him because that's when you're safer with him so it's completely meaningless what anybody saw in their you know observation custody evaluators are just i find rampantly forming huge and unfounded conclusions that they're writing into their custody evaluations based on a 60 or 90 minute observation of him with his children it's preposterous particularly because to go to the last item they are such couriers of favor the abuser can turn really nice for months literally months at a time because he's not out of control he can turn nice for months at a time when he's on a campaign when there's something he's trying to accomplish like he's trying to get criminal card charges dropped and he's trying to get her not to testify or he's trying to impress his new girlfriend or he's trying to win custody of his kids or there's some other reason why he wants to be in good with somebody in this case i'm talking about what because he wants to be in good with the kids he can curry favor just fine okay so i have a set of slides that are probably not crucial to get to let's get to these only if only if there aren't that many questions about about ways to work with abusers about their parenting we could i could also fit those into the second part if we have room there but for the moment let's let's let's uh stop and take more questions if we have more if there are more yeah there are and um just want to set the expectation we will not be able to get to everyone's questions today i think i looking in the q a box there were 57 questions that came in so i know a lot of a lot of topics that we're going to try and combine to make sure that we touch on as many different topics as possible so um the first one on our list is you had mentioned that the dbt therapy i believe correct me if i'm wrong on that pronunciation or that the acronym um what is it about that therapy that helps abusers change well i'm not i'm i don't i don't know that much about diablo behavior therapy it's it's it's not it has nothing to do with abusers it has to do with helping you with personality disorder and in fact i don't think it would be a substitute for an abuser program but it would for an abuser who was personalities or if you get him to do the abu if you get him to do dbt and then do the abuser program then that would give the abuser program a chance um it would almost be like it would almost be like the way you need to get him into substance treatment before the abuser program has a chance if he's personality disorder you need to get him into dbt before the abuser program has a chance but it's not it wouldn't be a substitute no okay got it i'm not far from an expert on the treatment of personality disorder so i wouldn't want to go into trying to explain why dbg works i have my own beliefs about why dbt works but i'd be speaking strictly as like from from a lay person's standpoint about what my what my feelings are about why dvt is is sometimes effective okay all right very good um one of this is a question that i've had as well as you were kind of speaking um because you talked about you know that very real idea that abusers are don't typically have a personality disorder or any kind of mental illness but still i mean within um the profession you hear the term narcissist thrown around a lot and you know that narcissism seems to be a common but controversial term when talking about abusers can you speak to that specific term and you know do you think it's used too loosely do you think it needs to not be used at all um what what are your thoughts on that term well again first of all the the ed gondoff's research which i thought was very well constructed and very persuasive and was working with quite violent batterers so if anything they were more serious than average abusers still found a solid majority not personality disorder and found that the rate of personality disorder wasn't even that much higher than non-abusive men it was higher than non-abusive men but it wasn't way higher than non-abusive men and was nowhere near 50 percent of abusers so the narcissism is i mean you know there's some different beliefs about this but i have quite strong beliefs based on what i've read particularly the book called narcissism the denial of the true self that narcissism has its roots in a very intense set of early childhood emotional wounds and abusiveness does not and so it's a mistake to start referring to all abusers as narcissists because you start referring to them as a narcissist and right away you assume you're dealing with a very wounded individual whose problems are in his family of origin whereas if you understand he's an abuser you think well he's not necessarily particularly wounded that's not likely to be the driving issue behind his behavior and his whole the whole surroundings that he grew up in are responsible not just his family of origin his his town his his whole nation that he grew up in the media i mean so many different influences so to call abusers narcissists a really lets them off the hook because narcissists can't really change their behavior that much and abusers totally can they're just not willing to and so it really lets him off the hook and it makes it very tempting to blame his mother and i have found throughout my time in the field that people are eager to find a way to blame the mother of abusers for how they've turned out the way they turned out it's like oh let's find some way to make women to blame for this and and by labeling them all narcissists that's going to tend to point a lot of the blame towards his mom and i think that's completely unfair and inaccurate yeah very helpful next question on here is what is your opinion on dv advocates using the and i not heard of this before the women's experiences with battering scale as a tool for identifying when a woman is a victim of course of control are you familiar with that tool it's it's it's i'm not familiar with it it's fairly new and i i probably shouldn't comment on it um i i've always been a little mystified by the eagerness to find a tool it's like if we can just get people talking about their experience we can figure it out but maybe you know it may be very helpful so i don't want to say anything negative about it and there may be people here who know quite a bit more about it than i do but you know i have been on the offender and not not on the victim and i mean i'm constantly as you know the whole time i'm making pitches about things i would like people to do with women but i'm doing it based on my experience with the offender yeah very good well that's definitely what i'm going to take a note of and look into myself what advice do you give to women who have successfully left an abuser and are navigating the family court system um so especially when the abuser fits the you know the white successful liked in the community profile you know they kind of you know look like they're the winner there yeah it's it's a long subject let me say a little bit about it now and then we can see if we have more time in the in the in the second half to say more about it but the you really want to want to avoid getting into battles that don't need to be gotten into because the abuser just thrives on battling and the abuser's lawyer thrives on battling they're going to try to turn everything into a battle they love it the attorney loves it because he or she is making an unbelievable bundle and the abuser loves it because that's what the abuser loves the abuser wants to still be central to your life he doesn't want you to be able to not have him be constantly the main thing you're thinking about even 20 years after you break up he still wishes you were the main thing you always think about but particularly for those first few years that's really what he wants so try to figure out what fights you can let go of and try to really stay on the things that really matter most to you and then don't give in on those but but try to you know try to see what even if it's unfair what you could let go of on the other hand don't give up too much financially there's this real temptation which i would feel the same way in an abused woman's position to think well i don't care about money like he's all greedy and he wants this and that and that what i want is the kids let him have the money as long as he'll agree to me have in custody and they give away the store in order to keep custody and emotionally i totally get it but it's actually a mistake because the financial agreement in a divorce is permanent you cannot read you can revisit child support but you cannot revisit any other aspect of the financial outcome of a divorce that stuff is set for good whereas custody can always be revisited so he'll say yeah you can have custody i want all the money and then two years later or three years later or four years later he's back going for custody too not only that but he's in a really good position to win custody two three or four years later because he's got all the money and you've given it all away so so it's very it's very deceptive because you think oh well i'm getting custody for good but you're not he's not there's not there's no way you can make him prom there's no legal agreement that could make him promise to never come back later to try for custody that agreement doesn't exist wouldn't have any legal standing so don't give up too much financially in order to keep custody because then you run the risk of just losing custody also later and then there's tons of other things i can say but i have to say realistically that also there's only so much you can do it's a badly badly broken system and it's a system that in our times has become increasing increasingly sympathetic to fathers who are accused of either domestic violence or child abuse and is starting to see them as victims of false allegations like that's even though false allegations are a tiny tiny percentage even in custody by the way there's research showing that even in custody false allegations are a tiny percentage the custody court's outlook is the opposite that the true allegations are a very small percentage and it's a so it's a very very hostile environment at this point in time for the abused woman i hate to say that i'm really i'm really sorry to say yeah and that was actually something i saw pop up in the questions as well because you said you know in the 30-year history now is is even worse than 30 years ago i think is how you awarded it is is that the the driving you know the number one thing on your list of why you think that it's worse than it was 30 years ago is that that shift between uh you know who's believed or is there more to that yeah but well there's a lot to it it's it's there's so many different professionals now that have realized how much money there is to be made and one thing that custody has that i'm not sure any other profession has is that in child custody the worse you do your job the more money that you make so because if you're a lawyer or a custody evaluator or a guardian ad litem which is really just a kind of custody evaluator or what they now call parenting coordinator or reunification therapist they have zillions of roles now who are all making tons of money the more you feed the conflict rather than contribute to the resolving of the conflict the more money you make because then it just drags on longer and longer and longer so for example if a custody evaluator says this guy's clearly a domestic batterer we're going to hold him accountable in this way in this way in this way and then he can have visits with his kids if he really meets these clear requirements that he's actually dealing with his abusiveness that case is just going to go away because you hold the abuser accountable they quit they say oh forget that and the way you make a lot of money is by keeping him involved and you keep him involved by blaming the woman and you know then and you feed the fights and so imagine a profession where the worse you do your job the more money you make you know that's a mess and then the the abusers have organized they created a movement that they call the father's rights movement that's not about father's rights it's about the needs and interests of men who've been accused of abuse and men who are who are angry about having to pay child support and obviously there are men who have legitimate grievances but they're not those aren't the ones who are in that's not what the father's rights movement is all about they're not the ones who are in the father's rights movement i wrote about that extensively in my book in custody also about the nature of the in fact one of the main characters is quite involved with the fuzz rights movement um and in custody so that as a way to sort of explain to people what that that it's it's not what it looks like because you think father's right you think oh that's a good thing right father's right is a good thing mother's rights are a good thing children's rights are a good thing but those organizations unfortunately are you read their actual stands on issues what they're actually advocating for what the kind of bills are that they're pushing through they're for father supremacy they're not for father's rights it's like calling the ku klux klan and equal rights for white people organization yeah yeah that was another thing that was touched on you know what were your thoughts on those organizations so i appreciate you touching on that um yeah there are fatherhood organizations that are not part of the whole father's rights thing that are they're called like fathers the whole genre called father involvement organizations that are really trying to encourage fathers to be more involved and then there's also what are called responsible fatherhood organizations and i'm not sure exactly what the difference is between those two tendencies but those are both like attempts to work with fathers on being better more caring more involved fathers that's good those are completely separate organizations from the father's rights genre yeah yeah very important distinction um next question so we have about five more minutes before we're going to take our break so we'll see how many questions we can get through here um so i've read about uh the deep techniques of don't engage explain personalize as being effective in co-parenting with a narcissist or abusive ex uh what are your thoughts about the actual effectiveness of this technique given how abusers act so first off are you familiar with that specific uh technique i i i am and the the it's my thoughts about it primarily are it's unlikely to make things worse so there's there's no reason not to to attempt those things and see how they go it's the the when people want to make these kind of all-encompassing philosophies it doesn't tend to work out that well because every circumstance is so different every abuser is so different and it also depends a lot on how the how the abuser perceives the court because if the abuser perceives that the court is not going to slow him down no matter what he does then it's not going to matter much what you do either but those things of like disengaging not responding to certain things sticking to you know the kinds of things that the that that acronym is addressing i think are really worth trying i just i don't want to promise anybody that that's going to make a difference that's where i get uncomfortable and people say well this is this is what works within our sister this is what works with an abuser it's like no this is stuff that will work some of the time with some and it's worth the try yeah no it's good to point out um next question is there's a little bit to it so uh sometimes i've i've heard survivors say that the pattern of course of control or just the abuse uh maybe physical abuse did not begin until after they got married moved in together or had children together uh well some of this may be a part of the survivor's denial maybe of early signs of control can these observe changes sometimes years into the relationship uh be attributed to the abusers deliberately uh deliberately responding to the changes and dynamics of power in the relationship and and the answer is yes that that you know i talked about the abuser's sense of his partner as something that belongs to him like an owned object and so the a key time when things are going to get worse is the is whatever the abuser defines as now you're mine so for example in teen dating relationships the first time the couple has sex is often defined as now your mind and so the the abuse the team dating abuser often that's when he suddenly gets a bunch worse is after the first time they have sex moving in together a lot of abuse begins upon moving in together we're living together now you're mine that i hear oh my god so many stories and they get me so upset that i've heard over all my years in the field about these horrific things happening on the wedding night or or or within a couple days later after that on the honeymoon but often on the wedding night itself it's like she's so happy everything's been great till now and that night it's a nightmare it's like dr jekyll and mr hyde it's like you're married to me i got you so yeah these are there can be it's not always true a lot of times it you know creeps up on you very step wise but there are many cases where the onset is really distinct and that's what it is it's it's them it's what it's what he defined what in his mind was the moment now you belong to me wow yeah that's really powerful because i too have heard many many of those stories of that being the moment so you say it's just it's this idea that he now has has control and will do nothing stop it nothing to to keep it right is that kind of the shift right and and and uh and by his values you now you now you now belong to him yeah yeah um let's squeeze one quick question in here um so what let's see what insights do you have specifically for prevention staff and programs um based on what we know about abusers i'm not sure i understand what the question was yeah it's a let's see maybe maybe just say it again so what uh so what insights do you have specifically for prevention staff and programs so maybe looking more so in the prevention side of things yeah i think that's that's that i missed that word so the we really want to get to teens you know the the this is where we really got to get above all because they have not both boys and the girls are still in the process of figuring out what their values are going to be and of course they're being heavily influenced by a bunch of different influences but but that's part of what it means to be a teenager is that your your values are still in flux and so it's a really crucial time to get conversations going and and i think it has been demonstrated that it's possible for example to to have quite an impact on the culture of a school and that's what i really encourage prevention staff to do is pick a school like pick a particular high school and try to work with that school on developing a wide range strategy to to to affect the culture of the whole school i saw this done by a project in cambridge massachusetts this was a long time ago that was multi-pronged like they went into every health ed class in the school for three sessions so every health ed class in school so every kid in the school in other words over time got this three session curriculum then they created a theater troupe an improvisational theater troupe in the high school they would meet once a week for 20 minutes roughly learn some curriculum piece about teen dating violence then they would make up skits about it and then at the end of the semester they would make those skits into a show that they performed at their school improvised and then took around performing to other high schools in the region kids who would never have been willing to attend a presentation on teen dating violence would go to see their school's improv troupe and they'd be re rooting for their friends i was i was at one of these i was at a couple of these performances and they'd be like go abby go you know henry whoever it is uh the boys would get really into it too the playing the abuser or whatever and then they would have a week that was dating violence related where they would ask people they would ask teachers to work stuff about dating violence into all different subjects so history in the history classes you're asked to talk something about the history of domestic violence and in a biology class you might talk something about the biology of injuries or the biology of reproductive choice or whatever would somehow relate to abuse and they had a they did surveys that showed that over time they had a it's really different from just popping in and making a presentation you can really take on the culture of the school and they showed they had surveys that showed that they had to have a they had a big impact on values there yeah that's fantastic some really unique and creative ideas i love that um well fantastic so let's go ahead and we'll take a break um and come back with the session two um so everyone take a moment to stretch use the restroom everything we'll come back here at 35 after the hour all right so we're back hope everyone had a chance to refresh and get ready to dive into the next session so um i'll go ahead and turn it back over to londy thank you and and uh look let's see how it goes in the second part but but i'm uh i'm happy to to try to aim towards having um you know answering more devoting more time for questions even though we did a fair amount but i'm happy to see if we can get devote more time for questions the second half including questions about either either part not it doesn't just have to be questions i want to just quickly show people the the um the uh the the cover of the new book just because i can't resist the the opportunity to to uh tell people about it here and it's um it's a novel about a a young woman who's a cus who's a journalist journalism intern who just stumbles into a really big story about a mom and a daughter who've disappeared and the the so the the mystery is about her trying to figure out what happened to this mother and this daughter and she's eventually starting to discover that that uh there may have been very good reasons why they may have needed to flee and the the one of the questions that arises about this book is you know is it a good book for you know people who are in current crisis to read and i would say not necessarily i mean it's the book is fun it's romantic it's kind of sexy at the beginning but then it gets and it's mysterious but then it gets it gets heavier towards the end and the you know abused women who are reading it are saying very positive things about it but it's not a book you'd want to read for example while you were currently in a custody battle yourself uh or you know still actively dealing with a really terrifying partner i think i think it could get disturbing and then i would say it's probably not appropriate for kids younger than about 12 years old just because for both of the reasons both because of the sexuality and the early part of the book and the more disturbing stuff in the later part of the book but i wrote it a lot as a hoping that it would be a way to to draw people in because it's like a mystery story and it's entertaining to draw people in to learn about what's going on in the custody courts whereas i felt like oh if i just write an expose about the custody courts no one's going to read it and i don't know whether that this strategy will work or not but that was my hope is that well maybe you can whatever that saying is about you can catch more flies on here where i was hoping that maybe we would ultimately be able to catch more people with a with a mystery story than with a like really completely serious expose kind of thing so i'm going to just take a quick second here to get my other uh to switch to my other slideshow so for some reason there we go sorry i was having a little trouble getting this thing to switch there we go so uh i've talked quite a bit about some of the various ways in which children get hurt by by having an abuser in the home and so i'm going to talk about some of the strategies that that we can try and some of the ways that we can help mom try to help the kids come back around the the research on children's exposure is it it's there's an interesting sort of mixed aspect to what the results are finding the on the one hand the the studies are finding that children who are living in a home where a man is abusing their mother are showing higher rates of essentially every measure of childhood distress whether it's depression whether it's self-harming whether it's runaway behavior and substance abusing behavior and reckless sexual behavior during their teen years problems with peers problems learning at school problems with behavior at school it's problems with their physical health it's just on and on but the interesting thing is or an interesting thing is that they're not being found to have way higher rates of all these measures than other children they're just being found to have somewhat higher rates of all these measures than other children and so i think what we have to conclude from that is that actually children are reacting in a tremendous range of ways to the experience of having to live around a man who's abusing their mother and so it's we we shouldn't assume that they're damaged for life they're they i think they have considerable capacity to heal if the right things are in place and i would say the research encourages that notion and that if the kids have resources they have some ability to keep themselves from from even getting as badly hurt in the first place in an emotional from an emotional standpoint so the message is yes it's very serious but the message is also there's things we can do that that can matter and there's things that mom can do that can matter if we can really be there for her she we can't expect her to be a hero but if we can be there for her then there are things that she can do and the the the research is unanimous or nearly unanimous in finding that how well how close kids are to mom is going to be the number one factor in how well they're going to do given what the abuser is bringing to their lives and the what what moted me what motivated me to write my first book which was the batterer's parent the batter's parent actually came before why does he do that was my growing awareness of how much harm abusers were doing to mother child relationships and what the research has now convinced me since you know what more recent research has convinced me is that that that's actually probably the way that abusers are doing the greatest harm to children is through the ways they're damaging kids relationship with their mothers uh they're also doing tremendous harm to kids through how terrifying the actual assaults are and in a number of other ways which i've already talked about but this appears to be if not number one it's a little hard to tell from the research but if it's not number one it's right up close to what's harming them the most so that means that we want to figure out how to be the counter to that we want to figure out how do we help strengthen mother child relationships how do we help heal divisions that have happened between moms and kids kids do actually let me i'll say something right here this because so that i don't you could come later but i'm afraid i'll forget to say it later very interesting research findings about the how abused mothers domestic violence victims how abused mothers talk about their kids and first of all finds that on average they talk more negatively about their kids than other mothers do in other words the experience of being abused yourself affects how you perceive your kids and some of it of course is because those kids are literally on average more difficult but it isn't just that because the a study looked specifically at how abused mothers who are pregnant describe the baby that's growing inside them and found that they on average described the unborn baby in more negative terms than other pregnant women did so it isn't just that the children are literally more difficult it's also that the abuser is managing to shape her view of her own child so the it means that it's a high priority for us to work with abused moms on their view of their kids and help them think about help help them develop more positive mental images during pregnancy to help them develop more favorable ways to understand what their kids are going through after you know after they're born to give them information about child development and childhood trauma so they understand that actually what their kids are exhibiting is largely predictable effects of what they're going through and i'll point you to a book uh sandra graham berman and alicia lewandowski where they looked at a number of different programs to help specifically domestic violence programs to help abuse moms and kids and they found that that was one of the elements that was the most helpful is any kind of information about the kids experience that helps her have a more favorable view of the kids the abuser tends to talk so negatively about the kids but then simultaneously is blaming her for the kids difficulties and the literature i don't think looks enough at sibling relationships i wish it would look much more at civilian relationships but i i just observe all the time in cases how much kids get all turned against each other and when that when you've got an abuser in the home and like which who's who's siding with him versus who's siding with mom and uh jockeying for for what the safe position is to stand and so forth so again anything we can do to work with with sibling groups to help kids work out their differences and their resentments towards their siblings i think it's really important to catch this stuff as early as we can because i deal with cases a fair bit where kids are either well into their teen years or already young adults and the alienation between siblings is so bad by this time that it looks almost impossible to fix or like it may take a mighty long time to do so and by that time you often have a kid or two kids who are completely aligned with the abuser and are just behaving in many ways the way he behaves the snarly looks the gross comments the calling mom the c word i mean the whole bit so we really want to get in there earlier if we can help siblings stay closer to each other if we can help kids and moms stay closer to each other it's going to make it much harder for the abuser to do the kind of damage that he otherwise will do and i do see examples of families who stay tightly together and i've also seen some of that from the abuser perspective because i've had clients in the abuser group saying and the whole family ganged up against me and i like it when i hear that because what that tells me is he didn't succeed in dividing them against each other and he's furious that he didn't and he's furious that kids stayed behind mom and stayed behind each other and so it can happen like that that kind of solidarity we have each other's back you know we have mom's back that that can happen actually i had i had a wonderful experience this was a while ago now this is probably four years ago now at a speaking engagement these people came up to talk to me afterwards at the end of the day it was an all-day thing like one of those six-hour ceu kind of things and these people came up to talk to me at the end of the day who were four kids four siblings all in their 40s who had all come to this program men and women and had come with their mother so there were five of the five of them were there their mother who was in her mid to late 60s was there with them and she had just within the last year or maybe two years at the most left their father which they had always wished she would do and this was just so inspiring to have these four siblings in their 40s and mom in her 60s like stand by each other still be in each other's lives they're all attending this program on domestic violence together it's it can happen it can happen people can stay by each other people can fight the divisive tendencies people can not give up on each other and and we can and we can contribute to that it helps when you have other healthy relatives involved not you know non-abusive relatives particularly it helps if some of them are male because that sends a really good message like to kids of like no that's not he's not the definition of manhood that's not what it means to be a man that how much to involve the abusers parents is i think a question that people need to go into with their eyes open because people think oh it's so great to have the grandparents involved not if they're in denial about the abuse if his parents get it that he was abusive then it's great to have them very involved with the kids and i have had cases like that but where he is denied where the parents are actively denying them the abuse and are blaming the mother for everything or blaming the mother for saying that there's been abuse that's not a great thing for the kids to be around because that's going to further tend to you know he's trying to poison their relationship with their mother and then his parents are going to further try to poison the kids relationship with their mother and that's not a good thing and now in our times we have this thing where grandparents have legal standing to go for visitation which i actually think is really messed up i actually don't think that should be allowed if unless the parent has lost their parental rights like where the parent is incompetent then yes grandparents should have some rights to visitation but now you can have a competent involved parent and grant i mean there are there i've i've worked now with abused moms who not only had to present kids to the abuser's visitation with the abuser then they had additional visits that they had to put their kids to with his parents really really bad policy not a good idea but you know where the relatives are well people sure let's let's look at how to bring them if anything more into the children's lives it's really helpful and then another thing that the research and and quite a bit of the writing is not looking at adequately is the importance of kids relationships with peers it's so clear even though the studies have not taken this question on the kids who have close friendships are doing so much better it's so noticeable in my cases i bet it's noticeable in your cases compared to kids who are isolated or kids who are very aggressive and are destroying their own friendships the kids who have close friends are much less prone to depression they're much less prone to to drug and alcohol it's just all the stuff that goes on they manage things a lot better but the thing is that they're often these kids are often carrying symptoms traumatic symptoms that make having successful peer relationships difficult they're often are kind of aggressive or very blaming of their friends or very easily hurt so the slightest the front is like forget it i never want to talk to you again so we want to make it part of our work to explore with kids what's going on with their friendships and to see how we can help them have more successful friendships one insight that i think that's really valuable that i that i like to s that i like to try to spread around it's not my insight but it's an insight that's come out of the trauma field over the last i don't know i've heard more and more about it probably over the last 10 years is when we're thinking about trauma in children to to to try to be aware that the trauma the traumatic effects that we're seeing are not just about what did happen but they're also about what didn't happen and what they what what the trauma people mean by this is we've got the direct direct effects of trauma on the child but then we've got a bunch of developmental steps that the child didn't manage to take because of how traumatized the child was so i'll give you like a a metaphor like an example for this say a child was four years old when her uncle got divorced and the and he came to live with her family and come to find out years later that from the time that she was four until she was seven until her uncle finally got his own place and moved out he was molesting her so she's carrying all the traumatic effects of these violations but she's also carrying a lot of lost development in other words in a lot of ways emotionally and developmentally she's still four years old when she's seven years old because the trauma was keeping her from being able to do just her normal four to seven year old stuff of just growing and learning and having challenges and facing challenges and having losses and facing losses and so forth so that when we're thinking about how we're going to help the seven-year-old heal we have to think of it not just as a kind of therapeutic project to try to help her process the horror of these violations but we also have to think of it as partly almost like a skill training project as a second you know that it includes along with the therapeutic work the skill training work that she needs because she needs help learning all the stuff that she didn't get to learn between age four and age seven when this concept was introduced to me i found this so clarifying and so helpful about things that i was observing happen and so the example when i'm talking about about about children of better women in with respect to their peer relationships is that in addition to this trauma they're carrying they've also got all this terrible role modeling from the abuser about how to you know how to intimidate other people how to say that anyone who disagrees with you is bad for disagreeing with you i mean think of all these terrible behaviors and attitudes that he's modeling you know to hate people who have different opinions than you do and look down upon them these are setting kids up to not have successful peer relationships so at the same time as we want to do emotional processing with these kids we also in a sense want to do skill training with them almost almost create like a little dialectical behavior therapy program for kids because that's part of what how dbt works is that it's a mixture of therapeutic work and skill training work uh the and by the way dbt is increasingly being used not just for personality disorder but also for post trauma because it's being it's being discovered that it can work quite well for people whose issue is not personality disorder it's the ptsd so so you know so how are we going to help kids learn skills and this is not always an easy question to answer but it's a question i'm eager to have agencies domestic violence agencies child welfare agencies all kinds of of agencies institutions in a in a town or a city start thinking like how are we going to do skill based work with traumatized kids in this area it's things like how are we going to teach kids how you do conflict resolution with peers how do you have a successful friendship how do you make a friend feel cared about what do you do when you don't like what a friend is doing do you just erase them because that's what the abuser's mentality is it's like oh i don't like what that friend did so they're not my friend anymore or do you do the opposite and stay friends with them no matter how they treat you that's not that's that's not a good approach either but that's another approach you learn from the abuser is that it's hopeless so you got to just live with it you learn that not because the abuser says it but because that's your life and your relationship with the abuser it's your dad or your stepdad or whatever and you have to deal with it so you learn not just just to put up with it you don't have any choice so we don't want to have them not follow you know either bad thing that he's learning them from them oh you know what there's something here i really have to say that probably belongs in the first half but i i think it's another really useful concept that's related to what we're talking about right now one of the things that i often hear people get wrong is they'll say uh boys learn abusiveness from the abuser and girls learn to sort of accommodate to abuse just put up with abuse and live with it from their mother from the abused woman that's false boys learn to be abusive from the abuser and girls learn to accommodate to abuse to to live with it to get along with it from the abuser not from mom mom does not accommodate it i mean she made years down the line but she she even years down the line she still periodically fights back every abused woman periodic almost every fused woman periodically fights back tries to stand up for herself tries to get her rights back the kids aren't seeing a model of someone who's always going along with it they're seeing a model of someone who periodically tries to stand up to it and really pays for it when she does and the reason her girls and in particular become hyper-compliant isn't because she's hyper-compliant they become hyper compliant because they're seeing mom gets creamed when she stands up for herself in other words they're learning hyper compliance not from her they're learning it from him the abuser is a crucial male role model for his daughters not just for his sons so but my you know my underlying point here is so we have to see how this is a setup for them to not have very successful peer relationships and we have to help them learn we have to do skill training work to help them learn how to have successful peer relationships because it's so clear from my case experience this is such that this is one of the central factors in how well they're going to do emotionally through their school years is how well they do it having friends researchers haven't looked at it but i'm confident that if they did look at it they would find exactly that that's really crucial next think about ways to to advocate for kids with school systems because these kids have needs they're often having tremendous trouble paying attention in school because they're so worried about what's going on at home or they're just all shaken up by what happened the night before and it's not just violence it's threats or it's just watching mom be verbally torn to bits is going to leave a kid so shaken up even if it didn't have any element of physical violence to it it's just imagine just watching your mother be treated that way by somebody she would they wouldn't have to it wouldn't have any violent element at all to shake you up for a long time afterwards you know i didn't grow up around that but i just try to imagine like what it would have been like for me to watch somebody just like ripping into my mother and telling her it would have felt so terrible telling her that she was a worthless piece of crap and she was a [ __ ] and she was this and she was she didn't know how to raise oh my god it would have been awful related to my point about how yes the violence is very serious but people are also underestimating how serious so many other things are for the kids so okay so they're having trouble paying attention at school they're often having trouble with their peer relationships at school and then they're often having behavioral problems in school they're being mouthy with teachers they're being defiant with teachers they're they're difficult and they're fairly commonly getting labeled bad kids and there was an interesting study years ago i hope this has improved in more recent years this is the studies a little bit on the old side but it found that when children were being exposed to a bad or at home when they were being exposed to domestic violence that that was rarely being identified by systems they usually was being completely missed like the juvenile court was prosecuting kids for juvenile offenses usually it never even realized or thought to ask whether they were witnessing domestic violence at home that child protection was missing at least two cases of domestic violence out of every three that it should have identified and so the so the school is quite likely unaware that these kids are being traumatized at home by what dad or stepdad is doing to their mom so if we explain these kinds of things to teachers we increase the chance that kids will get a supportive un patient more patient response from teachers which will really help how things go for kids but they may have other needs too they may have needs for special evaluations or special accommodations during exams and all kinds of things because their attention is so messed with and so if we can go to bat for them a little bit at school that might make quite a difference we want them involved in things as much as possible partly because it gets them not home so they're around him less but also just because it helps them develop their confidence it helps them develop their self-esteem it helps them develop a sense of power one of my beliefs is that everybody wants to feel powerful in the world i don't mean in a sick sense i don't mean like power to control or dominate other people like i'm not talking about being a power monger on a power trip but we want to feel powerful like we want to feel like we have an impact on things we want to feel like we can make things happen we want to feel like we make a difference if there's something not right around us we want to feel like we can set it right that's just a natural human desire and so if kids grow up and their their image of power is what the abuser is modeling for them then they're going to be very attracted to that but if we can give them experience much more positive experiences of power then they're going to become attracted to those rather than being attracted to his twisted oppressive way of thinking about what it means to be powerful kids would rather go in a healthy direction if they're offered one early enough in life so sports music theater you know different kinds of you know craft clubs or farm clubs or whatever it is it's really helpful for them to be just be out there be involved in stuff forming relationships i think the expressive arts are particularly helpful you know the dance and theater and all that kind of stuff theater's actually being played with more and more now as a therapeutic modality along with you know dance therapy and art therapy and play therapy um the bessel vander kolk who some of you may have been from be familiar with probably the biggest known voice in the us on trauma and he wrote a book called the body keeps the score and he writes quite a bit and the body keeps the score about meeting about all these different kinds of expressive therapies and how how well they're working he talks even about the therapeutic uses of music so these activities cost money so we want to talk with our agencies and with our towns about how are we going to fund children whose moms are being abused to be able to have more access to these kinds of activities that they really need to be in so next one is again from me not from the research but i bet it's similar in your experience that i'm noticing that by and large kids do better who are the kind who just it's sort of they just sort of show what's going on with them versus the kind of stuff it all in and just manage it and i'm a you know i'm fine sort of style of kid so we want to look for ways to help kids have outlets for it both athletic outlets and creative outlets and and you know emotional outlets to be able to just write stories and poems and be able to tell what's you know what things are like for them and what's what's going on for them they need safety so after school you know boys and girls clubs and those kinds of things are great if they have if they're welcome over houses of their friends that's often really wonderful to just have another nice home to go to but if you're working with kids directly also find out what else they do to comfort themselves the some kids just have like an outdoor place that they go and sit or a place they like to go for a walk nature is often really soothing to kids if they have pets or if they live near farm animals or just have other access to animals that's really soothing to kids and they love to have that and find out yeah find out where they go basically to feel okay what kind of safe feeling places they have found and and see if you can help them think about other places they might spend some of their time when when they need to feel safe and and need to be soothed okay the next one we'll talk about some depth and then we'll see if we'll see if there's uh we'll see if i take another round of questions but when i'm working with audiences in person so it's it's different doing an online training but when i'm [Music] working with audiences in person i always do an org an exercise with the audience where i talk about so what you what should you say to a kid who discloses that mom is being abused by a dad or stepdad or you know whoever the male is in the home and i'm actually in a few minutes we're gonna we're gonna come back and talk about that subject specifically but when i do that exercise every time and i've done that on exercises probably 150 audiences every time someone in the audience says you should tell the kids that it's not their fault excellent i totally agree 150 audiences have gotten that one right out of my 150 audiences zero no one has ever said you should tell the kid that it's not mom's fault and i find that striking and because you're an online audience you didn't get a chance so maybe you would have been the audience where somebody finally would have said that but but in my 20 years on the road i never had an audience member say you should tell a kid that it's not their mom's fault now that's quite striking to me and uh kids are quite concerned with the feeling that the that dad's or the abuser's violence is their fault but they are just as preoccupied with the feeling that it is mom's fault or the feeling that it is their siblings fault and those beliefs are just as destructive to them i'm going to say more about that in just a couple minutes what is it that blocks us from telling kids it's not your mom's fault well i think there's a few things that are in the way one is that i think as people in the helping professions we get a very strong message you should never take a side between parents with kids and i would agree with that but i would agree that this is not taking sides between parents because you're just telling kids that mom isn't responsible for what dad does you're not saying that mom's not responsible for what she does you're saying she's not responsible for what he does that's not taking sides between the parents that's simply telling them an ethical moral fact about adult life which is that adults are responsible for their own actions and it's so central to how the abuser causes harm in the home that he convinces his mom that it's her fault he convinces the kids that it's mom's fault and he convinces the kids that it's their own fault i believe that the long-term risks to kids of believing that the abuser's behavior is mom's fault is just as seriously risky to them as it is to believe that his behavior is their own fault now you may find that a stretch but i actually i actually believe as you reflect on it you'll become persuaded that i'm right so i'm going to restate this for them to believe that his behavior is mom's fault is just as serious a risk to them as it is for them to believe that his behavior is their own fault that the implications to their long-term mental health are just as serious like we're so worried about what's it going to do to kids if they feel to blame we should be worried about that they're going to have just as many mental health problems in the long term if they believe it's mom's fault the long-term risks to their behavioral health are just as great the long-term risk to their relationship health is just as great if they believe that it is mom's fault one of the things that they're learning from that is that when someone is being cruel to somebody else that can be caused by the person to whom it is being done not by the person who is doing it imagine going into the world having learned that because hey if it's mom's fault when dad or stepdad did it to her then when that bully at school does it to me that's my fault or the other way around when i'm bullying kids at school it's their fault it's that kid's stupidity that's making me abuse them because it's mom's stupidity that's making dad abuse her formulation that the abusers are quite fond of and that children absorb so we're setting kids up to be both aggressor and victim as they move through the world and what does the research tell us the research tells us that the sons and stepsons of batters boys who grew up with an abuser in the home are twice as likely and perhaps more than twice as likely but at least solidly according to the research twice as likely as other boys to become abusers themselves that's a huge jump doubles their risk that they will become abusers of women themselves and furthermore what that research shows jay silverman's research and two other studies not related to jay silverman's study found the same thing that it's the boys who think that their father was justified who grow up to become the abusers themselves silverman's study was particularly interesting because in his study he looked at boys who were more traumatized by the vials they had witnessed and compared them to boys that were less traumatized somewhat less traumatized by the violence they had witnessed and found no difference between those two groups in their rate of adult defending against females you would think that the boys who'd been more traumatized by the violence that they had witnessed as kids were more likely to become abusers of women themselves when they reached adulthood and silverman found that was not true that those two groups the more traumatizing less traumatized group had the same effectively the same rate of abusing females when they reached adulthood and then he broke he broke them up into a number of different divisions but the division that really proved to show the big difference in the rate of adult offending was the boys who had bought into the idea that the abuser's behavior was justified and the boys who had not the boys would not bought into the idea that the the abuser's behavior was justified didn't show any increased risk of becoming an abuser despite having grown up in a home of an abuser that's a striking finding no increased likelihood of becoming an abuser even though they grew up there if they didn't buy into the idea that what he did was justified and then these other studies found really two other studies found came to really similar conclusions that if they didn't take on the abuser's attitude attitudes they did not show strong signs of likely to become abusers themselves [Music] so it's hugely important for us with boys in particular to make sure they understand that it's not mom's fault because their belief about that is the key determinant of whether they're going to grow up to become abusers of women themselves now the impact on girls is less clear in the research the the with respect to know their likelihood to then become uh targets of abuse to become victims of abuse the the link with boys to increase risk of abusing of being perpetrators is very strong the risk to the the rest of girls less distinct in the in the in the research some studies find it some studies don't show it but what does turn up pretty clearly in the research is that if if a girl who grew up witnessing a man abusing her mother is abuse is is then abused as an adult herself she will on average take longer like we'll be there for a longer period of years on average it will take her longer to extricate herself from that situation on average than a girl who grew up in in a in a not a home where there was not domestic violence towards a month so what the research suggests is that not that a girl who grew up under those conditions is most like more likely to choose an abuser nobody really almost nobody chooses an abuser you can't even tell that easily who they are but not that she's more likely to choose an abuser but if she's one of the ones that has the bad luck to end up with one she's going to be more thoroughly stuck and again it makes total sense to me if you grew up believing it was mom's fault now it's happening to you well then must be your fault plus that's what the abuser's telling you because that's what the abuser always does so uh so we need to get unstuck from this exaggerated notion of neutrality between the parents and we need to start getting clear with kids that the the actor is the one who's completely responsible for the act not the person to whom it is done and we don't need to say bad things about dad in fact it won't help them if we say bad things about dad don't say oh he's an abuser or he's selfish or he's a jerk or whatever that that won't help them but it does help kids to hear what he did was not okay that's not acceptable and that's his problem he doesn't get to say that it's your fault you didn't make him do it mom didn't make it do it make him do it your siblings didn't make him do it adults are responsible for their own actions he needs to get help now we happen to know that what he probably needs more than help is jail but kids don't want to hear about dad going to jail so it's much for for a kid's world they would much rather here in terms of help or assistance so given that say you know he he needs to get help and it's his responsibility to get the help that he needs so let's let's uh i think this is a good place to pause again for a minute and see if see if we have uh see if we have questions great thank you so much um one of the first things that came up a lot is just requests for specific citations of studies that you've mentioned is there a good place on maybe on your website or other places that you would suggest people check out so they're the my book the batter is parent is the one is the only cited book of mine it's like it's a text or a professional book uh unfortunately it's crazy expensive it's i just saw that it's 90 now in soft cover i mean textbooks are insane but what i like what i encourage people to to be aware of is that the modern public library is just become an amazing institution and they will essentially get you any book in print usually within a week and including books from academic libraries they'll just order them from academic library they'll just order it you know on loan from academic libraries so you don't have to buy the banner as parent so that's the place that i most encourage people to go find citations i haven't made lists of these studies separately from the batter as parent the and and uh the i uh actually while we sit here i can probably look up the title of a book which is full of further citations of these studies actually maybe that might even make more sense to push you to to point you towards well either of those but but towards alicia lewandowski and sandra graham berman's book which i think is called the effects on children of exposure to domestic violence it's an unfortunate title because the book is to a huge extent about intervening it's a really really good book and you see a book that's called the effects on children of exposure domestic violence you're gonna think oh well this is just a list of how they get wounded and it's not what the book is it's it's it's full of terrific case examples in detail of how they worked with kids of all different ages on their on their healing and recovery so i'll see i'll see if i can come up with that with that title if not i could actually leave the room for a minute and grab that book because it's in a different room so or i can just send it to you afterwards and you can send it to everybody yeah i saw hannah jotted down the title that you just mentioned so we're gonna do our research and what we do in in the shared resources folders we have a document just called links and resources and so everything i'll make a note to follow up and make sure we get that information and let's make sure i'm getting the title right because that book has got tons of studies in it and and it's more up to date actually i think even than the batter's panel i guess they came out around the sink that came out around the same same time as the second edition of the batteries banner but they cite more studies than i did and and and more recovery oriented stuff specifically is in their book awesome okay fantastic that'll be better than kind of a lot of people's questions of different resources to look at um so let's move on here um what type of therapeutic approach is right for kids and teens who have aligned with the abuser so assuming that we're probably speaking more to you know male uh male children so uh we we we don't really know and by and it is more common with boys but actually there are a surprising number of girls who align with the abuser it's not it's not it would be hard enough if it was just boys but unfortunately the the there's a i think there's a real temptation maybe i'm over analyzing this but to to from my point of view there's this real temptation of girls to to feel like the way to not have happened to me what happened to mom is to blame it on mom and reject her and work very hard to be nothing like her and then that won't happen to me and i'm not saying they're consciously thinking those thoughts but but uh so the because the the the intervention of choice for kids is actually group work that's specifically for kids who've been exposed to domestic violence group that group work that's specifically for children of bad or women but you can't really have kids in those groups who are aligned with the abuser that doesn't really work it's not well first of all the abuser won't tolerate it because if they're aligned with him they're going to tell him they're not going to keep it a secret from him if they're aligned with him and as soon as he finds out he's going to demand that they not be in the group and in our times the abuser tends to run down actually to the family court to the custody court and demand that the court bar his kids from being in that group he'll say those groups are you know there's there was no domestic violence mom is lying about that it's a total invention and this group is going to indoctrinate these kids to believe that i'm a batterer and the court unfortunately will very commonly grant him his wish that she not be permitted to take her kids to that group so kids often need to go secretly and kids who are aligned with him are not going to go secretly to to a group like this and so it's worth trying to just send them to some other therapist who knows the terrain there aren't a ton of therapists who are are skilled and good with kids and teenagers even a harder group in some ways to work with and then on top of that we have to find ones who've taken it upon themselves to educate themselves about children's exposure to domestic violence because that's not part of any kind of school program to be a psychologist or a clinical social worker and so it's it's up to the therapist to take this on and attend a program like today's or read some of the key books in the field but there are therapists out there who are interested in that and are willing to do that and you may know therapists in your life who you like and you can approach them and say you know if you're willing to get a little training in this area we can guarantee you that we'll have clients for you and and uh because we don't have anything else that's specifically for them that's that's going to guide them to see through how this is really tricky we're essentially trying to get kids to see through how they've been indoctrinated and that's not easy to do particularly when they were traumatized simultaneously in general it's harder to get people to see through any form of indoctrination they've had if they were simultaneously being traumatized this is true of people who are out of like prisoner of war camps or into you know interrogation circumstances or all kinds of other you know you know boarding schools for native kids you know all this kind of traumatizing experiences people have where indoctrination and trauma if they come in at the same time get wound very very tightly together and so then it makes the it makes the indoctrination even harder to undo because it's interwoven with the child's emotional injuries and so i wish i i wish i had more to offer about that but a skilled therapist can sometimes do something because if kids start to open up about what they've been through and just what they remember about things and can even vent about some of their resentments towards mom and the therapist needs to support those to to an extent but not overjoined with those the kids sometimes then will from actually just having the experience of a safe place to talk start to notice certain other things that they're feeling as well or sometimes they're they just haven't wanted anybody to see the fact that their feelings are actually kind of mixed and then sometimes they start to be willing to let the therapist see well actually i do kind of miss mom some days or yeah so it's that's that's the best we've got for now i think it's a really interesting question and it's an important one because because we do need some place where those kids could get help to unravel that and it doesn't no clear avenue for that exists at the moment yeah all right good to know um so the next question is we kind of talked about this idea of you know the need for tools of some kind but maybe just talk about it in a broader sense but this idea of are there domestic violence screening screening tools that schools can use for children having behavioral problems at the elementary level not that i've heard of but again it's it's like the in order to get useful information for a tool you would have to interview mom and if you have access to interview mom you don't need a tool and again i'm not opposed to using tools but i'm just saying it's not it's not going to be a breakthrough kind of thing the uh schools have to be careful about what they ask kids the even you know teachers have to be careful some kids will just spill it to their teacher and in fact what i hear is that that's where they're most likely to spill it actually mom's parents they'll tell mom's parents sometimes like their maternal grandparents they'll tell and they tell peers that's different they'll tell peers quite a bit according to carol mcgee's research but if they tell an adult other than mom school teachers appears to be the next most likely person that they'll tell and because because kids develop i mean i can remember this from my own experience particularly in elementary school where your teacher is almost like another parent you know if she's a woman she's almost like another mom to you and uh and that's and that's and that's great and i'll talk a little bit today about some specifically of how a teacher or any other adult can respond who kids choose to who kids do choose to to disclose to but you know i think i think the basic questions that we need to ask are the the uh a tool isn't going to give us huge insight into because we need to ask do you are you ever scared at home does anybody at home ever hurt anybody else at home i mean the the does anybody ever hurt you are there things that you're worried do you worry for anybody in your home about whether they're okay that's about as far as the questions can go unless the child starts to give us some yes answers if the child starts to give us some yes answers then then there's all kinds of things we can ask yeah okay well let's wrap up questions for now i'll turn things back over to you and then we'll come back with some questions okay yeah i'm also as i say i'm happy to spend quite a bit of time on questions i do love covering more material but but i i know it's people also love leaving the day feeling like like they got a chance to to get to have their questions answered so okay so i've already talked about looking at ways to to to be healing connections between moms and kids and between siblings the we can't make kids be safe while an abuser's in the home so but we can do some things to increase their safety we can make sure that they understand how to call police if something scary is happening at home and we can actually involve them in safety planning i don't generally recommend trying to do safety planning with kids unless mom has already worked with an advocate on safety planning so the first thing we always want to do is see if mom's open to to doing safety planning for you folks who are in the domestic violence programs that's always i know one of the first places you want to go but i'm thinking partly through the perspective of say a school teacher who might want to try to work with a kid someone on safety planning well you'd want to see first if mom had gotten that kind of help and then we don't want to involve kids in safety planning unless they want to do it we wouldn't want to say okay well this is what we're doing today there's a strong ethic in the field that children should be entirely voluntarily participating in safety planning or not at all and then you can my website which again is just lundy bancroft.com has a guide to it on how to do safety planning with children of better women so i'm not going to go into the nuts and bolts of that today but just know that it's there in the articles section i i worked with uh a a piece from way back when that that barbara hart wrote some of you will know who she was the on how to do safety planning specifically for children going on visits with their with their abusive dads but i i modified it into a piece that's just about safety planning for living at home assuming that he's still in home with them and and then we want to try to find adults who will be more involved with these kids in these kids lives i know that that's not something that a therapist or an advocate can easily do but it's the kind of thing that we can help mom think about and we can ask kids who are the important adults in their lives and then that may allow us to ask mom how could we is there some way we could get these folks more involved and you know i've known him a couple times not not a huge number of times but i can you know i've known of a couple of examples for example where mom went to her brother who was a good guy and said you know how would you feel about like once a month you like take the kids out for their you know special time with uncle tim and he was like oh that would be cool i would be honored to do that i would love that and that's so helpful for kids and as i say in some ways even more helpful if it's a male because they get to have this special male time and but it's it's it's hugely significant if it's a woman too the kids do really crave for whatever reason i don't know if it's inherent or societal but they do really crave that that mail attention and they'll keep trying to get it from dad and they'll keep trying to get it and they'll keep trying to get it and he will be very inconsistent and unpredictable or he may only give them good attention when they're being inappropriate with mom so it's almost like a reward for siding with him which stack of course is then going to create all kinds of other unhealthy dynamics and a lot of kids would be tempting tempted to just give up if they had access to other positive male attention but one of the things i've observed happened in observing many of my cases is that mom gets in a relationship with a new guy who is not abusive the kid you know after her relationship with the abuser splits up kids rapidly develop an attachment to him and then they don't want to see dad anymore because it's like hey if we don't have to put up with that crap in order to get male attention why would we do it okay so i promised that we would that we would talk about the the what do kids need to hear when they disclose uh whether to anybody the and and the if it's within the context of a domestic violence program they're not going to be telling you anything you don't know usually occasionally they may but usually you don't already know what they're telling you but it's still a big step that they're going to start trying to talk about but these principles also apply when they disclose to a school teacher or friend's parents that's another place where sometimes it comes out as they tell the parents of friends of theirs who people that they trust so kid needs to hear i'm glad you told me they don't necessarily look at that way at it that way the child often feels that they are doing something wrong by telling you they've often been told in fact you better never tell anybody and unfortunately not just by the abuser they sometimes have been told also by mom you better never tell anybody and so they feel like oh i'm being such a bad kid they're ashamed of the fact that they're telling you this so it's very important if you say i'm really glad you told me you that that was the right thing to do they need validation for their emotions like wow that must get really scary wow that must that must hurt you in your heart must be so hard to see somebody being so mean to mom find out what their worries are every kid will have different worries i'm afraid that mom's going to end up in the hospital i'm afraid he's going to kill her uh i'm afraid that i've heard that if somebody reports it that the the child welfare people will come and take us away to live in a foster home so i'm afraid we're going to get taken away from mom my younger sister has kidney problems and she has to go like all the time to get dialysis and i'm really afraid of what's going to happen to her like i'm afraid of what dad or stepdad is going to do to her like any any sibling they perceive as particularly vulnerable i don't know how many of you have heard the famous lisa so-called lisa 911 tape where the girl is just terrified when she realizes that her stepfather has gotten hold of the baby her her young infant sibling and she was already scared on the 911 call but she was terrified when she realizes he that he's gotten hold of the baby terrified what he's going to kill the baby or somehow do terrible harm to the baby so it's it's it's un it's unburdening to them to just get to tell you what they worry about but it's also important information for you because then you know okay these are some worries we have to try to find ways to address we got to talk mom about it we have to find ways to reassure the child about it but also find ways to see if these dangers actually can be uh can be made less so and then kids obviously need space to process and everybody thinks oh well let's get them to a therapist and that's great but as i said there are not a lot of therapists who are really skilled with kids and there are even fewer therapists who have any training on domestic violence not a criticism of therapists it's just the way the therapeutic world works if you have access to someone who's good by all means use them but the the practical reality is that in in more cases than not mom is really the one who's gonna end up playing the role of therapist and the advocate the domestic violence advocate is going to be playing the role of therapist and close family friends and relatives are going to be playing the role of therapist so we wanted i think it's really good to give people written information give mom written information that she in turn can share with other people about how kids process emotions about why they may cry a lot and why that's actually a positive thing not a negative thing encourage her to stop trying to make them stop crying i encourage her to let them cry and in fact actually hold them while they cry and let them cry it out even if they cry for half an hour like that's actually what's going to be best is to just hold them and let them cry don't make them be alone hold them but if they want to be held but um the i encourage people to to photocopy freely even though it says you're not supposed to from my book when dad hurts mom copy all you want don't tell my publisher i'm telling you this but copy all you want from when dad hurts mom because there's so many things from that that you can then hand to mom and mothers tend to be particularly distressed when they're talking to me about how much their kids are crying and about how much their kids are having tantrums and these are normal responses to trauma and in fact they are healthy responses to trauma believe it or not even the tantrum is a healthy response to trauma the tantrum may include aspects that are not healthy right breaking stuff is not healthy hurting people is not healthy if the kid is starting to hit you or hit other people hurting oneself is not healthy but so the trauma may contain some things that are problem that the tantrum they can contain some things that are problematic but the tantrum is not in itself problematic that the the waving the arms around and the kicking the feet and the furious screaming and the bright red face and that's actually that's actually discharging distress the same way crying does and and laughter will also very effectively discharge a lot of distress that kids are carrying these these are healing releases that are inherent in the human being what happens is to a great extent is this cycle where mom feels that it's her job to stop the kid from crying and this isn't just domestic violence cases this is a problem widespread in parenting in general that the parent feels like i'm being a bad parent if i can't stop my kid from crying and that if i stop them from crying then i will know i have made them feel better well stopping crying is not doesn't tend to be a great path to feeling better in fact going ahead and crying hard and crying it all out tends to be a much better path to feeling better mom may also worry that if she lets her kids cry that then they're going to get weak just reassure her crying doesn't make kids weak it's not bad for boys it won't make boys wimpy or whatever she's afraid is going to happen to boys if they cry a bunch you can reassure her nope boys will be just as strong boys and girls will be just as strong probably stronger if they have more chances to cry part of what happens is that mom's stress about the child crying is just getting the child more upset and so if when we can tell mom it's not your job to stop the kid from crying your job is your only job is to make your child not feel alone she finds that such a relief it's actually probably the single point from when dad hurts mom that book that i've gotten the most comments on from abused women is how relieved she was when she discovered that she did not need to stop her kid from crying and that she did not need to stop her kids tantrums because she was just going so much of her energy was going into like what am i going to do about these tantrums it's not her fault it's not her fault this is a societal problem what am i going to do about these tantrums right so you don't have to do anything about those tantrums just accompany the kid don't let him or her hurt anyone or break anything expensive that's all you got to do the tantrums will stop of their own accord when the kid works out what they need to work out emotionally and the and the crying will stop when the child has cried out the grief that they need to cry out this child's got a lot to be sad about and then that in turn becomes such a relief to the child because then the child while they're having a tantrum isn't dealing with a parent who's flipping out about the fact that they're having a tantrum that you know the more the parent gets tense about the tantrum the more that actually will make the child feel more need for a tantrum it's not going to make the child feel less named and so the relief to both mom and child from from having mom be relieved of responsibility to make the crying or the tantrum stop really really good effects and just help moms understand like the crying in the tantrums is just the way the trauma is getting out and they'll do much better from getting it out i just read a wonderful book called uh goodnight mr tom i really recommend it if you can find it good night mr tom and it's about a it's a book that's not for young kids it's maybe for you know what you would call young readers or whatever like kids in the 10 to 15 range but i found it very enjoyable to read as an adult it's it's about a kid who is got a horribly abusive mother and he ends up uh i think she ends up dying or something i forget but anyway he ends up essentially in a foster home but he happens to stumble into living with somebody who's very loving to him and for some reason this guy understands that the boy is going to be crying a lot and and like holds him when he cries and just says like you know you just need to cry this stuff out and the boy starts to have terrible nightmares and this foster he's not formally a foster dad but he's an effective foster dad this just starts to say to him well you know you're going to have these nightmares until this stuff gets out of you just you know the screaming yelling that he does when he's waking up from his nightmares it's i've never really seen another book that where it where it was just understood like a traumatized person has the stuff has to be processed it has to get out so goodnight mr tom i recognize that i recommend that book really really highly uh you would enjoy it but it's also just a great book for moms and a great book for older kids for just understanding about how how distress gets processed and then another discussion that i feel like really needs to happen in agencies is because because there's not an easy answer to this next question is how are kids going to learn healthy values the i mean mom is going to try to the extent that she can to teach them healthy values and and she'll have some success with that but it's hard because the children are perceiving her as the parent who doesn't know as much and that's part of what the abuser does is convince kids that he's the one that really knows things and so whatever the values that he's teaching are going to tend to carry more weight than the values that she's teaching not always but they're going to tend to and what's he teaching he's teaching negativity about females and inferiority about females he's teaching bullying he's teaching you know a bunch of things i've already talked about today he's teaching subservience he's teaching obedience not in a good sense of obedience and a bad sense of like you should you know you have to do what you're told or else kind of thing he's teaching [Music] the that men aren't responsible for their actions and teaching more specifically in fact that females are responsible for what males do to them all these really really unhealthy values that people aren't responsible for their actions etc the victims are responsible for the actions of perpetrators where is where so where kids going to learn the counter to this they're not going to learn it from a therapist again that's not the therapist's fault that's not a therapist's job the therapist's job is emotional processing not correcting all these sick values that a kid's been taught so we need to look at systems i wrote about this a lot and when dad hurts mom we need to look at how you know how is this going to happen can we train moms some about some additional strategies that she can try that she hasn't tried for teaching them healthy values i i lay out a number of those and when dad hurts mom can we teach kids media literacy that's one thing that i really encourage because because these kids need to learn to see through manipulation because they're going to have the abuser in their life probably for good and at least for many years if he's stepped out and not bad they may have an easier opportunity to erase him from their lives but if he's dead he's going to be around for as long as he lives in some way in their lives but even if he stepped that he may be around you know his their parents may not split up i mean who knows i mean i mean him and their mom may not split up i mean who knows he's likely to be a factor in their lives for a long time these kids need have urgent need for the ability to read and recognize and defend themselves against manipulation and that teaching the media skills is one of the great ways to do that because advertising essentially is manipulation that's what advertising is with all due respect to any of your relatives that may work in advertising that's what advertising is it's manipulation the one of the fundamental principles of manipulation is i'm going to try to convince you that i want you to do action a because action a is what would be best for you when the real reason i want you to do action a is because that's what would be best for me is if you do action a right i mean that's the central principle of advertising to convince you we want you to buy this product because this would be good for you but no we want you to buy this product because that's what would be good for us and advertisers use so many different manipulative skills and kids aren't going to get defensive about it if you're talking about advertising if you're saying your dad does this and this kids are going to get defensive that doesn't feel good to have people saying that about dad even if it's true it just doesn't feel good to kids whereas they don't mind if you're saying that about advertisers and when they learn the concepts they then will apply it to dad themselves they don't want the criticism coming from you but they don't i mean i remember this again from my own childhood i was very critical of my parents i didn't want anybody else being critical of my parents it was fine if the criticism came from me i just didn't want it coming from anybody it felt bad if anybody else said anything bad about my parents right i mean isn't that true for most kids so if we can equip them with the ability to recognize these things then we got to trust them they will apply it to the to the abuse perpetrator if they've got the key concepts another resource that i point people toward for younger kids where it's maybe feels too early to start talking to them about about a critical read reading of advertising is the children's book a bargain for francis russell hoban h-o-b-a-n he wrote a whole series of these francis books she's a badger you know with this stripe down the middle of her head there's a bargain for francis bedtime for francis which i don't really like that book bread and jam for francis there's all these francis books and the one called a bargain for francis is a story in which francis gets completely manipulated by her friend gloria into trading her china tea set for a plastic tea set her friend gloria convinces her that the plastic tea set is better than the china tea set with a bunch of manipulative skills and gets her to trade and gloria uses so many classic things that the abuser will do i don't think russell hogan had this in mind when he wrote the book but this is great because it gives us the opportunity to have a discussion with even quite a young child well how did how did gloria pull this off what was she trying on this page what was she trying on this page and then a kid will suddenly be tuned in to all these tactics when he or she starts to observe them being pulled by the domestic batterer and by the way at the end of the book gloria i mean francis the main character pulls a nice trick to get her china tea set back and that's important because kids really need a happy ending you know it's so imp particularly young kids they really need it to end happily and it does she ends up with her china tea set back at the end of the at the end i want to take a few more questions i want to look i'm going to just sort of check my own notes here this stuff i've already talked about a bunch the again the expressive therapies are are proving particularly promising and our the expressive therapies are particular are proving particularly promising in our time so do be looking to play you know anyone who does play therapy dance therapy theater therapy any of those kinds of things are really really valuable and and this stuff this is stuff yeah i'm seeing through these sides that i've really gotten these things there's a there's a couple more things i could talk about but let's let's break again first and check in and see if there's more questions because i really feel like the most crucial questions i have gotten to all right fantastic so let's let's dive back in here um and just you know so we have about 12 minutes left so we'll kind of round things out with these questions and get to as many as we can um and thank you to everyone who has submitted them uh so many questions and we'll do our best to address as many as we can um so the first one on this list is how do you help um a student's student's success when communicating with the parent who may be the abuser the the main thing that i think we have to do is just stay as focused as possible on what will what we believe will work um i do tend to want to put quite a bit of emphasis on every positive thing you can say about the child the when you're dealing with an abuser you may get either extreme you may get an abuser who does not want to hear any that the child has any problems oh mom is really exaggerating how this kid is doing this kid is actually fine and and therefore is in denial about the problems or maybe at the other extreme it has nothing positive to say about the kid oh this kid just has such a bad attitude so so you may end up on either side of that either having to to try to gently push towards well you know i do think there are some difficulties here or the opposite push of like no i you know i see a lot of good things in this kit but the abuser is is is not someone you're going to move real far and actually he's going to start to be very reactive against you if he senses that you're trying to move him very far he's not going to move nearly as far as he should is what i'm saying so set your goals limited i'm sorry you have to do that but this is what's realistic set your goals limited let's see if i can move him this far and try to just keep bringing it back to what the child needs the modern abuser this changed quite a bit in the in the has changed quite a bit in the 30 years that i've been in the field the modern abuser is quite a bit more invested than he was 30 years ago in impressing people with what a great dad he is and so we want to try to use that to our advantage and say because he's it's quite likely he's going to want to impress you they won't all but a fair number we want to really show you what good dads are so you can try to use that to your advantage you can say things like well you know i'm sure you want your daughter to be you know not getting so embarrassed when she wets herself at school or i'm sure you want your you know of cour of course you wouldn't want this after your son and uh and and see if you can appeal some to that to that side and then i hate to say it but the abuser tends to care a lot about success so things that you can say well this is the kind of thing we found really tends to lead to improved grades like that kind of language even if that's not what you care about that's likely to be what he cares about so so you might want to reach for that kind of thing too yeah very good thank you um is it useful to challenge or try to change a survivor's idea that the abuser is a good parent yes but gently gently the the you know she tends to face such a barrage of criticism from him and then often from other sources in her life that if we come off critical it's going to just exhaust her like oh my god this is just another person so but but the but some you know some gentle pushing is is often going to be fine she'll she that's often going to be reasonably well received you know she's on guard usually because she's ready for you to be critical of her and for example part of why she's on guard against any notion that he's not a good parent is that she expects that what's coming right after that from you is judgment criticism of her for not having left him it's like well because he's not a good parent you should have left him and that's part of why she's not going to acknowledge her she's got concerns about his parenting yes she does but she's not going to acknowledge them to you because she feels like what's coming next is you're going to start to be critical judgmental of her for still being in this relationship and then she has to go into like all the reasons why she this is not a time she can leave if she starts to feel like wow you're not going to do that you're actually going to be on my side about stuff not not all abused moms but many abused moms become quickly more receptive because they actually want guidance they don't want criticism but they do want guidance and and she's so used to being blamed for everything by everyone not just by him but by everybody else too and so she's you start to give her if you start you can even say explicitly i don't think this is your fault and i want you to know that's not where i'm going with this and and i'm not even saying you should leave i know that's not the answer to everything i just don't want you to be blaming yourself for blaming your kids for problems that i suspect he's really causing well that's something that there's at least some chance you'll be able to hear yeah really helpful thank you um you talk you gave a really great example earlier on about the you know the theater program the improv troupe things like that but what are the really the best ways for um for domestic violence agencies or just any kind of um institution that interacts with children to put in place of preventative or active services at schools i mean typically the health ed class is where things start because that's usually where they're willing to let you come in and do like a three or five session curriculum and you can find good curriculums on teen dating violence and that's the place to start talking to kids about domestic violence is by starting talking about in their own relationships because that's just the easiest that's just the easiest place for them to start thinking about it it's a little less it's actually a little less heavy for them than to dare start talking about what might be going on at home peer leadership programs exist in some schools so that's a good place so there's there's pro there's some schools have programs where kids can volunteer and get a little training and then they're a peer leader on conflict resolution or they're a peer leader on substances or something like that and the some schools are willing to create a track where they're a peer leader on teen dating violence and kids if they you know like say oh yeah i'll sign up for that training be a peer leader on tv peer leadership is a way in and then sometimes but this really takes resources sometimes you can have groups that actually meet at the school that for a secondary school would be a group for for kids who are being abused by a dating partner and for younger kids like elementary kids it would be a group for kids whose mom is being abused at home and the group that meets right at the school it's just so much easier for mom to get her kids there because they're already there and so it's a great way to increase participation yeah fantastic um many of the people on the school day work directly with you know young boys and teens what are some preventative measures they can take when they're working directly with with that group to try to talk to them about manhood is really important and and women can do that it doesn't have to come just from men but to to you know by the time a kid is 12 or 13 and maybe even younger i think actually you can start exploring with them like how do you think boys should be how do you think boys should treat girls how do you think men should treat women and then we can work on trying to unravel positive messages about masculinity from negative messages about masculinity and those two i have a little i have a powerpoint just about that that i actually haven't never used that much but i'm happy to share with people where i talk about how a positive message keeps getting linked to a negative message so a positive message like that's about like you should provide well for your family that's a positive message then gets linked to this message about because i'm providing that should give me more say than other people in the family particularly than my wife or girlfriend or a message about men should be strong gets linked to a message about men shouldn't cry or men shouldn't ever admit to being afraid or a message about men should be protective towards males should be protected towards females then gets linked to a message about therefore we have the right to tell females what to do and oh yeah well because i'm yeah i'm doing this to protect you so so as long as i'm doing it to protect you you've lost your right to say no to it and and so the what i like about the concept of doing that with younger boys is that i don't think it's a good idea with younger boys to go in and just start telling them all the terrible things there are about men they're not that's hard enough for a guy to hear at 18 or 20. it's i think it's i think it's too much for a kid to take in at 12. he's not ready to hear a bunch of negative things about males at age 12 when he's male and that's why i would rather go in [Music] with him with with uh with that with more that kind of message like here's some really good messages you've gotten about being a boy here's some not so good messages you've gotten to be about being a boy how could we un on you know how can we break the link between the the healthy messages and the unhealthy messages but then a lot of it is just be really loving with them like boys just need people to hug them and laugh with them and be sweet with them and say how did it go today and oh that must have been really hard and oh that must get scary and just like just be really warm and loving with them they often are going to pretend they don't want it often they're just going to go like this while you're doing it and they want it so bad yeah really helpful well we're getting really close to the the end so i wanted to just give you a moment to kind of reflect on on everything we've covered today and and share anything that maybe we didn't touch on or just some final words for for our domestic violence professionals today um i just believe really deeply in the power of group work with children of better women and so i i just want to keep encouraging agencies to look at where could they get funding or can they collaborate with other agencies to be able to offer groups where because kids are just dying to meet other kids who've had to live with a battering dad or a battering stepdad and a place where they can come to talk about their feelings and where they can process both their positive and negative feelings towards the abuser and where they can process both their positive and their negative feelings towards mom and where they can explore the whole question that i've said is so important about who's responsible for the abuse and so they can help sort of tease all those things out and come we hope to a point of understanding the abuser's responsible for his own actions and where they can start to explore the question about like how do i want to behave when i'm in a relationship and how do i want to be treated when i'm in a relationship and all those things work so much better in group than in individual work and so that's really my big plug is is is first try to find out where around you there may be groups because to some extent that service is available some places the groups that are you know they're often groups that are for high-risk kids and that's not what i'm talking about he's a group specifically for children who've been exposed to domestic violence that's what we need and if it doesn't exist try i really encourage you to try to get the conversation going about how that how that could be gotten to happen yeah fantastic suggestion thank you so much well um such a pleasure to have you here today we really appreciate you taking the time uh to just spend the day with us spend the long nice three hours with us um and thank you to everyone who attended today we really appreciate you tuning in um so just one quick thing as we we leave i do want to say thank you once again uh to to cap60 uh for further support for this uh presentation today if anyone is interested in learning more about cap60 and how it can help your organization more easily collect and report data please stick around and representative will do so in a short demo or you can send an email to sales at capsixy.com and just a quick reminder uh that the webinar recording slides transcript certificate attendance and any shared resources will be available uh and emailed to everyone within a week of the presentation so anyone that logged in will get that information and if you're a call-in listener send us an email to info at domesticshelters.org to let us know where we should email those materials so with that we'll conclude today's presentation but like i said stick around and whitley with cap60 is going to share a little bit more about uh that software so welcome whitley hello hi can you hear me i can hear you yes i'm going to go ahead and stop my screen share and let you kind of take over i know we will probably see some people uh kind of logging off as we go but i'm really looking forward to seeing what you have to share today thank you ashley as ashley said my name is manager use software solutions um i'd like to take a moment to thank you ashley waitley we're having a little trouble with your audio it's cutting in and out a little bit um perhaps if you turn your camera off maybe that will kind of help with the bandwidth a little bit um getting getting that through that's my first suggestion okay how do i sound now it's actually better so yeah that works sometimes that's all you need to do um so i'll just start all over again my name is whitley i'm the senior product manager at cat 60 software solutions and i wanted to thank you ashley heyer domesticers.org team organizing and hosting incredibly informative to you for sharing your today i'm currently so inspired and moved by all your tremendous work and i'm looking forward in some of provided us so thank you for that um and thank you all for hanging out a little longer for this quick demo to keep this the 20 minute time frame um i just wanted to give you a quick little overview of cap 60. we are an agency-wide client-managed report we're compliant with all major funders so voca vala fispa and we're also working to become compliant with hud um as well today i'm just going to cover the centralized intake process our client dashboard and i'll end with an overview of the reports i'm also going to link some additional information in the chat box so that if you are curious or want to learn more about those links or you contact me directly at my email which is whitley cap60.com further ado i'm going to the site here and show you our system so our system is set up in a modular fashion you'll see at the top here we have some higher links and part of me one second so at the very top we have our hierarchy here so these are the modules of which we're creating some of our data collection and actions through and the very first page you'll see all of the webinars that we host these are all training events so we cover different topics of our system every week and you have access to that um as long as you need to as i mentioned we're a client-facing data collection agency so we look for setting up the client through an electronic file through an intake process and then reporting on the demographics of that client the services provided and other nuanced data all of our information is reportable and you can also search through the entire database by accessing a client and looking through their profile so if you were to be audited you can easily assess all that information i have two different options here the victim services intake or the hotline intake now the hot take is more kind of a bridge version of our longer form this is designed specifically for agencies who do work with hotline helplines and allows you to quickly gather and capture as much information as you can over that crisis call and then of course being able to then report that information to your funders this is just an overview here you can see that you're able to capture first name last name set date of birth um some characteristics victimization details provide services or provide a referral and then the intake process and sometimes over is our longer form here this is the services intake process we designed this to be initiative and customer friendly um so here i can start by indicating the intake date so i can choose today's dates i can also then decide if a person wants to be considered anonymous or non-anonymous a lot of times we see that individuals are still comfortable working with us they want to remain anonymous so we've built in this mechanism here where if you select yes from this drop down the person's name will autofill as anonymous first name and the last name will be unique identifier that unique identifier is how you would search for that person in the future to update their profile provide them additional services and so on you would then select your agency [Music] you can assign centers so this is kind of like a virtual center here that you would create for yourself and then you could in take some information about the individual their sex gender identification birth date if they're not providing the birth date you can always put in a fake birthdate and then additional contact information and whether it's safe to call leave a message or text that individual this first screen acts as a duplicate client check so we certify that all the data you're inputting is being ran against a duplicate client check so that you're not accidentally adding somebody more than once into the system this very first step inside of the intake process is the safety assessment form now this is a just a general safety assessment form this is where you're going to ask somebody if they are in a safe place if they need immediate medical attention where their current location is if there's any areas they may feel unsafe in their city and if they could maybe describe a little bit about the last incident if they have any current or pending legal or custody issues or any thoughts of maybe harming themselves or others and at the very bottom you would choose to either accept this person as a client or select no to then kind of abandon this process and get out of this in a really quick so that if the person is uncomfortable you don't have to continue through the process i'm going to say yes here to continue through when i select save and continue i'm now profited into the primary victim information page where i collect some more demographics these are all reportable to all the major funders um you have the ability of selecting which ones you want to consider mandatory so you see with the red asterisk here these are the ones i am considering mandatory for my practice database here but you would just quickly fill out some some demographic information anything that you may want to report about this individual so you have primary language work status education military status and so on further down the page here we have the voca specific characteristics so if you're checking any of these off they are automatically being built and plated into the report you also have an area to add any agency specific additional characteristics so if you maybe have a wheelchair accessible area in the building um in this person somebody in the family of has a wheelchair and may require access to that you can use that as a characteristic that you're tracking or if maybe the offender lives in the home or there's a sign language that the sign language interpreter needed for this client you can track all of that information in this system these classifications are specific to vawa tracking so this is automatically articulating to vawa and then you have the disability and health insurance areas that are reported to all major funders you'll see at each um the bottom of each page there's a comment box where you can add any additional information about the client at that level well saving continued to now move into the third step of the intake process which is the shelter assessment here inside of the shelter assessment you'll notice that this is a skippable page so this is a very first skippable page in the intake process where if you are an agency that does not provide shelter services you can easily get this or if maybe and isn't applying for shelter services you can easily skip this as well if you do provide shelter or have a shelter that you are you're enrolling clients into you can use the screener as a way of assessing this person's needs so here at the very top i have whether i want to accept this person into shelter yes no or not at this time and i would save and continue to move forward to now the family information page now this is the household level information this is where i'm going to put in information about the address they may occupy their housing so here you'll see homeless the county of residency is very important for reports number and household also very important and then family composition so this is the single parent home this is a two-person home single person and so on you also have some additional fields here where you can track family related characteristics so maybe this family is bringing a pet with them into the shelter and you want to be notified of that or you can also set up family needs and track that through the system as well so save and continue to move forward here the next step is also a skippable step but this is where you would add in the additional household members so if moms plus two children are coming into your shelter you can always add the additional household members by selecting that button and filling out all the pertinent information on this page and this is basically a deposit of the first two steps here for the additional household members you can also edit the primary household member's information at this level as well so if maybe this person came in as anonymous but then provided their name at this level you could change that here next step is uh to add the offender so we do offer offender tracking you can search for offenders you can add photos of the offenders to our system should you want to track that information and you can also attach the offender to the victimization which i will do here in just a moment so let's go ahead and add an offender on the offender page you can select whether you want this person to be anonymous or not if you do have a name for them you have [Music] information you have about this person you can fill out so here i can put sex if i have a birth date or estimated asian years race ethnicity maybe height weight hair color hair color or hair length any characteristics specific to the offender are trackable through the system so if they have access to weapons or they have a history of violence you can also indicate their address or identifying tattoos other identifying features and then also at the very bottom the description of a vehicle so safe here to add a fender smith into the database here and the next step is to then attach or to crease the victimization and attach the offenders to the victim this victimization page has a lot of things that you can do with it here you can start by putting in the intake date and then specifying the date of the incident so sometimes we see that somebody may be coming into the agency today but the incident actually happened a few months ago you can make that specification here so then choose whether this person will be fully partially served or not served denied services this is trackable to vawa so you'll want to make sure that you're looking at this as well from the victim drop down you'll select your victim so here i have my anonymous victim and then the victim type whether it's primary or secondary from the offender drop down i can choose to add the offender if i like or if not you do have the not applicable not reported option i'm going to attach the offender and then the relationship of the offender to the victim here and this is a pretty standard list and it's pretty encompassing here so you find about every relationship you can imagine here and you can attach that relationship to the victim you have the ability to attach three offenders per victim per victimization further down the page we have the primary abuse experience here this is a list that is reportable to all major funders they all use about the same terminology you can have this defaulted or you can choose which one you're primarily working with inside of your agency and then you have the an option of reporting any secondary abuses experience you'll see that i have this check all option here where i could check every single abuse or i can check as many that apply by simply selecting on it and saving i also have the ability to track weapons this is a customizable area so you can change the language or track whatever nuanced weapons you may be tracking and reporting on and then here you have the ability to select whether this is reported to the police when the crime was reported within so you have 24 hours up to a year police officer's name department name who reported the crime so the victim themselves or another individual it's another person who was that person maybe it's their this person's aunt and then down here at the bottom we have some victimization related characteristics here traumatic brain injury is reportable to all major funders internet partner violence is as well and then some of these other ones are good for just reporting and um you know looking at through the system at the bottom here you can select the county and state that the victimization has occurred in and then write in any abuse history information or additional comments that you might want to record when i say here i have created a victimization for this individual you can see here the date the victim's name the abuse that their primary abuse i should say and the offender that is attached to the victimization the next step here is recording income here it's pretty straightforward you're going to select their income range so whatever range they fall within and then their primary income source this is a customizable area and then if they're receiving any other income sources you can then also attach any of those additional income sources and the last and major step here inside of the intake process is to provide those services so we've we've created the profile by um capturing all of the major demographics and that we would want to report on about this client and now we can report on the services that we're going to provide them so here the contact information um or sorry contact type here you can choose how you were contacted from this client so here i can say this was a hotline call the type of service is either going to be victim services so as a service that's provided because of the victimization or non-victim services you can also record time of service and then you would select the family member here the victimization that is now on file for that family member and create the program you would like to enroll them in you can also indicate the service location so where you provided services to them also the staff member who assisted them and if you have volunteers on staff you can also track that and down here you'll see a list of all of your services that are connected to that program you can choose to literally provide all services or you can go through and choose whichever services you provided over that call or in person say that i provide you for 30 minutes um maybe hotline crisis line first and let's say interpreter services so once you have filled out the services you provided you would save and continue the then essentially submit person's profile into the database once you submit here they now have an electronic file in their own client portal here which is their client profile you can see that i've been hopped into their service area so i can quickly just look at those services i just provided and all of that is listed out here i have the ability to add any service comments or additional service details directly from the data grid i can also then look at their dashboard so this dashboard is going to show you some alerts here that i have set up i can see the intake date of this individual i can quickly add their family data graphics so if i needed to update any information i could do so here really quickly and all of these blue links here are pages that pop up and allow you to add edit or delete information about this individual you can see here i have the services provided in the bottom and those are the services that i just provided during the intake process so if i wanted to come in and add more simply add more here you can also see the program i enrolled this client into and i can update their status of whether they've been approved or denied access to the program and as i said previously i do have some alerts here on the dashboard so some of those characteristics that i had indicated for this individual did have an alert set up that's part of the administrative setup so here if i wanted to check to see why i have a client alert i'd be notified of those alerts so here are the characteristics i selected and i know because i set this up that the offender lives in the home is one of the alerts i want to notify somebody before they start to inside of the client portal as i said earlier this is a profile so an electronic profile here this is where you would update the household members page um you could come in and change household information update income track your call logs here so you see that hotline call that came in and the date it came in you can monitor your offenders add edit delete or add more same with victimizations um you could provide referrals so if you need to refer this client to maybe the police department or another organization in the community you can provide that referral through their dashboard sorry their client portal you can also track inventory so if you have a shelter and you have it set up inside of the system you can track inventory you're providing through the shelter we have unlimited document storage so you can upload any personal documents about this individual if you have waivers they need a sign or any type of thing that you need to store inside of their client profile you can upload those here you also have the ability to track client notes so this is anytime you're working with a client if you're taking notes or if you want to even set an alert about a note you have the ability to do that under the client notes page and then we've also created a custom client forms where you can track any of your agreement and acknowledgement forms if you have a shelter agreement form that they have to sign or client rights forms you have the ability to create that form inside of the database and then actually receive their signature and keep an electronic file of it inside of their profile lastly you can track their emergency contact information under the client as well we have some additional build out area so we do have an automated shelter built out so you can check somebody into a virtual shelter and every night that they are checked in they will receive a emergency shelter stay or whatever service you'd like to provide them automatically through the system the check-in process is very simple we're just filling out some information here for the check-in date estimated check out dates the program we're enrolling them in the shelter i'm providing them services through whether it's an emergency shelter or transitional housing shelter and then here's my individual and i'm going to assign them a bed and attach their victimization and when i save here my system is going to automatically provide the service i have set up every night that this person is checked into the shelter so this really helps streamline shelter services and just kind of monitoring shelter from a higher level also under the sub module you can enroll somebody on a waiting list you can check their shelter history provide them inventory through the shelter and upload any documents or provide them referrals through the shelter and then into the shelter we also have a transitional housing module so here you could use this exact same setup to indicate a transitional housing location for this individual and streamline their stays by every night they're checked in they will receive that automated service we also have counseling and legal build outs here inside of the counseling module you can track appointments for your clients this here would be at the client level so my family members i could assign them appointments with any of my counselors by filling out the scheduler and then i can monitor their appointments through the appointments page for the legal sub module we have protection order tracking so this is pretty straightforward but also incredibly helpful here you can set up a protection order for this person you can also track the offender who may be also part of their client profile as a participant in this protection order you can assign a signed counsel paralegal advocates who are working on this protection order or servicing this protection order where this protection order was serviced the court case number if there's a judge that's overseeing this protection order if this is the first protection order you can indicate that or if there's been any violations to the protection order specify whether it's civil or criminal the type of protection order here and these drop downs are all customizable actually i'm going to make this temporary finance category this is specific to vawa fispa they want to know the violence categories for the protection orders so all of this is tracking to those reports the ruling of the protection order and then you can also put in an expiration date and on the client portal dashboard it will notify you whenever this person or a person has a protection order that is expiring and then you can also indicate follow-up dates and follow-up tasks to services protection order once you've enrolled the protection order you can also upload a physical copy of it or you can add minutes to revise the protection order maybe changing the type or the ruling status for the protection order and you can monitor it all here under the sub module the legal sub module we also offer case tracking it's very similar you're going to fill out all this information and just monitor somebody's civil or criminal case and then again you have the ability to schedule appointments with lawyers or legal advocates system you can have their availability set up and mark off times by scheduling an appointment with your clients now everything i just showed you was directed for the client specifically one client at a time but we do have these higher modules where you can look at things from an agency perspective so here under the victim services module i can look at my shelter activity so here are all my individuals who are checked into the shelter i can also quickly pop into their profile if i needed to from here by just selecting their name here on the residency page you'll see the date that they checked in how many days they've been in shelter and their estimated checkout dates we also can monitor waiting lists from this level are bed availability so this is going to show me my beds that are available inside of my shelter if i had inventory set up you can see inventory here as well this is going to show you all those people and i can provide them inventory items through here same with meal service if you're providing meal services you can track that through the system and we also have an amenities log so as somebody's being checked into the shelter they may be receiving items items from you that you'd like to be returned upon their departure you can have that set up in the system and have them sign a log saying that they did indeed check out these items and will be returning them when they leave and lastly there's a children's initiative form that allows you to assess the child's safety upon leaving the shelter it's pretty straightforward um here they're you're mainly asking about their school enrollment status during their shelter stay who they're going to be living with after the shelter stay and how the services that you've provided through your agency have been effective for them also at the higher level we have the housing so again transitional housing you can monitor the residency so at that level we are adding the specific location so this is a way for you to come in and see okay an apartment one i have this person they have been checked in for x amount of days we also have counseling and legal schedulers and calendars here so you can schedule a group session here at this level and monitor everything on your calendar where you can provide services and follow up with the clients who are enrolled in that support group all right so the last thing i want to show you all today is the reports module inside of your reports you'll have access to two types of reports we have more so agency management reports so here under agency-wide you can look at hr information so you can actually monitor the um side of the database as well as their trainings that they are attending wages and so on you can do the same for volunteers and then also monitor your resources so if you're setting up resources that are funded by assistant funders you can track all that information and report on it directly here we also have the victim services report so these are specific to tracking higher level service reports and funder specific reports so we have some of the major funders as i had mentioned earlier the boca stop muskie report and i'm just going to quickly show you those so these are examples of reports you can see again all the blue areas are links that you can either drill down deeper into information or customize and build a report for information you'd like to see i could hop into any one of these pages to see the information so if i wanted on and hop in here and look at my reporting quarters so third quarter this is a tally report so this is just going to give you a general tally of the clients and their demographics on files you'll see that you have a new client breakdown versus continuing client and then those demographics that vocal wants to report on all listed out specifically here you also have the ability to drill down into all of the clients so this is a feature we've added just to make everybody's life a little easier here if for whatever reason you wanted to see who client 1940 is you could select that number and services that individual tracking to this report you can also look at them as an individual here so here's their information name birthday age and demographics and then there's victimization that's on file so vocal requires a victimization for our clients who are receiving books station on file so this is one way we provide business other [Music] the demo went great and the the auto was pretty uh solid throughout but it just started to cut out a little bit more here um so i can hear you right now and i'm gonna jump in with one quick question and then give you a chance just to kind of wrap things up one question that came in from amber smith was is cap60 a salesforce platform no we are not a salesforce platform we do however have integrations with salesforce um we focus mainly on nonprofit database where salesforce the odd scope they do a lot of different things and we've designed what you're seeing today specifically with victim service agencies in mind and with the help of a victim services agency so ours is a little more curated to what you're looking for as far as transformation to your funders and reporting on the correct demographics awesome thank you for that um was there anything else you wanted to to wrap up with or anything else you wanted to make sure we shared today i think that's good i did want to link some information in the chat box if that's okay yeah of course i dropped your email address in there too so if people want to send you an email directly to learn more information or just to kind of chat about their specific needs um encourage everyone to do that but oh that's great thank you so much ashley and i just um linked some additional information too if you're looking to speak to somebody directly you can select that link there and fill out the form and we'll be in contact with you or if you have a question for me specifically you can reach me at my email awesome well this is fantastic and uh a big thank you to everyone at cat64 uh you know being willing to partner with us on this specific webinar um we had such great feedback already about from uh from everyone who attended so i think it's been a pretty successful day and i think everyone's going to walk away with some really great information so uh with that we will officially conclude today's webinar thank you to everyone who stuck around and thank you uh whitley for taking the time to show off cap60 thank you thank you ashley all right have a good day everyone bye-bye

Channel: domesticshelters.org

Views: 26,097

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Id: 1mqzB-_kIig

Length: 211min 38sec (12698 seconds)

Published: Wed May 18 2022