We start with a snow-bright morning and end with a sharper lens. We sit down with advocate and system analyst Valerie Frost to explore how systems built to protect families can become tools of coercive control—and how to change that trajectory with better listening, precise language, and survivor-centered practice. Valerie traces the everyday realities of child welfare, family court, schools, and law enforcement, showing where checklists fail, how jargon shuts doors, and why knowledge inequity forces survivors to learn a foreign language just to get help.

We dig into visible versus invisible harm and why non-physical abuse or coercive control often gets dismissed or misread, leaving anxiety and hypervigilance weaponized against the survivor. From “customer service” logic for public systems to the risks of records, we examine how police calls and protection orders can be turned against survivors, and how both over-engagement with systems and system hesitancy get blamed. The conversation moves from critique to action: validating protective parenting, centering context over compliance, and anchoring assessments in the perpetrator’s pattern rather than the survivor’s reactions.

Valerie shares practical tools—build a dated log, control your narrative with consistent documentation, protect your basics like sleep and hydration—and argues for policy shifts that mandate recognition of coercive control, limit unnecessary information sharing, and reward restraint over surveillance. We also talk about showing up whole: professionals who are survivors, survivors who lead, and creating rooms where the end user defines engagement.

The takeaway is simple and demanding: Systems don’t need more policies as much as they need better listening; survivors have already mapped where harm happens.

If this conversation resonates, subscribe, share it with a colleague or friend, and leave a review so more people can find survivor-centered guidance that actually helps.

Send us a text

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

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

Visit the Safe & Together Institute website.

Start taking Safe & Together Institute courses.

Check out Safe & Together Institute upcoming events.

What happens when David turns the tables on Ruth and interviews her—seven years into their shared body of work?

In this special anniversary episode, David marks seven years since Ruth joined the Safe & Together Institute by stepping into the interviewer role. This is a founder-level conversation about vision, values, the hard work of scaling, and how systems actually change when lived experience is treated as critical professional expertise—not an add-on.

Ruth traces her journey from working with medical practitioners to stepping in at a pivotal moment to help transform Safe & Together from a training organisation into a systems-change engine. She names the deeper vision behind that shift: embedding domestic abuse-informed, trauma-informed, child-centered practice into the real operating conditions of systems—through values-aligned leadership, business rigour, and operational strength. A major throughline is properly supporting critical care workers: how practitioners can’t deliver safe, effective, ethical practice when they’re hemmed in by poor practice, rigid forms, siloed communication, unrealistic or victim blaming mandates, and inefficient workflows—and how better systems design can make good practice easier, more sustainable and impact and costs more measurable.

Central to that vision is Ruth’s development of the Credible Expert approach: embedding diverse & targeted community survivors as system-literate, multi-talented professionals with lived and cultural expertise into design, strategy, and decision-making—not as consultants after the fact, but as compensated contributors with ongoing input. David and Ruth discuss how this approach strengthens programs and interventions, prevents harm, surfaces dangerous blind spots, and creates better outcomes across child protection, courts, domestic violence responses, and allied services—while also supporting the people doing the work by reducing confusion, improving cross-agency conversations, and lowering moral injury.

The episode also offers an unflinching critique of “reduce removals” initiatives—naming how misidentification, poor police practice, punitive responses to poverty and failure to work with perpetrators as parents undermine the goal of keeping children safe and together. Ruth is clear: if systems want fewer removals, they have to address the concrete conditions that drive them—and stop asking frontline workers to carry impossible contradictions.

Looking ahead, David and Ruth introduce SafetyNexus, the technology company created to carry this vision forward. SafetyNexus embeds the Safe & Together Model into emerging technology while applying the Credible Expert approach from the very start of development—ensuring survivor expertise is part of governance, desi

Send us a text

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

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

Visit the Safe & Together Institute website.

Start taking Safe & Together Institute courses.

Check out Safe & Together Institute upcoming events.

We are starting our 7th season and asking the question: "What if love wasn’t the soft side of this work, but the method that makes healing possible?"

We chat again with Nneka MacGregor—co-founder and executive director of WomenatthecentrE, survivor, advocate, and visionary—to explore how love, joy, gratitude, and community connection can transform responses to gender-based violence. Instead of centering punishment that rarely repairs harm or teaches nurturing protective behavior, we examine a path where boundaries are love, accountability restores dignity, and systems are redesigned to reduce violence at its roots.

Nneka shares the personal story of surviving an attempted femicide and the vow that shaped her leadership: to live with gratitude, choose joy, and build a world where women and children are safer. From there, we dig into transformative justice—what it is, how it works, and why carceral reflexes often disconnect people from community, dull empathy, and compound and reproduce harm. You’ll hear a clear case for accountability that tells the truth, makes repair, and supports real change without throwing people away.

Nneka also introduce three bold frameworks that flip misogyny and misogynoir on their heads: amourgyny (love of women, girls, trans, and gender-diverse people), amourgynoir (centering love for Black women, girls, and gender-diverse folks), and amourgenous (centering love for Indigenous women, girls, and two-spirit people). These ideas are already influencing policy in Canada, offering a practical language for institutions to move beyond retribution into more behaviorally grounded and care-centered design. Along the way, we redefine power as something you hold upright and share—strong, embodied, and unentangled from coercion, control, and violence.

If you’re a practitioner, policymaker, survivor, or ally, this episode offers a grounded blueprint: lead with love, pair it with firm boundaries, build accountability that repairs, and design systems that center those most harmed. Subscribe, share with a colleague, and leave a review with your take: where should love show up first in your world?

Send us a text

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

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

Visit the Safe & Together Institute website.

Start taking Safe & Together Institute courses.

Check out Safe & Together Institute upcoming events.

Mist, wind, the volcanic island of São Miguel, and a hard look at the words and jargon that decide families’ futures. We begin in the Azores, Ruth’s ancestral home, where arguments for European westward expansion took shape after Bartolomé de Las Casas reported the finding of two “dead Amerindian" bodies—and where mainland-imposed poverty, illiteracy, and family separation set conditions that still shape domestic violence today.

From that grounding, we pull apart a label that quietly drives child removals, court outcomes, and professional blind spots: “denial.” Across child protection and domestic violence documentation, the phrase “mother is in denial of the impact of domestic violence” appears with alarming regularity—automatically shifting scrutiny onto women in records that determine custody and liberty, while the person causing harm fades from view. The result is compounded harm at both personal and system levels.

We trace how this term traveled from early psychoanalysis—where women’s reports of sexual violence were recast as inner conflict or sexual turmoil—into today’s case notes and court filings. Over time, denial and hysteria morphed into failure to protect and parental alienation, redirecting attention from perpetrators’ patterns of violence to mothers’ supposed deficits in “controlling” that violence or responding to it. Instead of centering victims’ reactions to harm, we argue for real behavioral evidence: name who did what, to whom, with what impact, and what has been tried with the person causing harm. This shift is not cosmetic, yet it changes documentation, supervision, and safety planning, and it guards against wrongful liberty removals and harmful system collusion with perpetrators.

You’ll hear practical questions that move practice quickly: What did she do or say that led you to that conclusion? What is your specific safety concern about that behavior? These prompts redirect focus from a survivor’s inner world to the perpetrator’s actions, choices, and behaviors—opening the door to mapping risk to children, cataloging incidents, and designing interventions that actually reduce danger. We also widen the lens to the ecosystem around survivors—family pressure, faith norms, small-island logistics, and economic traps—that make “just leave” dangerous or impossible for many.

The invitation is clear: try a week—or a month—without the word denial. Replace labels with behavioral pattern facts. Keep the person causing harm at the center of risk and response.

If this resonates, subscribe, share with a colleague, and leave a review telling us which label you’re dropping next. Your words help others find the show—and change practice for the better.

Send us a text

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

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

Visit the Safe & Together Institute website.

Start taking Safe & Together Institute courses.

Check out Safe & Together Institute upcoming events.

Rain on the windows, a century-old clock in the kitchen, and a plate of bacon by the coffee set: David’s 60th birthday set the scene for a raw, open conversation about vocation, love, and the future of domestic violence–informed systems. We pause to reflect on 40 years of David’s practice and what it means to be truly witnessed. Then we get specific about how to build safer families by changing how professionals see, measure, and respond to harm.

We dig into a strengths-first approach that starts with what’s going right and why that’s not soft—it’s real and nurturing of change. By centering survivors’ experiences and recognizing good practice in workers, we create solid ground for hard conversations about accountability. We talk candidly about the damage caused when systems remove children from safe parents because of a perpetrator’s behavior and how the Safe & Together Model reframes responsibility, documents patterns of coercive control, and reduces unnecessary removals. Along the way, we explore an ethic of care that holds multiple truths: refuse to demonize people, refuse to whitewash harm, and persist in naming impact.

Looking ahead, we outline three big moves. First, scale with integrity: more Safe & Together Model Certified Trainers, Partner Agencies, and outcomes data across child protection and community services. Second, bridge men’s mental health with male violence prevention—a silo-busting agenda that catches risk earlier, supports men in crisis, and protects partners and kids. Third, bring practice into the workflow with SafetyNexus, a model-guided technology that streamlines documentation, builds decision maps, reduces moral injury and burnout, and delivers real-time quality assurance. We also share how “credible experts”—survivors and cultural leaders—are paid, respected, and embedded in design so solutions are ethical, non-extractive, and truly useful.

If you care about domestic violence, child safety, survivor-centered practice, men’s health, or building humane systems that actually work, this conversation will give you tools and hope. Subscribe, share with a colleague, and leave a review with one insight you’re taking back to your practice.

Send us a text

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

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

Visit the Safe & Together Institute website.

Start taking Safe & Together Institute courses.

Check out Safe & Together Institute upcoming events.

What happens when men are finally invited to speak from the heart? We sit down with Kenneth Braswell, founder of Fathers Incorporated and author of Too Seasoned To Care, to explore fear as a learned behavior, anger as a secondary emotion, and why safety and healing must stand side by side. From Crown Heights to Sheepshead Bay, we trace how Brooklyn’s beauty and danger taught vigilance, how redlining and racial tension shaped daily life, and how those lessons echo through fatherhood, relationships, and community safety.

Kenneth shares the moment he shifted from powerless boy to accountable man and the simple progression that drives his work: Change how a man feels, then how he thinks, then what he does. We unpack the hard line that keeps families safe—no excuses for coercion or abuse—while still making room for men to tell the truth about abandonment, shame, and the fears that hide beneath control. This is not about shaming men. It’s about giving them an acceptable language for emotions, practical skills for conflict, and the courage to choose connection over domination.

We talk prevention that starts at home: more eye contact, softer touch, and everyday rituals that teach boys their feelings won’t cost them love. We also talk repair for adults: how to own fear without handing it to your partner, how to build trust after harm, and how to raise sons and daughters who know that boundaries are acts of care. Along the way, you’ll hear stickball and Scully, letters to a younger self, and the reminder that men need friendships that honor the grown man and the inner boy.

If you care about safer families, healthier men, and kids who thrive, this conversation offers a clear, compassionate path forward. Listen, share with a friend who needs it, and leave a review to help more people find the show. Then hit follow so you never miss an episode.

Send us a text

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

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

Visit the Safe & Together Institute website.

Start taking Safe & Together Institute courses.

Check out Safe & Together Institute upcoming events.

The house looks perfect from the street—until you step inside and feel the air shift. We sit with survivor, campaigner, and author David Challen to trace the shape of coercive control through a child’s eyes: a mother’s world shrinking, a father’s rules governing every room, and a son trying to earn love by molding himself to a script that never fit. This is not a tidy true-crime arc. It’s the long echo of control on identity, mental health, and the stories boys are told about how to be men.

David unpacks how “small” acts—who can visit, when dinner is served, how money is spent—stack into a total system of power. He names what many miss: economic abuse as a lever, isolation as a tactic, gaslighting as the daily weather. We talk about the man box and the costs of belonging, from silence to self-erasure. We tackle the hard part too: accountability that goes beyond time served. Real repair means naming strategy and impact, especially on children who lived the consequences, and measuring change by consistent, relational behavior over time.

For practitioners, we get specific. Speak to children separately. Document patterns, not just incidents. See acting out, addiction, or stoicism as possible signals of exposure to domestic abuse. For schools, use relationship education to decode media, practice empathy, and give boys language without shame. For survivors—especially adult child survivors—claiming identity and community can turn a private burden into shared understanding and support.

Terms like coercive control, boys’ mental health, domestic abuse, economic abuse, restorative justice, and healthy masculinity thread through this conversation for a reason: They’re the keys to earlier recognition and real change.

If this resonates, share it with someone who needs language for what they’ve lived. Subscribe, leave a review, and tell us: what does real accountability look like to you?

Find David's book here: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/93021229-the-unthinkable

Send us a text

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

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

Visit the Safe & Together Institute website.

Start taking Safe & Together Institute courses.

Check out Safe & Together Institute upcoming events.

The conversation opens with end-of-the-year reflections and personal milestones—international book releases, masterclasses, collaborations, and community work—and quickly moves to a timely, thorny question: Can we talk honestly about male violence without “shaming” men? We take a stand for courage, honesty, and clarity using global data, real cases, and practical frameworks to show how accountability, truth about behaviors and their impact, and compassion can live side by side. Our goal isn’t to score points; it’s to keep families safer, support children’s well-being, and help men find a way back into healthy connection.

We share insights from research in Australia, including applications of the Safe & Together Model in child and family services and in Aboriginal-led settings. That work underscores a core theme: organize around shared values, not shared trauma. We explain why labels and decontextual tags fail families and why pattern-based, contextual practice—mapping behaviors, impacts, and risk—succeeds. Along the way, we address restorative justice and carceral responses with nuance: Both can help or harm depending on how they’re used, and some people do require firm containment. The standard remains constant—what increases survivor safety, improves children’s stability, and creates the strongest opportunities for behavior change.

We also unpack the “shame” debate with care. Shame is a human emotion; the task is to guide it into inclusive responsibility, not silence the conversation. The facts are clear: Men are disproportionately perpetrators of serious violence, and boys growing up amid coercive control learn dangerous scripts about loss and power. Naming this is not man-bashing—it’s a necessary move toward balance, health, and prevention. We close with a story of loving confrontation that strengthened a father-child bond, offering a model for how accountability can deepen connection rather than destroy it.

If this resonates, subscribe and share the episode with someone who cares about safer families, effective practice, and honest conversations. Leave a review to help others find the show, and tell us: what does accountable love look like in your community?

Send us a text

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

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

Visit the Safe & Together Institute website.

Start taking Safe & Together Institute courses.

Check out Safe & Together Institute upcoming events.