Naming the Tactics

Na mi n gt h eTa c t i c s :

Me n ’ su s eo f c h i l d r e nt oma i n t a i n p o s t s e p a r a t i o n p o we ra n dc o n t r o l o v e rwo me n

Ho meo f Th eDu l u t hMo d e l S o c i a l Ch a n g et oEn dVi o l e n c eAg a i n s t Wo me n

Credits & Thanks We would like to give special thanks to all of the incredible mothers who shared their stories, their laughs, and their tears with us in the focus groups from which the Using Children Post Separation Wheel was created. Many are currently using the Duluth Family Visitation Center for exchanges or visits and some are in the midst of custody, divorce or criminal cases. To all of the women whose daily lives are a testament to the dangerous and difficult reality postseparation, we dedicate this manual to you.

To the parents who have piloted this program, thank you. Your willingness to try something new and your trust have helped to create success.

A huge thanks to Jill Abernathey, Jennifer Hauck, Lindsey McAlpine, Micca Leider, Brenda Jeka, Hannah Bengston, Erin Wojciechowski and Rachael Perry, the incredible staff and interns of the DFVC, who spent countless hours gathering information, conducting one-onone interviews, conducting focus groups, and consistently bringing the lived experience of battered mothers to this manual. This, on top of keeping the DFVC running and community collaborations afloat during the writing of this manual, enables the DFVC to realize social change and ensure safety for battered women and their children using the visitation center. A strong cohesive team makes all the difference!

Thank you to our collaborative partners, in particular the St. Louis County circuit court judges, as well as the attorneys, guardians ad litem and Safe Haven Resource Center advocates who support the Transition Program.

A big thanks the other staff of the Domestic Abuse Intervention Programs, in particular Scott Miller and Denise Lisdahl.

PHOTOS Photos throughout the manual are meant to represent transitions out of violence: neither beginning nor end, but the mess between; hope, relief, freedom, and good news; fear, uncertainty, confusion, and bad news; nothing is definite, each day seems monumental, each decision seems life-altering, and those perceptions are often accurate. These photos are meant to represent day-to-day life, the impacts of violence on life, and life changes wrought by nature, by violence, and by our own power.

Table of Contents 07

Chapter 1 Our Perspective

21

Chapter 2 Withholding Financial Support

Prepared by: The Duluth Family Visitation Center, a program of Domestic Abuse Intervention Programs

31

Chapter 3 Undermining Her Ability to Parent

Authors: Beth Olson Frances Macaulay

43

Chapter 4 Using Physical & Sexual Violence Against Mother and Children

53

Chapter 5 Using Harassment and Intimidation

63

Chapter 6 Disregarding Children

73

Chapter 7 Discrediting Her as a Mother

85

Chapter 8 Disrupting Her Relationships with Children

97

Chapter 9 Endangering Children

109

Chapter 10 Transition Planning

135

Appendix

Contributions: Rachael Stanze Editors: Chris Godsey Shirley Oberg Layout and Design: Lori Nae Y. Letica Photos: Jane Gilley Lori Nae Y. Letica

Š COPYRIGHT 2013 Domestic Abuse Intervention Programs Domestic Abuse Intervention Programs 202 East Superior Street Duluth, MN 55802 218-722-2781 www.theduluthmodel.org

About the Author, Elizabeth Olson Beth Olson started as the Team Leader of the Duluth Family Visitation Center in February 2009.

She set to work, building a cohesive Visitation Center team, securing funding and building relationships with women, children, and men at the center. Then she went to the experts, women affected by post-separation violence, to understand their experiences, the impact, and how supervised visitation and exchange could help. Beth worked with system professionals to shift the visitation paradigm from using time-centered models to requiring behavior change for moves to unsupervised visitation. To support long-term safety for battered mothers and their children, she focused on creating a common language for understanding how men who batter use children as tools. Beth coordinated the development of resources for battered mothers to help them parent amid post-separation violence, created new ways of documenting and intervening in men’s post-separation violence, and developed visitation center policies and procedures that encouraged men to focus on their children. The result of this work is the Using Children Post Separation Wheel, the development of a successful transition program focused on long term safety of women and children and this manual.

Beth has 20 years experience advocating for victims of sexual assault, domestic violence and child abuse, leading many systems change efforts and developing meaningful programs that last. A community activist, she ran for Duluth City Council as a social-change advocate, earning over 11,000 votes and falling short by less than three percent. Bringing community- based advocacy into academia, she teaches two courses at The College of St. Scholastica (CSS) on Dynamics of Sexual Violence and Advocacy and Community Involvement. She holds a master’s degree in social work and has developed policies and response procedures for sexual assault/ abuse and domestic violence for the local school district and St. Scholastica. Beth is currently the executive director of First Witness Child Advocacy Center in Duluth, MN.

About the Author, Frances Macaulay Frances Macaulay worked in the Duluth Family Visitation Center (DFVC) from February 2010 to July 2012. Hired initially as the transition specialist, she worked intensively with families, the courts, attorneys, guardians ad litem, mental health practitioners, and other advocates to develop individualized transition plans at the DFVC. In this time she helped organize the focus groups, whose end product was the Using Children Post Separation Wheel and the Transition Program. She worked intensively with staff and parents to develop guidelines for visitation center documentation and indicators for transition. Through trial and error, hours of phone conversation with moms, dads, therapists and attorneys, the Transition Program came to be. Frances was the DFVC co-coordinator and team leader from January 2011 to July 2012, overseeing program development, funding, daily operations, and on-going development and implementation of the Transition Program. During her time at Domestic Abuse Intervention Programs, Frances also was mentored into coordinated community response (CCR) work and is currently working in facilitating focus groups of battered women and their children for the Blueprint For Safety Project, a re-vamping of the Duluth’s policies around domestic violence.

Frances is an experienced legal advocate for battered women and holds dual degrees in sociology and Spanish from the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. She currently works for First Witness Child Advocacy Center as the multidisciplinary team coordinator and forensic interviewer.

Naming the Tactics Men’s use of children to maintain post-separation power and control over women

A publication of the Domestic Abuse Intervention Programs Duluth, MN

Chapter 1 Our Perspective

BATTERING Battering is an ongoing use of intimidation, coercion, violence and other tactics intended to control and dominate an intimate partner. It involves patterns of physical, sexual and emotional abuse. In severity it ranges from intimidation by pushing, shoving and restraining to stalking over a period of many years; to making a victim live in constant fear of harm to herself, her children, or her family; to the extreme domination of physical violence of “intimate terrorism” (Johnson); and to killing her or her children or other family members or friends. Battering is distinctive for the variety of coercive tactics, the level of fear it produces for adult victims and their children, and its potential lethality. It is not the same as hitting someone in a marriage. (Pence and Sadusky, 2009, 4)

One effective tactic of oppressive power is to present itself as victimhood, and many men in men’s non-violence groups call themselves victims of the legal system, of the women they abuse, or of unfortunate circumstances. If they admit using physical and emotional violence, they say it is part of a relationship problem primarily caused or equally contributed to by the women they batter. They say drugs or alcohol cause their violence. They say they have always been angry, maybe because of where or how they grew up, and that if they could learn to control that anger they wouldn’t use violence. Some of what they say makes sense. Relationship problems and difficult partners do exist. Drinking and drug use often lead to bad decisions. Childhood trauma creates real emotional wounds. But none of those realities or other circumstances explains or excuses a man using emotional and physical violence to control a woman.

A man systematically abusing a woman is not a relationship, chemical-use, or childhood-trauma issue. It is battering.

Referring to or treating it as anything else distracts attention from his violence and the beliefs that drive it, the experiences of the woman and children he hurts, and the long- and shortterm consequences he creates for him and them. His violence comes from believing he is entitled to power and control over her and their children. Actions that enforce his control and their compliance or obedience make perfect sense to him.

He expects to have control over her and believes in using emotional and physical violence to command it.

Defining battering as a relationship problem suggests the woman a man abuses is partially responsible for his violence against her. Treatment or intervention methods based in that perspective will probably require her and their kids to Our Perspective

7

adjust—to stop doing and saying things that “make him violent.” Learning to see his battering as an intentional system of violent oppression based in the expectation of being in control requires a process of honoring and understanding what life is like for her and their children.

That learning process creates opportunities for practitioners to protect mothers and children by holding men who abuse accountable and creating reasons for them to stop using violence. The process can also help practitioners see that once he is no longer with her, he will probably increase his use of their children—his most powerful remaining point of access—to punish and control her.

Using a man’s addiction or traumatic experiences to explain his battering ignores important context and further endangers the woman and children he’s hurting. When practitioners believe those conditions cause his violence, they will focus on helping him stay sober or resolve feelings because they see those approaches as the way to keep her and the kids safe. They will not see that the beliefs supporting his battering exists independently from addiction and trauma. Getting sober and finding emotional resolution are significant, important processes, but they often do not stop a man who batters from abusing the woman he is with, because the beliefs that support his violence have nothing to do with drinking, using drugs, or being traumatized.

Counseling and psychological approaches that address a man’s violence by focusing on him as an individual often miss opportunities to address how socialization—including the norm that says men are supposed to be in control— informs and validates the beliefs that support his violence.

Like most other men, those who batter have learned, through family, religious, and social norms, that they have a right, even a duty, to dominate and presume deference from women. Because of those lessons and norms, many men expect to be in charge of women, especially in relationships.

A man who batters expects control over the woman he is with so strongly that when he believes she is threatening or resisting his dominance, he enforces it with whatever level of emotional or physical violence is required to force her into compliance. He believes he owns and has ultimate authority over his family. He either believes he is always right or, as some men in Duluth Model men’s non-violence classes say, “I may not always be right, but she’s sure as hell never going to tell me I’m wrong.” He alone gets to establish rules for her and the kids, decide when the rules have and have not been broken, and determine and administer punishment.

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Naming the Tactics

Many practitioners will try to address a man’s violence against a woman with couples counseling and anger management. Those methods can help many families and men, so using them to address battering might seem to make sense. But unless an intervention method accounts for the power imbalance he creates the first time he hits her, or the control he maintains through systematic emotional violence, it misses the point, endangers her, and fails to hold him accountable.

Couples counseling and anger management fail to identify his violence as a set of decisions intended to force her into compliance. Under his control, she knows her job in a couples-counseling session is to say and do what he expects or face the consequences. She is not safe to truly participate in any couple-based process. He may legitimately struggle with anger, but many men with that same struggle don’t batter their wives and girlfriends, because they don’t believe in using violence to get what they want. He can learn to “manage” his anger in multiple ways, but if he does not identify and change the beliefs that support using violence to control her, he will still expect to get his way, and he will still use violence to do it.

A man who batters often convinces himself and many other people—including his counselor or therapist, the woman he abuses, the children who suffer through his abuse and its effects on their mom, extended family members, and friends—that his violence is her fault because she is a bad wife or girlfriend or mother. He may intimidate her into taking responsibility for his actions. He may convince other people, including practitioners, friends, and family members in her support system, to intentionally or unintentionally collude with him. By the time she finds the courage and resources to try leaving him, he may have beaten her, manipulated or scared their kids, and deceived many other people into sharing the beliefs that justify his violence: she is worthless; his violence is her fault; he deserves to control her; he is the victim. Even if she and the kids find safety from his physical violence, they may struggle to let go of the beliefs he pounded into them. When they’re gone, the illusion of him as a victim will grow, and the people around him may feel even more justified in minimizing his violence, denying it, or blaming her for it.

When a woman resists an abusive man’s control by leaving him and taking their children, he often intensifies his use of the kids—perhaps his only remaining source of access to her—as battering tools. The Using Children Post Separation

Our Perspective

9

Wheel illustrates eight common tactics (briefly described toward the end of this chapter) he might use. Instead of getting to know his children or working to parallel parent with her, he will endanger and disregard them in attempts to scare, punish, and coerce her. His demand will be the same as when they were together: absolute compliance.

There are mothers who abuse their She may blame herself for problems her leaving children. This manual causes him and their children. She will probably is not about them. It struggle through chaos and self-doubt to parent is about how a violent effectively, to keep herself and her kids together, and father’s tactics for to help potentially skeptical allies--family members using children to keep and friends, attorneys, visitation center workers, child abusing a woman advocates, and other practitioners--understand the who left him can almost-impossible reality he has created for her and distort the perspective the kids. The more unhinged and ragged she appears from which to them all, including the kids, the more composed and practitioners view reasonable he might seem, and the easier it will be for her. If the distortion many of them to believe him when he says he is an is strong enough, earnest father just trying to negotiate life with a “crazy” practitioners will see woman. If they cannot see his process for controlling her as a bad, difficult her, they will make decisions that endanger her and mother instead of as the children by helping him blame her for his violence. a battered woman They will collude with his methods for disguising his struggling to protect oppressive power as victimhood. her kids and survive his violence.

AUDIENCE

This manual is for any practitioners who work with battered women, violent men, and their children: visitation center workers, judges, child guardians, social workers, attorneys, women’s and children’s advocates, men’s non-violence group facilitators, therapists, law-enforcement officers, and others. It will be useful for anyone who seeks to understand battering more deeply.

THIS MANUAL’S PURPOSES 1. To name and show how fathers who batter use children as tools post-separation to maintain power and control over women.

2. To provide concrete ideas about integrating post-separationviolence interruption methods into supervised visitation and exchange practices.

3. To propose a process for using behavior change as a guide for transitioning a father who has battered into less-restrictive visitation and exchanges.

4. To create a firm base for innovations in naming and interrupting post-separation violence, in infusing visitation 10

Naming the Tactics

center practices with knowledge about post-separation violence, and in managing transitions into less-restrictive visitation and exchanges.

WOMEN WHO DO NOT HAVE CUSTODY This manual is about battered mothers who leave abusive men and retain custody of their kids. Some mothers who escape violence lose custody to the men who batter them, or to other family members, for using violence to resist or defend against being battered, or for what may look like failing to protect their children from violence. Some battered mothers who lose custody visit their children in visitation centers. Their transitions to less-restrictive visitation and their unique supervised-visitation struggles are addressed minimally throughout this manual but deserve much more conversation and consideration.

DEFINITIVE AND CONDITIONAL LANGUAGE Our experiences tell us that while not all men who batter share identical beliefs or combinations of violent tactics for enforcing control over the women they abuse, their beliefs and actions are usually quite similar. When we use definitive language—when we say a man who batters “will” do something or that he “does” believe something, for example—it is because that action or belief is so common among the men who batter we have worked with that we are comfortable referring to it as something that defines why and how some men use violence. When we use conditional language—say something “may” or is “likely to” happen, for instance—it is because we want to make it clear that while we see that belief or behavior very often among men who batter, we know it isn’t universal.

PRONOUNS AND TERMS This manual is about women and children harmed by men who control their families with patterns of physical and emotional violence. Throughout the text we refer to those men with a variety of terms such as “fathers who batter,” “abusive men,” “a man who batters,” “violent fathers,” or “a violent man,” and with simple pronouns such as “he,” “him,” or “his.” In reference to women hurt by men, we use terms such as “women who have been battered,” “battered mothers,” “a mother who has been battered,” “a battered woman,” “abused women,” and the pronouns “she,” “her,” and “hers.” We use both “children” and “kids.”

While the details of how battered mothers and their children separate from violent men are unique from family to family, in this manual we almost always describe the process as her and their children leaving him. Abusive fathers rarely Our Perspective

11

volunteer to leave women and children. A battered mother usually has no power to make a violent man leave. We know of very few cases in which a violent father and the woman he abuses have made a mutual decision for one of them to leave, and for her to have custody of the kids. Most often, a battered mother and her children must escape the man who is abusing her, and they are in great danger when they do, because he believes controlling them is his right or duty. He sees them as possessions, and he won’t easily give up ownership even, as this manual illustrates, after they’re gone.

THE DFVC TRANSITION PROGRAM, THIS MANUAL AND THE NEW WHEEL The Duluth Family Visitation Center (DFVC), a program of the Domestic Abuse Intervention Programs (home of the Duluth Model), opened in 1989 as the first visitation center in Minnesota and one of the first in the United States. Its mission is to protect battered mothers and their children and hold abusive men accountable as part of a local coordinated community response (CCR) to domestic violence. It is a temporary solution to safety risks created by abusive men’s post-separation violence against women and kids.

Most parents restricted to visiting or exchanging kids under supervision at the DFVC are subject to conditions dictated by civil, order-for-protection (OFP), and family courts. Some orders come from criminal court. Courts typically dictate between two months and two years of DFVC-supervised visits and exchanges, based on type and degree of violence in precipitating incidents. Some parents are referred to the DFVC by social workers, probation officers, and other practitioners.

Fathers comprise about 90 percent of parents ordered or referred to the DFVC. Most mothers who can see their kids only during DFVC visits have lost or are losing custody, or are under protective orders, because they used violence to resist or defend themselves against being battered.

Protecting battered women and their children while holding violent men accountable requires DFVC workers to operate from a disciplined perspective based strictly in what moms and kids need for safety. Practitioners haven’t always listened carefully to abused mothers’ and children’s voices, but since starting to listen they have consistently heard that unsupervised post-separation visits and exchanges are often dangerous. We have learned to see how abusive men often intensify violence against women and children who are trying to leave or have left, how men who batter use kids as battering tools, and how battered women are always in danger when men who abuse them can use their children as weapons.

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Naming the Tactics

We can’t predict when or even if a man who batters will stop using violence to control the woman who left him, but we do know he is almost guaranteed to keep doing it if his tactics are not challenged. Our policies and procedures are designed to encourage behavior change in abusive fathers that supports long-term safety for battered women and their children. Fostering that change requires setting concrete goals and constantly assessing behavior. It has little or nothing to do with the amount of time a father has been using the DFVC. This manual calls for a paradigm shift: from a model in which visitation and exchange decisions are based on ensuring “equal time” for an abusive father to one in which those decisions are based in him maintaining non-violent behavior changes that increase safety for the woman he abused and their children. A time-limited model presumes that once the relationship is over so too is his violence and control. The new paradigm is rooted in the philosophy that his actions and beliefs are more important than the amount of time he has been assigned to supervised visits. Battered women and children, and advocates who listen to them, know that when an abusive father is allowed to bide court-ordered time without changing violent behavior or beliefs, he is still a danger to the woman and kids he abuses.

In a model where supervised visitation is mainly a courtordered way for an abusive father to bide time, judges and other practitioners often do not account for whether his violent beliefs and behaviors have been challenged or have changed. Visitation center workers, social workers or guardians ad litem (professionals court-appointed to determine children’s best interests) might keep folders full of notes about when, where, and for how long a violent father participates in court-ordered visits, but those notes might minimize or say nothing about abusive subtleties in how he interacts with his kids. The notes might describe a few obviously dangerous incidents, but contain no information about behavior patterns that can help practitioners discern if or how his beliefs that support violence are changing. In a visitation-and-exchange process that tracks time but does not assess and describe a violent father’s behavior and the beliefs that support it, very little if anything will change for her or the children.

Any visitation center staff preparing to help families transition into unsupervised visits and exchanges must examine every aspect of the center’s programming, and understand their role as one aspect of long-term, community-wide violence

Our Perspective

13

intervention. Every part of the examination process must be driven by coming up with substantive answers to questions including, “Who is doing what to whom, with what intentions, and with what damage?” Every decision leading to a transition plan’s implementation affects whether it protects moms and kids or endangers them in any of many possible direct and indirect ways.

CREATION OF THE TRANSITION PROGRAM Creating a DFVC transition program based in behavior change was a daunting, gradual process. During every conversation about what the program would mean or could actually achieve, we identified obvious ways our policies and practices had to change. Through trial, error, and success, we developed ideas, procedures, and eventually the Transition Program that continues to evolve as we learn from battered mothers, their children, men who have used violence, other practitioners, and each other. We hope this manual inspires visitation centers around the U.S. to take up the transition-planning challenge, and that practitioners keep learning from women, children, men, and each other.

In order to create the Duluth Model and the original Power and Control Wheel in the early 1980s, Ellen Pence, Coral McDonnell, Shirley Oberg, Michael Paymar, and others spent hundreds (maybe thousands) of hours listening to and learning from experts: women who had been battered. Women’s voices and experiences are still the foundation of DAIP’s and the DFVC’s work, and we started our Transition Program by consulting mothers who had been battered, had left violent men, and were struggling to navigate visitation and custody issues.

We needed to understand the realities women’s and their children’s lives after leaving men who battered. We needed to know how the DFVC could interrupt abusive fathers’ post-separation violence and help women and kids feel and be safer. We spoke with women one-on-one and in focus groups. Some of them had used the Visitation Center, and some hadn’t. Some were in an early version of the Transition Program, and some had been abruptly ordered into unsupervised visitation by judges. As we gathered information and insight, and as our ideas evolved, we asked more questions: What happened when you left? How did our decisions help or cause problems for you and your children?

We wanted to know what safety meant for her. Some women said things were “OK.” Most said they had serious concerns about their own or their children’s safety because of men’s continued threats and violence. We also convened focus groups among men who had used the DFVC and asked what 14

Naming the Tactics

had or hadn’t changed for them, and why.

By listening to battered mothers we learned that practitioners often unintentionally endanger the mothers and children they are trying to protect. The women told us how intervening agencies, including visitation centers, often enable a father’s post-separation violence. In fact, the women saw us as an extension of the system that had believed him and minimized his violence. We were not immediately seen as a safe place for women and their children. We learned that even when she is supposedly protected by a court order for him to have no contact with her, he has astounding ability to abuse her through tactics on the Using Children Post Separation Wheel—tactics that depend on collusion from family members, friends, and practitioners including judges and officers of the court, mediators, children’s advocates, visitation center workers, probation officers, social workers, and men’s group facilitators.

The eight tactics on the Using Children Post Separation Wheel came from those conversations and focus groups with battered moms. We tried to fit what we learned into tactics on the original DAIP Power and Control Wheel, but when we shared the result with battered women they helped us see how it only partially described what they were experiencing. It didn’t show the unique ways in which the violent men they had left were using children to maintain power and control. It especially failed to illustrate the ways in which violent fathers undermine women as parents and interrupt their relationships with children. After what felt like hundreds of conversations and drafts, we came up with the Using Children Post Separation Wheel, which inspires many “A-ha!” moments when we share it with battered women and advocates. Some cry, some smile, and some show relief when they see the simple but powerful illustration that validates their experiences.

The experiences of battered mothers and their children must be the foundation from which visitation centers assess, document, and interrupt post-separation abuse by violent fathers. Protecting women and children must be the basis for all visitation-and-exchange orders and processes. All practitioners who respond to men’s battering of women must understand that while credible visitation center workers can assess behavior and protect women and children, they and other practitioners can never know enough to conclude that a father who has battered is no longer a threat.

Our Perspective

15

Using Children Post Separation to Maintain Power and Control Wheel

USING CHILDREN POST SEPARATION TACTICS 1. Withholding Financial Support • Withholding child support, insurance, medical, basic-expense payments.

• Using court action to take her money, resources.

• Interfering with her ability to work.

• Blocking access to money after separation.

2. Discrediting Her as a Mother • Using her social status against hersexual identity, immigration, race, religion, education, income.

• Inundating systems with false accusations of bad parenting, cheating, using drugs, being “crazy.”

• Exploiting “children need a father” to gain sympathy.

• Isolating her from family, friends, practitioners, other supporters.

3. Undermining her Ability to Parent • Disrupting children’s sleep, feeding patterns.

• Withholding information about children’s social, emotional, physical needs.

• Contradicting her rules for children.

• Demanding visitation schedules at children’s expense.

4. Disregarding Children • Ignoring school schedules, homework.

• Ridiculing their needs, wants, fears, identities.

• Forcing family members, new girlfriends or wives, other women to do his parenting work.

• Treating them as younger or older than they are.

• Enforcing strict gender roles.

5. Endangering Children • Neglecting them when they’re with him.

• Putting them in age-inappropriate emotional, physical situations • Using violence in front of children.

6. Disrupting Her Relationships with Children • Coercing them to ally with him.

• Degrading her to them.

• Using children as spies.

• Isolating children from her; her from children.

7. Using Physical & Sexual Violence against Mother & Children • Threatening to kill or kidknap the children.

• Physically hurting her.

• Abusing children physically, sexually, emotionally.

• Threatening suicide.

• Forcing sex as a condition for keeping the children safe or allowing her to see them.

• Exposing children to pornography.

8. Using Harassment & Intimidation • Destroying things belonging or related to her or the children.

• Using children to justify breaking nocontact orders.

• Threatening & stalking her, the children.

• Making his presence known while staying conspicuously outside protectionorder boundaries.

• Abusing animals.

• Using third parties to harass, threaten, coerce her.

Our Perspective

17

If we pay attention to the voices of battered mothers and their children, we can become allies and advocates who can accurately represent their fears, needs, and concerns within courts and other systems designed to protect them and hold violent fathers accountable. We can become less likely to collude with abusive fathers’ violence or control tactics. We can contribute to long-term safety for abused women and their children by expecting and helping fathers who have battered to stop trying to control the women they have battered and start developing nurturing relationships with their children. If abusive fathers’ violence remains invisible to us and other practitioners, its effects on mothers and their children will continue.

UNDERSTANDING AND USING THE NEW WHEEL The wheel represents the simple, effective way that fathers who batter use their children to maintain power and control post-separation. In this visual representation of that system, eight tactics commonly used by fathers who batter radiate from a central hub of power and control, and tightly connect to an outer rim of past physical and sexual violence and coercive, controlling behaviors against their partner and their children.

Here’s how it works: if a father has used physical and sexual violence and coercive and controlling behaviors against his partner and children, he has defined the relationship so that he holds the power. Her actions can only be in reaction to his.

She and their children are acutely aware of the power dynamic and their own vulnerabilities as they leave the relationship.

Contrary to the belief of “once she leaves, the violence ends,” fathers who batter focus entirely on her. Punishing her for leaving is his objective and modivation for his actions. His obsession with her will drive his time, energy and interaction with the kids. This is what clearly distinguishes post-separation violence from bad behavior during a relationship break up.

A system is only as good as the belief system of the judge, therapist or other professional responsible for making judgements and recommendations. His ability to use the tactics are maintained by the systems and institutions she turns to for help. He can effectively use these systems against her. His greatest power post-separation is getting the community, her support system and her children to turn against her. Unless his post-separation violence is interrupted he will keep using the children through these eight tactics by effectively getting us to scrutinize her and ignore his prior and on-going violence and controlling behavior. Some of these tactics are subtle in that they don’t immediately instigate a formal system response (child protection petition, criminal charges, etc), while some are overt. All are insidious and effective.

18

Naming the Tactics

As systems practitioners, we must use the wheel to question our assumptions when we define mothers as bad parents and when we characterize mothers and their children as manipulative or uncooperative based on their choices and responses that we deem unstable, irresponsible, or wrong.

An abused, vulnerable existence requires battered mothers and their children move into survival and navigation modes that, from outside an understanding of the battering, seem dysfunctional. After women leave, they may, for some time, still define themselves according to their abusive partner’s definitions. Children of mothers who have been battered often follow the same pattern, and both mothers’ and children’s reactions are often misunderstood by intervening systems because mother’s parenting decisions and their children’s behaviors can make very little sense outside the context of the father’s battering. When mothers who have been battered and their children seem unstable, therapists, judges, Guardians ad Litem, attorneys, visitation center staff, and other systems practitioners often focus on her ostensibly questionable parenting and ignore his violence and its effects. Mothers are often blamed when their children are scared to visit abusive fathers and when children suffer emotionally or act out because of fathers’ violence. When we don’t understand the function and impact of fathers’ violence, and when we allow court and social service systems to minimize, deny or blame it on mothers and their children who have been battered, we keep them in danger and enable his continued power, control and violence.

Institutions that respond after mothers who have been battered leave their abusers—visitation centers, courts, attorneys, court-appointed child guardians, social workers, advocates, etc.—often unintentionally uphold fathers’ battering tactics. Instead of interrupting them, we systemically support his power and control tactics through our policies, decisions and interactions. This must change.

We as practitioners and communities have a responsibility work to together at creating long-term safety for women who have been battered and their children by interrupting tactics of fathers who batter.

Our Perspective

19

Lori Nae Y. Letica

Chapter 2

Withholding Financial Support

If he doesn’t let the kids take winter boots back and forth between houses, they will be without boots if she can’t afford them. Their feet will be wet, they will be cold, and they may not understand why they are allowed to wear warm, dry boots all the time.

A mother who leaves a man to protect herself and her children from his violence often struggles financially. Paying for basic housing, food, clothing, and medical care, with or without help from him, may overwhelm her. When they were together, he controlled the money. He may have limited her ability to meet children’s basic, academic, and extracurricular needs by dictating if, when, where, and how she worked, and how money was spent—including what and when to spend on children. He may have appropriated family assets and incurred shared debts to suit his needs and wants. If he hid financial resources and information from her while they were together, and forbade her to work or go to school, she probably has very little money—possibly none—when she leaves him. Her job prospects will be entry-level and pay her less than he makes. Still, she will need to take care of her kids and pay post-separation legal costs. Navigating social services, protecting herself and the kids while dealing with his constant attempts to control her and the kids may make having a job almost impossible. If she is desperate enough, she may risk her safety by making deals with him to meet her and the children’s basic needs.

He

brings me back to court whenever he can. My debt is rising with attorney and court fees. I don’t know what I am going to do if this continues.

-Mother of two

I

have to pay for half of the mediation and guardian ad litem [court-appointed children’s advocate] fees, yet my income is one quarter of his income after he pays child support. My hands are tied if I need to go back to mediation.

-Mother of three Legal attempts to achieve what might seem like fairness between him and her usually ignore his battering and its effects and compound her financial and safety challenges.

His financial control when they were together has likely left her with very few resources, including money she needs to

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pay for court-ordered child-welfare professionals and other legal costs, or supervised visitation services. Legal decisions that treat them as equally equipped to handle post separation parenting keep him in power and make her and her children more vulnerable.

I

had to get an OFP [order for protection] against him after his harassment caused me to lose my job and the police calls forced me to lose my apartment. He refused to pay any costs for the children though, and I wasn’t able to get child support because he was on the reservation and claimed that I was still with him. I ended up having to Neutrality is impossible drop my order because he told me he’d start paying in a relationship where for the children if I did. What other choice did I have? a man’s battering They needed food, diapers, shelter, everything. The has created a power order made it so much harder for me, because then he imbalance. All attempts at forced me to choose between meeting the kids’ needs equality only enhance his and protecting myself and them. leverage and weaken her —Mother of two, ages 6 and 9 position.

He may intensify economic abuse against her after she and their children leave, because even without direct access to her and the kids, he can coerce her with financial bribes or threats. He may know she’s financially desperate, and offer her money to see him, to let him see the children, to drop the protection order, to suggest joint custody, to have sex with him, or to do other things that endanger her or the children.

A violent father’s intentions are clear when he withholds resources from his children or their mother until she complies with his demands. When he punishes and manipulates her for not complying, and uses or endangers children in the process, it becomes clear that what his children need financially are not his focus.

Family court decision makers can choose to interpret the post separation economic coercion he uses to get what he wants from her and the kids as the unfortunate but understandable act of a guy who just wants to see his kids. They can also choose to see it as an abusive attempt to keep controlling a woman and children he no longer lives with. The first interpretation rewards his abuse and leaves her and their kids more vulnerable. The second one holds him accountable for his violence, and helps her and their kids toward safety.

Family coin dish, Lori Nae Y. Letica

The

court orders me to pay for everything, including his costs for visiting the children. I had to leave because of his violence, yet he is still not responsible for contributing to the children’s lives. He does not have to pay child support, and he chooses not to work. Our safety is worth the cost, but why doesn’t anyone see that he needs to be accountable, too?

—Mother of two Court decisions about post separation parenting costs may focus more on trying to be fair than on recognizing his violence as her reason for needing to leave him, or on keeping her and their children safe. If she has been making all or most of the family’s money, the court may order her to pay all visitation fees and basic childcare costs, even if it also orders equal parenting time. When she is ordered to pay for everything, he avoids accountability for a situation his violence created. If she makes much less than he makes and she requests visitation, the court may still order her and him to split fees, which also dismisses his accountability.

Regardless of their financial states, when parenting-cost arrangements do not hold him accountable, they collude with his violence and endanger her and their children.

A married woman who leaves her husband to escape his abuse faces the challenge of dividing debts and assets with a man who has used violence against her to get his way. If he has controlled the family’s spending, she and their children may not know about or have access to significant assets.

The family may have spent massive amounts of money on his interests and hobbies, but have scant furniture, clothing, and other household items, which he may decide are his. To keep what he wants, he may threaten and intimidate her and lie about his child custody and visitation intentions. While she faces those challenges during the process of establishing a life without him, her assets and income will probably shrink, her debt probably deepens, she loses support from some family and friends, and her responsibility to provide for their children grows.

He

should pick up the children’s medication, because they are on his insurance, but he chronically forgets. My son is afraid to tell him, because he gets so angry, and when I remind him he says I should have let him know sooner. These are regular medications.

—Mother of two, ages 14 and 17

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As a single parent, a mother who leaves a man who batters her will need to work to care for their children. He may have limited her financial freedom by making working impossible for her while they were together. The more independence she can manage after leaving him, the less he can keep controlling her, so he may do anything he can to make working inconvenient or uncomfortable for her, to make her boss or co-workers see her as a difficult employee, to make her quit, or to get her fired.

He may demand a visitation schedule he knows will prevent her from working as much as she needs to keep her job or to pay her and their children’s basic expenses. He may get her in trouble or damage her credibility by excessively calling or going to see her at work, or by calling her co-workers and supervisors and telling them bad things about her. If he can keep her from earning money, and from being able to take care of herself and their children, he will maintain control over them.

Child support arrangements can also help him use money to maintain post separation power and control over her and the kids. When a court decides her economic assets are defined in part by court-ordered support he pays irregularly or not at all, she might be ineligible for assistance she needs because of financial hardship he created. If he ignores court orders to split daycare fees, medical bills, insurance, and other childcare expenses, she, as custodial parent, will have to pay everything and keep the children safe, or pay what she can and risk legal, social, and emotional repercussions for seeming like an inadequate provider. She may make desperate or illegal decisions to bridge financial gaps. In many cases, no systemic or institutional mechanism can help her or hold him accountable. She can initiate mediation or contempt-of-court charges, but even if that process creates new orders for him to pay, no reliable measure exists to hold him accountable.

The

more he has our child, the less he pays. Seems like paying less child support is his motivation for asking for more time.

-Mother of one, age 3 If the court grants more post-separation parenting time to him than to her, she may be ordered to pay more child support than he pays, because the court expects his daily living expenses will increase. But even when the children are with him, she often will be responsible, based on expectations he enforced when the family was together, for meeting the kids’ daily needs.

For example: if he won’t provide diapers, toothbrushes, food, and other basic care items at his house, which is common among fathers who batter, she can either send the children to his house and know their needs will not be met, buy what

24

Naming the Tactics

they need and send it along with them, or deliver it when he demands her to. Every one of those situations allows him to avoid responsibility for a situation he created, puts financial strain on her, or puts more practitioner scrutiny onto her but not him.

I

left my job and apartment to go to the Cities [Minneapolis/ St. Paul] with him, and he abandoned us down there, so when we came back, I had to live with my mom, stepdad, and five siblings for two years.

-Mother of one If he is financially stable, has limited her access to money, and was able to maintain a high standard of living for the family, she most likely cannot, and he probably will not help her, provide their children a similar standard in the home she tries to set up. She and their children may live in a level of poverty that means needing welfare and food assistance to meet basic needs. Their children may miss educational and extracurricular activities and other growth-and-development opportunities because she can’t pay for them and he won’t.

He will often use her economic struggles to belittle her, to discredit her among teachers, doctors, judges, social workers, and other people whose perspectives of her create real consequences for her and their children, and to disrupt her relationship with their children.

He may also define kids’ clothes, toys, gift money, and other personal items that he paid for as his property. He will expect anything he buys or gifts the children receive at his house to stay there, regardless of what the kids need or want when they are not with him. If doesn’t let the kids take winter boots between houses, they will be without boots if she can’t afford them. Their feet will be wet, they will be cold, and they may not understand why they are allowed to wear warm, dry boots all the time. To him and the system, she will look like an incompetent mother. Even though his violence created the disparity, he and his advocates will portray her financial struggles as evidence that she and her home are unstable and that he and his home are defined by stability. This argument can be successful in supporting his requests for custody and parenting time even though these requests may actually be based in his desire to pay less child support and provide no support to her.

I’m

stuck because of him. Everyone looks down on me because of what he has done to me. He’s ruined my credit and I have two kids.

-Mother of two, ages 5 and 9

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Children from a home split because their father batters their mother, and whose needs are never or inconsistently met because his rules limit everyone else in the family, may still blame their mother for their struggles—and even their father’s struggles—that arise from the split. Their relationships with him and especially her will be strained.

They will be forced to navigate adult issues and take undue responsibility for their own wellbeing. Instead of learning about their parents as safe, consistent sources of love and support, they will have to spend time reacting to chaos, attempting to understand who is at fault for it, and trying to negotiate situations in which their needs are less important than his desires.

Kids often ask a mother who left to escape their dad’s violence why he won’t let them take clothes from his house to her house, or why they can’t play sports or participate in other activities (that require fees she can’t afford on her own and he won’t help with).

If she answers honestly, she risks being judged for involving the kids in adult issues or trying to turn the kids against him.

If she lies or ignores their questions, they often blame her or themselves.

ROLE OF THE VISITATION CENTER Court-ordered supervised visitation or exchange is a direct attempt to minimize the danger a father who batters poses to the woman he abuses and their children. A visitation center is one of the only domestic violence intervention sites where post separation interaction among him, her, and their kids is regularly observed, making visitation center workers, policies, and documentation practices crucial in identifying and interrupting his economic abuse.

Orientation, check-ins, and documentation are valuable chances for visitation center workers to prevent visits from becoming opportunities for him withold financial support. When he says, “She spent that money I gave her on herself,” or, “I pay child support, so I shouldn’t have to pay for anything else,” and practitioners believe him without question, or have no contextual knowledge or documentation to challenge what he’s saying, she often takes on sole financial responsibility whether she can afford to or not.

Visitation center workers know that context and have that documentation, which are derived from

Make a move, Lori Nae Y. Letica

policies and procedures that prioritize her safety, children’s best interests, and his accountability.

Visitation center documentation that illustrates his pattern of withholding financial support from the kids and inhibiting her ability to provide for them is invaluable because without it, evidence of his economic abuse and other violence is usually absent from court proceedings. When she is court-ordered to pay for supervised visits or exchanges, regardless of her income or how it has been affected by his abuse, she may be forced into choosing between safe visits or exchanges and basic needs like food, medicine, and clothes while he avoids being held accountable for his violence and its effects.

Because visitation center workers have unique interaction with him, her, and their kids, they can provide information and perspective that helps courts and practitioners and holds men who are abusive financially accountable to their children.

TIPS FOR EFFECTIVE POLICIES AND PROCEDURES • Structure fee policies to promote batterer accountability and victim safety. Require payment from parents courtordered to visit kids in the center, and provide waivers for victims of domestic violence, stalking, and sexual assault.

• Keep fees reasonable, and work to understand all parties’ economic situations. Many men who batter lie about their economic situations or purposely work less to avoid paying child support and other expenses. If he knows she is struggling financially, he may try to convince her that the benefits of supervised visitation aren’t worth the financial burden of paying for the service.

• Prioritize her and the children’s safety when enforcing fee policies. If he can’t or won’t pay, which normally would suspend services, create individual plans to ensure she and the children are safe. If cancellations based on his overdue fees seem likely to endanger her and the kids, or to adversely affect her ability to care for the children, consider maintaining the visit schedule and reporting his unpaid fees to the court.

• Develop or adapt fee policies with judges and other people who will be involved in creating and enforcing court orders. An inclusive policy creation process can drastically reduce or eliminate court orders forcing her to pay. A policy waiving fees for victims can help keep her and the children safe if she is ordered to pay.

• Expect him to meet children’s needs during visitation:

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meal and snack foods that account for allergies or other dietary requirements; bottles with the formula she uses; appropriate diapers; extra clothes; toys or games. The DFVC and a local food shelf partner to provide food and diapers for visiting parents who can’t afford them.

• Document all financial transactions facilitated through the visitation center. Put photocopies of tax-returns, bankruptcy notices, child-support notices, car-title transfers, medical payments, and other financial-transaction paperwork in both parents’ files. Visitation center financial-transaction documentation can stand as factual evidence in court.

• Document exchanges of children’s items. Use orientations and check-ins with her to establish expectations for passing and returning items during exchanges.

• Use orientations and regular check-ins to gather information about child-care expenses, then apply the information to facilitating arrangements and formal, written-and-signed agreements about how parents will pay for kids’ clothing, school supplies, sports fees, and other needs.

LOOKING TOWARD TRANSITION Meeting children’s basic physical, social, and emotional needs requires money. Responsible parents are expected to pay for the clothing, insurance, food, diapers, activity fees, medical care, educational expenses, and myriad other costs that come with helping children grow and develop. DFVC policies and procedures are based on the expectation that a father who has battered will provide for his children’s needs and support the ability of the woman he has abused to also be a provider.

Transition plans are ideal opportunities to help men who have withheld financial support start to take accountability for child support and other financial commitments. One father who used the DFVC hadn’t paid child support in years, but started making regular payments when they became a requirement for transitioning to off-site visits with his kids.

Before,

he would always promise to buy the kids boots and bring their hats and mittens from home. He would never follow through, which always forced me to have to show up at his house to get the things for the boys. I had an OFP against him, but didn’t have any other options for getting the boys the winter things they needed.

Finally, with help from his mom and the visitation center, he started getting the boys the things they needed. It wasn’t about me anymore; it was about what the boys needed.

-Mother of two, ages 1 and 3 28

Naming the Tactics

ACCEPTING FINANCIAL RESPONSIBILITY: WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE When a father who has withheld financial support accepts financial responsibility, he equitably helps provide for the children, and he leaves her free to work at supporting herself and their children without the threat of his violence.

HE FINANCIALLY SUPPORTS THE CHILDREN AND THEIR BEST INTERESTS • He pays court-ordered child support and children’s expenses.

• He pays support amounts set through visitation center (if payments are not court-ordered).

• He cooperates in agreements to ensure children’s needs are met.

HE MEETS CHILDREN’S NEEDS DURING HIS TIME WITH THEM Supervised Visits • He brings and feeds kids appropriate food.

• He brings bottles with appropriate formula.

• He feeds children with her breast milk if she provides it.

• He brings diapers, wipes, extra clothing, and other hygiene items.

Supervised Exchanges • He returns all clothing, sports equipment, games, toys, and other items children bring to his house.

• He follows through on agreed-upon purchases of clothes, sporting equipment, school supplies, etc.

HE SUPPORTS HER ABILITY TO WORK • He schedules visits or exchanges to fit her work schedule.

• He shows up for scheduled visits.

• He maintains a consistent visitation schedule.

• He stops disrupting her ability to work.

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Jane Gilley

Chapter 3

Undermining Her Ability to Parent

When she could be forming relationships with their kids, and helping them grow and develop, she will be forced to solve and take responsibility for parenting problems he creates. She will seem less and less credible. Their children’s emotional and physical needs will be inconsistently met, and the kids’ bonds with both parents will suffer.

Even in shared parenting arrangements, there is primary caregiver. This parent schedules and takes the kids to doctor, dentist, and other healthcare appointments; registers them for school, gets them up, ready, and out the door every day; gives permission for and coordinate rides to and from practices, games, rehearsals, day camps, and other activities; helps kids make friends and develop social skills; teaches them how to express feelings appropriately; models how to eat, sleep, and stay clean and healthy; decides when and where to shop for their clothes; and takes primary responsibility for many more facets of their children’s growth and development. In a non-battering relationship partners share some responsibilities and discuss major parenting decisions. They can disagree but she never needs his permission and decisions arn’t driven by fear of him hurting her or the children. Parenting relationships controlled by men who batter function differently. She will do the primary caregiver activities and he will control how she does them. She remains the primary caregiver when she leaves, no matter how much time the children spend with him.

I

was diagnosed with gestational diabetes with my twins.

He blamed me and monitored my medical condition as though I couldn’t take care of it myself. I was his property, giving birth to his children.

—Mother of three A father who uses violence to control the woman and children he lives with sees them as something like human possessions. He most likely dictates her parenting style and responsibilities, severely restricting her freedom to make decisions while forcing her to be the primary caregiver, even if she works full-time and he doesn’t. He makes all the rules for the children and her, decides when and how the rules are enforced (which often includes invalidating her decisions in front of the children), and changes rules to meet his own needs and desires, all based on the fundamental beliefs—common among fathers who batter— that he is always right, and that he is entitled to control.

Undermining Her Ability to Parent

31

She constantly—and in ways he, the children, or people outside the family don’t notice—scrambles to protect herself and their kids from his violence by trying to meet his shifting parenting and housekeeping demands. His unpredictability and violence create a dangerous, chaotic life for the children and her, and she gets blamed for most of it. When he makes a mistake or causes a problem, he blames her for not anticipating his wants or needs. When the children resist his rules, he blames her for not keeping them in line.

They

know [the violence] he’s capable of. They do exactly what he tells them to do and never ask for help with anything when they’re with him. If they need help with homework or anything they wait until they’re with me so that he won’t get mad at them. They’re very careful to keep him happy during their time with him.

—Mother of two, ages 7 and 10 A father who batters often sees enforcing rules and administering punishment as his main or only parenting responsibilities, which he carries out with threats, intimidation, and physical and emotional violence. When he punishes the children—inflicts pain on them—he and they may blame her.

They may believe she caused him to be violent by being a bad mom and making him angry. She may learn to agree that it is her fault. The kids may resent her for not keeping them safe and comfortable, and for what they see as her implementing his rules, failing to prevent chaos, or not standing up to him. Even though he controls everything, including her ability to make parenting decisions, he and the kids may believe, and she might agree with them, that all the family’s problems, and all the violence he uses, are her fault.

Whenever

he had our baby son while I was at work or had another obligation, he would go to his parents, where his mom took care of the baby.

He never took the time to learn how to care for our son, and now that he has visitation I worry because he has no parenting skills of his own.

—Mother of one, age 2 When they live together, he may force her to always be at home or with the children, and he may have no interest in learning how to parent. If he lets or makes her work, or if she has to be away from the house or kids for other reasons, he may ignore children’s needs he doesn’t care about or know how to meet: feeding them, changing their diapers, making sure they get naps, playing with them, and generally taking care of them. If he takes the kids to his parents’ house, to a sister’s, or somewhere else he can get a woman to do what he won’t Moment of rest, Lori Nae Y. Letica

or can’t. Practitioners, friends, and family members may find it easy to see him as a caring, responsible dad. They may think it’s cute the kids are spending time with their grandma or aunt. They may not see what she knows: he is uninterested in learning how to care for the children, and if people he usually gets to do it are unavailable the kids will suffer. Her ability to be a good mom is undermined when she has to compensate for his lack of participation, for how he endangers and damages their children, and for being seen as “crazy” when she expresses concerns about his lack of parenting interest or skills.

He

was supposed to be watching them, but he’d fallasleep or go out and work on his car, leaving them alone [when they were very little]. One day he sent the girls to the gas station with money to buy him Monster [energy] drinks, but they weren’t allowed to get anything for themselves. They had to wait until I got home to eat.

—Mother of two, ages 7 and 10 If she has to be away, she will work hard to make child care easy for him. She will buy food, plan and assemble meals he doesn’t have to cook, lay out clean clothes, set up his day so other basic parenting tasks are as convenient as possible, then clean up when she gets home. He will tell children to take care of themselves, command older siblings to take care of younger ones, leave dirty diapers and other issues for her to address when she gets home, and generally avoid childcare responsibilities. The less she can rely on him to parent responsibly, the more stress she will feel and the less physical or emotional energy she will have for being the mom she wants to be.

After she leaves, people outside the family expect her to make parenting decisions while he refuses to care for the children and is in fact using them as tools to punish her. He will complicate her life and harm their kids by demanding visitation or exchange times that disrupt their sleep, eating, school and homework, bath, sports, social, and other schedules. The more she lets him know about the kids’ needs and her structure for meeting them, the more he will make decisions and set rules to contradict her. His intention, as when they were together, will be to get what he wants and make sure she doesn’t get what she wants, even if it means their kids suffer.

It’s

taking me so long to potty train her, and she has no idea what normal is anymore. She only wears underwear at my house, and was so close to being potty trained before he got more custody [visitation time]. She Undermining Her Ability to Parent

33

comes home from time with him in a pull-up and a diaper rash from wearing it all weekend long. I have to spend the next week trying to get her back to normal. If I say anything he just uses it against me to make me sound crazy, but it’s not about me, it’s about our daughter.

—Mother of two, ages 2 and 3 He will let the children eat and do whatever they want when they’re with him, even if it harms them. He will dictate or refuse to participate in guiding kids through potty training, switching from bottles to cups and solid foods, reducing or eliminating naps, and other developmental stages. He won’t care about parenting according to the children’s best interests. He will use them—his primary access to her—as tools for undermining and controlling her. Child custody and visitation arrangements based in trying to give him equal parenting time, instead of in protecting her and the kids from his violence, enable that tactic and the beliefs that support it.

When

we were together, I had to do everything for the boys. He never changed a diaper, cooked or fed them, put them down for naps, nothing. He’d scream and yell at me in front of the children if I didn’t do something right, or if one of the boys smelled because they hadn’t been changed quickly enough. Now the boys are too scared of him to ask to go to the bathroom. They’re afraid to ask their dad for help with anything.

—Mother of two, ages 2 and 4 Family court judges often order identical parenting time for an abusive father and the mother who escaped his violence, based on the belief that equal time is fair and creates the best outcomes for kids. But if he battered her, has threatened to punish her (maybe by hurting the kids) for leaving, undermines her ability to parent, and uses the kids as tools to control her, giving him equal time endangers her and the kids. If he gets equal parenting time immediately after she leaves with the children, the kids may struggle to develop identities separate from his abuse.

He could use his court-ordered time to develop positive relationships with his children—ones that support her and their relationships with her. But he will probably use the time and the kids to get back at her for leaving, and to control and undermine her in many of the ways he did before she left.

The kids will suffer from spending half their time with a dad who cares more about revenge against their mom than about meeting their basic physical, emotional, and social needs.

Practitioners who propose visitation arrangements that don’t 34

Naming the Tactics

account for his post separation violence may be facilitating his ability to undermine her ability to parent. Even after she leaves him, she will have to consider how his possible reaction to every decision she makes could endanger her and the kids. When she says yes to a visitation arrangement based in equal time, she may actually be acting out of terror toward how he would retaliate against her or the kids if she said he shouldn’t get any time.

When

he was trying to get custody, he “needed to be there” and made a big scene about being a great dad to the GAL [guardian ad litem, or children’s advocate], attorney, anyone who would listen. The minute he got joint custody he stopped taking him [their son] to his therapy appointment if it was during his week, and rescheduling the appointments during my time. I’m not always able to take him on such short notice, if he tells me at all. Then he told the teacher and therapist that I’m not caring enough about our son.

—Mother of two, ages 14 and 16 The more time with kids he gets, the more parenting and other work she will usually have to do, and the less time she will have for doing it. He will reschedule or skip anything he doesn’t want to do during his time with them, but not tell her. She will be left to figure out what the kids have missed and what they need to (or can) make up. Her weeks will be filled with taking kids to and from therapy sessions and dentist and doctor appointments, explaining why they missed practices and rehearsals, helping them finish rushed school assignments, and constantly scrambling to fulfill her own parenting obligations while compensating for the ones he decides not to meet. Since she is the primary caregiver, her constant struggle to keep up may seem to come from instability or ineptitude, and she may lose credibility with healthcare professionals, teachers and coaches, and other parents, limiting the kids’ opportunities. If the children misbehave in his eyes or fail to meet his needs when they are with him, or if he just wants to punish her, he will work hard to prove she is a bad mother, and that “her” children are no good.

They

came home bouncing off the walls from eating nothing but junk food at his house for the entire weekend. They didn’t have any of their homework done and were angry at me because I was making them read instead of play video games. They told me I was “no fun”’ compared to their dad. Of course I’m frustrated. It’s Sunday night and I’m supposed to fix everything in a matter of hours.

—Mother of three, ages 6, 8, and 9 Undermining Her Ability to Parent

35

Practitioners accustomed to working with families split by divorce may be tempted to see differences in what the kids eat at each parent’s house, or how late each parent lets them stay up, as just normal parts of parallel parenting. A mother being punished by a man for leaving him will often struggle against practitioners who don’t see that for her, what practitioners see as “normal differences” are actually him using kids as weapons to undermine, discredit, and break her. After kids spend time with a father who is ignoring their best interests to undermine their mother’s ability to parent, they may be tired, crabby, and unable to cope with much of anything.

While trying to maintain something like stability amid the chaos caused by his obsession with punishing her, she will need anywhere from an evening to a week to help the kids recover from time with him. She will need to account for sleep deprivation and food-related discomfort; for him not taking them to appointments or practices; for him not helping them with homework or other obligations; for him abusing or intimidating her and them; for stress from knowing that when the kids were with him they were suffering because he took care of his own needs at the expense of theirs; for judgment from practitioners, doctors, teachers, coaches, family members, the kids, and anyone else who blames her for problems that come from his abuse, from his decision not to parent.

Her

bedtime with me is nine o’clock regardless. On his weekend he put her to bed at ten, but then she stayed up with her cousin until after midnight. She came back Sunday night and was exhausted, crabby and with her homework for the next day not even started. I emailed him a request to keep her on the nine o’clock bedtime schedule so that the week wouldn’t be ruined because she doesn’t sleep on the weekends. He responded by telling me I should stop trying to control his time with his daughter, and said she was acting that way because I was a bad mother.

—Mother of one, age 12 The inconsistency and chaos that come from a violent dad undermining a mom’s ability to parent impedes kids’ development, and she can’t stop him from doing it.

Practitioners, including visitation center workers, can.

ROLE OF A VISITATION CENTER Since a father who has battered cannot use violence against his children or the woman who left him during supervised visitation, visits gives him opportunities to focus on becoming a dad who respects his kids, helps them build relationships with their mom, and supports her ability to parent instead of undermines it.

Nonverbal, Lori Nae Y. Letica

A visitation center can support him in belief changes that lead to sustained behavior changes in many ways: by basing all policies and procedures on keeping mothers and kids safe and holding fathers who have used violence accountable; by building trusting, dialogue-based relationships with fathers; by showing fathers what they must do to progress toward fewer restrictions; and by noticing and interrupting fathers’ attempts to undermine mothers’ ability to parent.

He may tell visitation center workers he has always been very involved in his children’s lives, but then only be able to give examples of spending time with them in situations where the woman he abused or other women and girls cared for the kids. She will be able to give detailed descriptions of the daily, weekly, and monthly parenting jobs she always has done alone, with limited resources, because he forces her to be the primary caregiver while dictating and questioning her decisions. Careful visitation center workers will notice and do what they can to account for those dynamics during visits and exchanges and while interacting with parents and kids.

Visitation center workers who develop a trusting relationship with a father who has battered and has never actively parented can help him deal with being nervous or resentful about taking care of his children. They can help kids through fear, hesitancy, or resistance associated with meeting their father or being around him for the first time since he abused their mother. If he has never changed a diaper, prepared a bottle, tried to calm an upset child, or done other parenting work, visitation center staff can dialogue with him about what to do and how to do it. Understanding his beliefs and experiences, including his perception of her safety concerns and his level of desire to repair harm he has caused, is crucial for visitation center workers in helping him create potential for developing safe, positive parent-child relationships.

TIPS FOR EFFECTIVE POLICIES AND PROCEDURES • Schedule all first visits to be an hour long, which is enough time for staff to evaluate a father’s parenting abilities and his children’s comfort levels.

• Check in with mothers and children after every visit; pay attention for information that could help make future visits more safe and comfortable for them.

• Demonstrate parenting skills for fathers when necessary: changing diapers, preparing bottles, comforting crying children, playing and reading, helping with homework, and just talking.

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• Document when staff members demonstrate parenting skills, when they suggest ways to build parent-child relationships, or when they intervene because of safety concerns or policy noncompliance. Include clear details about why the staff member intervened, what they taught or explained, and how the visiting parent responded. This information is vital for tracking progress toward increased victim safety. Share it, as needed, with systems practitioners who help make decisions about parenting time and visitation transitions.

• Validate, answer, and act on children’s visitation questions and concerns.

• Expect fathers to bring diapers and wipes, extra clothes, food, and anything else their children need, and to actually change, feed, and otherwise meet their kids’ needs, during visits.

• End visits early if children show or say they want to stop, or if fathers refuse to meet their needs.

• Provide parents with information about modeling behavior, setting boundaries, maintaining structure, and other methods for helping children grow and develop.

• Focus policies for compensatory time and increased visitation on safety and wellbeing for mothers and children. If a mother or child requests more visitation time and visits are positive, consider increasing it.

• Avoid visits during nap times. Visitation is for building parent-child relationships, which requires kids being prepared to engage and have fun.

• Ensure that during meal-time visits, fathers bring or prepare appropriate food for their children. The DFVC and a Duluth food bank partner to provide food for parents who can’t afford it.

• Encourage visiting fathers to parallel parent reliably, and to create visits defined by safety, continuity, and building trusting relationships with their children.

Many judges, children’s guardians, therapists, and other professionals dictate or encourage co-parenting between a father who batters and the woman who left to escape his abuse.

Co-parenting, which requires equal power, compromise, and negotiation between parents, is not possible when one parent batters the other. Parallel parenting is more possible.

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This chart from Mary Ann Aronshon, MA, LMFT, illustrates differences between cooperative and parallel parenting.

COOPERATIVE CO-PARENTING 1. Parents communicate more freely and directly about large and small issues.

PARALLEL PARENTING 1. Parents communicate little and by neutral means. They do communicate in children's emergencies.

2. Parenting plans can be general, flexible, and negotiable.

2. Parenting plans must be very specific and rigid to avoid conflict and the need for communication.

3. Transfers of children can be direct.

3. Transfers occur at neutral locations.

4. Parents consult and discuss regarding children.

4. Parents inform one another of issues regarding children.

5. The two households can cooperate with one another.

5. The two households operate independently.

6. Differing parenting styles can be discussed.

6. Discussion of parenting styles is off-limits.

7. Communication can be more general.

7. Communication is strictly limited to children's issues.

8. Meetings can be informal.

8. Meetings, if they occur at all, are scheduled, time-limited, formal, and may require a third party.

9. Understandings may remain unwritten.

9. Understandings should be clearly written and sent via neutral means for clarification, agreement.

10. More child-focused.

10. More adult-focused.

11. Transfers may be smoother, more relaxed.

11. Transfers may be more abrupt as children move from one separate culture to another.

12. No third party needed.

12. Third party authorities may be essential to work out changes or disagreements.

13. Parents may be able to help the child in talking about the other parent.

13. Each parent takes charge of his/her relationship with the child, and sends the child to the other parent to discuss their separate issues.

LOOKING TOWARD TRANSITION A father who has battered helps create transition readiness when he consistently meets children’s physical, emotional, and developmental needs, and when he supports their mother’s ability to make her own decisions about how to meet those needs. When children’s needs are met and their mom is safe to parent freely, a safe foundation for a positive parent-child relationship exists.

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SUPPORTIVE PARENTING BEHAVIOR INDICATORS FOR TRANSITION (THIS IS WHAT VISITATION CENTER STAFF SHOULD PAY ATTENTION TO AND DOCUMENT) HE SHARES NECESSARY INFORMATION ABOUT CHILDREN (Through visitation center staff or other agreed-upon communication methods.)

Supervised Visits He lets her know: • When diapers were last changed.

• When and what children ate.

• Concerns children expressed during visitation.

Supervised Exchanges He lets her know all the above plus: • When and how long children napped.

• Medicine children were given, when, in what doses, etc.

• Illnesses or other health concerns.

• Schedules and requirements for school assignments, games and practices, performances and rehearsals, and other obligations.

• Times and locations of scheduled appointments.

• Comments and recommendations from therapists, doctors, and other professionals.

HE EXPECTS VISIT TIME TO BE BASED ON CHILDREN’S ROUTINES AND NEEDS • He schedules visits around children’s nap and meal times, or he feeds them during visits.

• He accepts routines and discipline standards their mother sets and does not falsely, repeatedly accuse her of lying about them.

HE VALUES MOTHER’S CHOICES AND DECISIONS • He follows mother’s choices about which diapers, bottles, and other products to use.

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Jane Gilley

Chapter 4

Using Physical & Sexual Violence against Mother & Children

His likelihood for killing her is highest when she leaves or tries to leave him—when his ability to directly control her is most threatened.

He

was beating me in front of the children. The whole time, he was saying to them, “See? I’m not touching your mother.”

—Mother of two, ages 2 and 4 When a father who batters is with the woman he abuses, he will be violent in many ways. He may humiliate and mock her, punch and kick her, choke her, drag her by the hair, throw things at her, sexually taunt her, and rape her, sometimes in front of friends and family members, and often in front of their children. He might also threaten to kill her, the children, and himself, or beat and berate her even if she is holding an infant or a toddler. Regardless of how he abuses her, he hurts their children, who he may also be directly abusing.

If

he is willing to do these things to me, why do people think he won’t do it to them?

—Mother of two He may also abuse his children, and she may seem to be letting it happen. Many family members, friends, and practitioners will accuse her of being a bad parent and human being, and hold her responsible for his violence, without understanding how his battering dictates and constricts her choices. They will not see that he has isolated, beaten, or sexually abused her, or told her she is crazy and incompetent, until she is powerless or compliant. They may not see that she is horrified by what he is doing to the kids, and terrified that if she says or does anything to question him, he could kill her or them.

When

I wasn’t working I could protect my son from the abuse, but when I was working I had to send him up north to keep him safe. My son would wake up at night when he [the man who abused her] was yelling at me, telling me I was a whore, breaking dishes, shredding plants. Then I knew I had to leave.

—Mother of one, age 8

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Some mothers who can safely make parenting decisions do use violence to punish and control children, but this chapter is about mothers who can make very few choices without fear of being punished by a man who batters them. It is about women and children who men abuse during post-separation child visits and exchanges. Sometimes part of a man’s battering process includes coercing or intimidating a woman into abusing children. Some battered mothers make the agonizing decision to yell at or hit their children as a protection measure—they know he will do it if they don’t, so they try to do it less intensely, and with less damage, than he does.

Most battered moms do not collude with or participate in child abuse. A mother who works outside the home may not know the man who batters her is also abusing or neglecting their children. If she does know about his child abuse, she may endanger herself to protect the children. In a home where a man batters, mother and children often develop strong bonds expressed in safety plans, subtle manipulations, and unspoken tactics for protecting themselves and each other. A battered mom most often tries to protect her children and help them learn how to protect each other.

I

was waiting in my car outside his house to pick up my son.

He [the father] came running out of the house at me. I knew by the look in his eyes he was coming to kill me. I rolled up the window and locked the doors. He jumped on the car and was punching the windows to get in. The windows were breaking.

He was screaming at me. I started to back up to get away, and backed into another car. There wasn’t really any damage, but when the police came he convinced them that I tried to hit him.

They told us to call the visitation center.

— Mother of one, age 4 The risk that a violent father will kill the woman he abuses or their children is highest when she leaves or tries to leave him—when his ability to directly control her and them is most threatened. She knows this, either intuitively or through experience, and she must weigh any thoughts about leaving against the possible harm to her and the kids. She may leave in an instant, with nothing, because a rare opportunity presents itself. She may plan and gather resources for months or years then make a careful, methodical escape. If he knows she wants to leave, or if she gets away, he may threaten to Jane Gilley, Unfolding

take the children and everything else from her, to hurt her or the children more severely than he already has, or to kill her, the children, or himself. He has carried out past threats, so she has no reason to doubt him.

Getting away does not guarantee safety for her and the kids.

More often than even battering-intervention practitioners realize, violent fathers beat and rape mothers during unsupervised child visits and exchanges. Anyone who pays attention to daily news reports knows many stories of estranged, abusive fathers killing mothers and children.

Some battered moms find the physical danger of trying to leave, or the constant stress of trying to protect themselves and the kids in the chaos of hopping among couches and shelters, more difficult than being with him and knowing what to expect.

If

I was still with him, I would be able to protect my child better.

—Mother of one, 15 months Some battered mothers say they find staying with a man who batters less draining than leaving and having to deal with his continued abuse and practitioners who hold her responsible for provoking, avoiding and ending his violence against them. Battered mothers have told Duluth Family Visitation Center (DFVC) workers they believe “the system” cares more about protecting men’s rights than about keeping women and children safe. If practitioners don’t base every policy, practice, and decision on protecting a battered mother and her children and holding the man who batters her accountable, we give her fewer and fewer reasons to seek or trust our help. We endanger her and the kids by making it easier for him to physically and sexually abuse them without consequences.

Even

after I left and had a protection order, his church told him that we were “forever married in the eyes of God.” In his mind, this was permission to force sex at every exchange. This went on for years after I left him.

What could I do?

—Mother of three, ages 6, 13, and 14 More often than we might like to admit, she will feel and be dismissed and doubted by people who are trying to help her.

Child protection files are opened in her name, not his. She is scrutinized. He isn’t. She risks losing parental rights, family and friends’ support, her job, and other rights and resources.

He rarely does. If practitioners and her supporters learn he abuses her in front of their children, or that he directly Using Physical & Sexual Violence against Mother & Children

45

abuses the children, they may say their support depends on her kicking him out, leaving, or filing a protection order against him, even if those processes are beyond her resources, or would put her in danger. In Minnesota, practitioners can create a service plan that basically requires her to change him or get rid of him if she wants to keep her kids. They may say she will lose the kids if she “lets” him see them, even if she faces contempt-of-court charges for disobeying orders to participate in dangerous, unsupervised child exchanges and visitation.

If she leaves, she and her kids may lose a home, financial stability, and other forms of security; she will be criticized by family, friends, his attorney, and other people for taking his kids away from him, and for complicating his and the kids’ lives. She will be patronized with chemical-dependency and psychological assessments, parenting classes, and other humiliating requirements based in the belief that she and the kids are suffering not because his violence causes problems, but because something is wrong with her. She will be expected to change. He will not. He could be granted significant parenting time if she doesn’t meet the contradictory, crushing expectations practitioners and systems place on her.

would call me and threaten me. I had to give him phone sex, or he would take the kids from me. This was always the threat. Eventually he succeeded—he took the kids.

—Mother of three, ages 5, 8, and 10

He

During unsupervised visits and exchanges, a violent father might beat the woman who left him, rape her, or coerce her into having sex by threatening to hurt her or their children, or take the kids. Courts that base visitation orders on supposedly equal parenting time instead of on safety for her and the kids often dismiss those and other forms of violence during visits and exchanges as “relationship problems.” The more she tells authorities about his threats and violence, the more likely practitioners are to see her as annoying and demanding, and to accuse her of trying to prevent him from seeing “his” kids.

Judges, attorneys, police officers, and other practitioners who believe she’s just whining when she describes his violence, tries to get protection orders, or requests long-term supervised visitation, will classify what she’s saying as nothing more than one side of “he-said, she-said” testimony. Eventually, she will just stop speaking up, which is what he wants.

My

children went camping with him and his new wife. He threatened her with a gun in front of the children. He treats her like he treated me, and the children see it. It was then he had to see them supervised. The court ordered him for just a few months. When it was time for him to go unsupervised again, 46

Naming the Tactics

he wrote me a list of demands about the children. Here we go again.

—Mother of three: 8-year-old twins and a 12-year-old An abusive man’s post-separation physical and sexual violence are not simply relationship problems. They are intimidation and coercion tactics he uses to get what he wants. They are direct declarations that if the woman who left him and their kids resist his power and control, he will hurt them. The beliefs that help him justify that behavior don’t apply just to her, but to any woman he’s with. Unless those beliefs change or practitioners hold him accountable for his violence, he will keep doing whatever he needs to do to maintain power and control over women he is with, and his children will keep witnessing and being damaged by it.

My

children spend 40 percent of their time at their dad’s house. My son recently came back to me with bruises on his neck and marks on his back. He said his dad and stepmom held him by the throat and hit him.

The visitation center and law enforcement documented the injuries and my son’s statement, and social services was called. I tried to get a protection order to have visits supervised. I was denied the order. Social services did not even investigate, because we’ve had so many reports they told me I was no longer credible. My son wanted to see his dad, just not at his house, not when he was violent. He screamed and cried when he had to go.

—Mother of two, ages 4 and 8 A father who abused a woman and their children when they were together will often escalate his child abuse when she leaves. During his unsupervised visitation time, when she can’t be with the children, they must try to protect themselves, and they may spend entire visits appeasing him to avoid his violence. Whether kids are abused by a dad who batters, or see him abuse other family members, they are forced to make decisions about how or if to protect their mom, themselves, and their siblings.

My

daughter’s therapist reported her dad to child protection services due to a violent incident that she was exposed to at his house. She didn’t want to go [to his house], and would scream about getting in the car. The social workers asked me, “Why would you do that? Why would you send her?” There is no communication between social services and the courts. Child protection services are telling me that it was abusive to send her, but I know a judge would hold me in contempt [if I didn’t send her]. There was

Using Physical & Sexual Violence against Mother & Children

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no protection for me or my daughter from the system in this situation.

—Mother of three: 4-year-old twins and one 9-year-old Lack of communication among practitioners may create conflicting expectations for a mother and endanger her kids after she leaves a violent man. For example: a court may threaten to hold her in contempt and possibly reduce the time she gets to spend with the kids if she doesn’t participate in visits and exchanges that feel dangerous to them, and social services may remove the kids from her home if she takes them to see a dangerous dad. Regardless of which impossible choice she makes, she—not him—is held accountable for his violence and its effects. He typically won’t be at risk of losing visitation or parental rights, even if he uses violence during visits and exchanges.

ROLE OF VISITATION CENTER would not return our son. Then he wouldn’t answer my phone calls. The line would just ring and ring. One time I went to his house to get our son, and he shot at me as we were leaving. We had to run, but thankfully we are alive.

—Mother of one, age 6

He

A battered mother will often first meet DFVC staff or other practitioners with bruises around her neck, scratches across her arms, a swollen nose, black eyes, and other visible and invisible injuries. Children arrive afraid, hesitant, resistant, and excited. They may not have seen their dad since he was beating their mom and they couldn’t stop it. They may also have been abused by him, and their only interaction with him may have been submitting in an attempt to placate him and avoid his violence. If we place more importance on meeting court orders for his visitation rights than on honoring those experiences, we are endangering her and her kids and helping him dismiss their right to autonomy.

I

knew that if I didn’t have exchanges at the visitation center, I’d really be in trouble. He’d be able to harass me. He would physically get at me, and get his friends to get at me.

—Mother of one, age 2 One visitation center guiding principal is protecting battered mothers and their children from abusive fathers. Everything about a center—including its physical space, its documentation and parent-conduct policies, and its operation philosophy and procedures—must focus on safety for battered women and their children. Staff who understand domestic violence dynamics and their long-term effects on children are most able to interrupt his physical, sexual, and other violence. Visitation center staff need 48

Naming the Tactics

to check in with children, listen to and document children’s concerns, and work with other practitioners to validate kids’ voices.

TIPS FOR EFFECTIVE POLICIES AND PROCEDURES • Require mothers and fathers to use separate entrances and exits when dropping off and picking up children.

• Maintain a parking policy that prevents mothers and fathers from having contact outside the center.

• Require the visiting parent or the parent who dropped off children to wait at least ten minutes before leaving the center, so they can avoid contact with the other parent and children.

• Require parents to arrive at staggered times.

• Report on-site protection-order violations to police.

• Report on-site threats against staff members or anyone else to police.

• Document all on-site incidents and incident reports.

• Prohibit on-site physical discipline. Illustrate, teach, and encourage methods of redirecting behavior, and pass mothers’ effective non-physical techniques along to fathers.

• Document threats to spank or hit children.

• Intervene in threats of physical discipline by redirecting conversation and action, then document children’s reactions to the threats, and fathers’ reactions to the intervention.

• Refer mothers to shelters, advocates, social services, therapists, police, and other people and organizations who can help maintain her and her children’s post-separation safety.

• Work with community programs that help battered women access long-term advocacy. In a community without longterm advocacy, collaborate to create it.

• Collaborate with other practitioners to solve problems and establish legal and social-service processes for responding to mothers’ and children’s safety needs.

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• Participate in a coordinated community response (CCR) and work with police officers, attorneys, advocates, social workers, men’s non-violence program coordinators, other CCR participants to identify and address challenges in keeping mothers and children safe post-separation.

• Create safety plans with battered mothers. When fathers make threats or have outbursts, help them implement the plans.

LOOKING TOWARD TRANSITION Any policy or action that strays from the central purpose of keeping battered mothers and their children safe can endanger them, so every aspect of a plan for transitioning to off-site exchanges or visitation, including standards for how a father behaves, must be based in that purpose. The more a mom and kids trust staff, the safer they may feel to discuss off-site abuse.

If staff can document information about a father violating courtordered visitation conditions, they can often suspend his visits or move them on-site without court approval, or support court action that keeps a mom and her kids safe.

ACKNOWLEDGING HIS PAST USE OF VIOLENCE Practitioners can coordinate to protect a battered mother and her children, but no one can ever guarantee their safety, regardless of how long it has been since they left or were last abused by a man who has used violence against them. The most effective way to acknowledge an abusive father’s violence and to protect a battered mother and her children is to reduce or limit his access to them while holding him accountable for changing his own behavior. He won’t make lasting behavior changes until he changes beliefs that support using violence, and he won’t be able to change those beliefs until he acknowledges his violence, its effects, and his responsibility for it. A community can’t force a violent man to change, but it can hold him accountable for not changing.

SAFE, RESPECTFUL VISITATION AND EXCHANGES BEHAVIOR INDICATORS FOR TRANSITION: HE DEMONSTRATES RESPONSIBILITY FOR ESTABLISHING SAFETY Supervised Visits & Exchanges • He follows all visitation center policies without trying manipulate, coerce, or intimidate anyone.

• He does not throw threatening, violent outbursts.

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Naming the Tactics

• He follows protection-order boundaries and intentions.

• He does not abuse children, partners, other family members, or animals.

HE FOLLOWS DEVELOPMENTALLY APPROPRIATE PHYSICAL BOUNDARIES WITH CHILDREN DURING VISITATION Supervised Visits & Exchanges • He uses appropriate discipline methods.

• He maintains age-appropriate and child-driven physical boundaries (e.g. allows children to shower and change clothes in private).

HE ADHERES TO AGREED-UPON EXCHANGE BOUNDARIES Unsupervised Exchanges, coordinated through transition plan • He exchanges children at agreed-upon sites and times.

• He communicates necessary information about the children respectfully.

• He allows the children’s mother physical space (e.g. doesn’t force her out of her car and into his).

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Lori Nae Y. Letica

Chapter 5 Using Harassment & Intimidation

He may try to get his way or avoid responsibility by yelling at advocates or visitation center workers, calling them names and insulting them, threatening them with violent gestures, or invading their physical space. Those tactics often work, and getting what he wants by harassing and intimidating people who are trying to protect her and the kids helps him justify using those tactics against them all.

A battered mother is still vulnerable to harassment, intimidation, and other forms of abuse from a violent man after she leaves him, even when his access to her is legally limited or cut off. Harassment, in this context, is any repeated contact she does not want that he uses to threaten her or the children. He may disregard or follow court orders in ways intended to show her he can hurt her and the kids if he decides to. He may exploit systems and institutions set up to protect her and the kids. He will use the kids—sometimes by intentionally hurting them—to manipulate and scare her.

He

tries to make me feel like he is still in my life by driving around my house. Or he arrives early for [child] exchanges and waits to watch me drive in, or he will drive right by my car and wave. I have no witness.

What can I do?

—Mother of two, ages 2 and 4 A violent father who is court-ordered to stay away from her and her home, job, childcare site, and other places will often maintain legal but conspicuous distance, to show her he is watching her and to remind her that legal protection only goes so far. He may drive around her block for hours, show up and make his presence known in places where she can’t easily find safety, or otherwise openly defy protection orders in ways designed to scare her and practitioners, showing them how much power he has.

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He

continues to live his life, however my life changes. He works at the library, and I can’t know his schedule, so now we can’t go to the library anymore. It’s like the OFP put me and my kids in a frame. We can’t go anywhere. He was circling my house all night. He knows my schedule, and would wait in the McDonald’s parking lot when he knew we would go there after church. I can’t do anything like I used to, and the boys are always asking me why we can’t. I don’t know what to tell them. I can’t tell them the truth.

—Mother of two, ages 2 and 4 During unsupervised child exchanges, she and her children are especially vulnerable to his intimidation and harassment.

With no conditions or practitioners to hold him accountable, he can drive recklessly, yell or scream at her and the children, make sure to be cleaning his gun when she picks up or drops off kids, bully hesitant kids, slash her tires, break car windows, and do anything else to intimidate them, all without consequences. Under the fear and pressure he creates, she may be unable to update him about children’s food and medical issues, homework schedules, and other needs. Without legal and other practices that hold him accountable for intimidation, harassment, and other violence during exchanges, she and her children can’t feel or be safe.

Our

court order states that our son is with his dad every other weekend and one day a week. The order means nothing to him though. He just showed up at my house whenever he felt like it to take my son. If I wasn’t home, he’d call me repeatedly, 60 times sometimes, to demand visitation and make sure that we couldn’t have a good time together.

—Mother of two, ages 7 and 12 He may create or pretend to have an urgent childcare issue to justify texting, calling, emailing, going to see, or demanding a visit from a woman he abused and is under court orders not to contact. When the kids are with him, he might tell her one of them is sick and needs medicine she has. He might intentionally keep a school book or assignment he knows a child will need, so he can deliver it to her house. He might bait her with a text message, call, or email saying he has something important to tell or ask her about the kids, then berate or harass her once she responds.

Shelter, Lori Nae Y. Letica

It

was written into the order that we could email about finances only. He sent 35 emails in one day with a $ in the title, and the whole body of the email was about what a bad mother I was, how I was keeping his kids away from him, and how God was ashamed of me for leaving him.

—Mother of two, ages 14 and 18 When he manipulates and harasses her with claims about their kids’ welfare, he forces her into torturous, intimidating decisions. If he is court ordered not to contact her but sends a text message that says “he’s sick, come get him” during a visit she is faced with an impossible choice.She could ignore the court order, endanger herself, and risk being reprimanded for not staying away from him. Or she could comply with the order, protect herself, and get accused of being a negligent, self-interested mother. Every time he harasses her with a child-based lie to manipulate and intimidate her, her choices become more difficult and confusing, and she has good reasons to feel more fearful, frustrated, overwhelmed, and unsure about how to act and who to trust.

He’d

yell at me, screaming threats at me and our son, throw the car seat, anything to make the exchange awful. My family never believed how bad it was until my mother did an exchange and he went ballistic on her, screaming and stomping around the car while my son was trying to get in.

—Mother of three, ages 3, 9, and 10 He will use kids as harassment and intimidation tools, slipping threatening or manipulating notes for their mom into their jacket pockets or book bags during hugs, forcing them to convey verbal threats to her, punishing them for being on “her side,” and telling them to accuse her of screwing up the family.

He may also have them threaten to abuse her the same way he does or force them to watch and participate when he abuses her. They come to understand that he values them not for being his children, but as effective tools for hurting their mom.

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When he harasses, intimidates, and abuses her, he is also hurting the kids. They are often in the back seat when he grabs for her through a car window or slams his foot into a door. They watch from house windows as he or his supporters stalk her by driving around the block for hours or leaves “love” notes in the mailbox. They hear him scream obscenities and threats at her, and see him flip her off, mimic slitting her throat and other violent acts, and mock and laugh at her. When they see him get what he wants by harassing and intimidating her, they learn that violence and threats can be effective tools for controlling her and other people.

The

kids don’t dare act how they feel. They have to think about how they feel and act, and can’t ever tell him what they’re actually wanting to do. They’ve heard his threats. He’s put them in a place that they don’t ever really get to make a choice.

—Mother of two, ages 8 and 12

When he uses the kids as tools for harassing, intimidating, and controlling practitioners and their mom, he prevents them from being or figuring out who they are. He puts them under immense pressure to please him and either protect or distance themselves from her. He teaches them, through powerful examples, that harassment and intimidation are effective means of getting what they want when they want it, that girls and women exist to serve boys and men, and that boys and men exist to dominate girls and women. Instead of learning productive conflict-resolution skills they learn to yell, intimidate, and punish—use harassment, intimidation, and other violent tactics—to get their way. Children who grow up learning those lessons apply them to relationships in school, friendship, dating, and other areas of their lives. They often internalize fear, and distrust any adult’s ability to protect them.

emailed him to ask if he could buy school supplies, since he hadn’t paid child support in three months. I didn’t receive a reply. I sent another one the day before his weekend with her, and when he responded he criticized me for “trying to control his time” with his daughter, and for not providing for her needs myself. He only responds when he can turn something around to make me look like a bad mother or uncooperative.

—Mother of one, age 9

I

If she tries to parallel parent with him, she will probably face intimidating and exasperating accusations—from him, from his and her friends and family members, and from practitioners who collude with him—of trying to control how he parents and spends time with the children. He may harass her or

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Naming the Tactics

practitioners who advocate for her with constant claims that they are trying to control him with mandates about what to do during “his time.” If he can successfully portray himself as a victim, and get practitioners to see him as one, he gains another opportunity to effectively use the system to control her and avoid accountability.

His

family is trying to buy or scare my witnesses, who are all American. I can’t use my friend from the Ukraine, because I won’t be taken seriously.

—Mother of two, ages 2 and 4 After she leaves him, he can often use the image of himself as a victim to engage practitioners, his support network, and her supporters in colluding with his harassment and intimidation. When he can encourage practitioners to believe she is a bad mother, or she is lying about him abusing her, they will be more likely to threaten her with losing custody of the children or accuse her of obstructing the court process.

When he can convince everyone that he isn’t really violent, and that their “relationship problems” are her fault, they will put her under immense pressure to drop her protection order against him, stop being difficult, and say yes to an arrangement that works for him. She may forfeit rights that protect her and the kids, or never learn they exist. The whole process will focus on convincing her to help him and their kids, instead of on acknowledging the effects of his past and current violence and protecting her and the kids from future abuse. The more his violence disappears from the process, the more danger she and the children face.

Our

daughter came home saying that he kicked the cat down the stairs. He had three kids with the other woman. My daughter huddled the kids in the bedroom and put something in front of the door. He came to the door demanding she come out with the kids. She told him he had to say sorry for hurting the cat. He said the cat shit on the floor. My daughter said, “Well, if you would clean the litter box it wouldn’t have to.”

—Mother of four, ages 8, 10, 14 & 16 A violent father will often hit and kill pets in front of the woman and children he abuses, as punishment for what he see as their or an animal’s bad behavior. Witnessing and feeling responsible for violence against animals can create long-term mental and emotional damage in children. When their dad—someone they should feel safe around—is the one hurting the animals, that damage is compounded.

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I

had to come get my son early because he [her son’s father] started yelling and swearing at [visitation center] staff. When I got there, he had left, but my son was crying, and we called for a police escort. The guardian who was there to watch his visit said it was her fault, and totally excused his violence. The staff wrote it into a letter to the judge, and wouldn’t let him back without a commitment [to have respectful and non-violent interactions] and a special meeting.

—Mother of one, age 11 A father who batters will often try to harass and intimidate practitioners who enforce behavior boundaries and expectations. He may try to get his way or avoid responsibility by yelling at advocates or visitation center workers, calling them names and insulting them, threatening them or invading their physical space. Those tactics often work, and getting what he wants by harassing and intimidating people who are trying to protect her and the kids helps him justify using those tactics against them all. All domestic violence responders must hold abusive men to behavior and communication standards in which harassment and intimidation are unacceptable. Some practitioners respond to his harassment and intimidation by asking her to change, to make things “easier for everyone.”

When that happens, we become part of the problem—we participate in making his harassment and intimidation effective.

ROLE OF VISITATION CENTER When a father harasses, intimidates, and keeps endangering a woman who left to protect herself and their children from his violence, she may seek help from police, an attorney, a shelter, or other agencies, including a visitation center. Visitation centers exist to keep battered mothers and their children safe by interrupting abusive fathers’ harassment, intimidation, and other violent tactics during exchanges and visitation.

Duluth Family Visitation Center (DFVC) policies, procedures, and physical space are designed to help parents build safe, positive relationships with children, and to maintain boundaries that prevent or de-escalate conflict. Well-trained staff members treat all parents and children respectfully and expect both parents to behave respectfully during on-site visits, exchanges, interventions, and phone calls. Yelling, screaming, and all other harassing or intimidating

Waiting for Justice, Lori Nae Y. Letica

behaviors are strictly prohibited. Allowing a violent father to use harassment and intimidation within a visitation center supports his process of endangering the woman he has abused and their children.

TIPS FOR EFFECTIVE POLICIES AND PROCEDURES • Set clear boundaries, expectations, and consequences for breaking policies during orientation.

• Maintain consistent consequences for threats, intimidation, harassment, and other violence. (Examples: Ending a visitation session. Contacting police, his probation officer, or his attorney. Reporting the incident to a judge.

Terminating visitation until further court action. Scheduling individual meetings to discuss his behavior.)

• Require court orders protecting battered mothers and their children to stay in effect, and report on-site violations while using the visitation center.

• Discourage communication between parents during onsite visits and exchanges when a protection order is in place.

• Create policies and spaces that prevent as much involuntary contact between parents as possible.

• Require parents dropping off or picking up children to park separately, and to enter and leave the center through predetermined separate doors.

• Schedule staggered times for parents to pick up and drop off children.

• Work with both parents to establish contact boundaries that keep her and the children safe and hold him accountable for ensuring their safety outside the VC. • Document—with painstaking care, clarity, and comprehensiveness—all messages from both parents about visitation, exchanges, cancellations, requests, and other matters.

• Maintain a policy that says he must have necessary childcare items for exchanges and visitation, and consider arranging ways for parents to pick up or drop off childcare items at the visitation center. Neither parent should need

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to pick up anything at the other parent’s house, especially when a protection order is in place.

• Help fathers who have used violence speak or write safe, child-focused, and respectful messages to women and children.

• Monitor parent-child communication during on-site visitation.

Intervene when conversation seems intended to threaten, manipulate, or intimidate children or their mother. Document the conversation, the child’s reaction, the intervention, and the parent’s reaction to the intervention.

LOOKING TOWARD TRANSITION Visitation center workers are in uniquely critical positions for illustrating how an abusive father uses patterns of harassment, intimidation, and other violence. They document and intervene in his harassment, intimidation, and other violence, and they have frequent contact with him, the woman and any kids he has hurt, and practitioners. They are also uniquely positioned to see the behavior changes he must make before they trust him not to harass, intimidate, or endanger her and his kids during unsupervised visitation and exchanges.

BEHAVIOR INDICATORS FOR TRANSITION HE COMMUNICATES WITHOUT BEING THREATENING Visitation • His communication with his kids centers on them. He does not pick on them or try to manipulate their feelings.

• His communication with visitation center staff is respectful.

He doesn’t threaten them, yell or swear at them, call them names, or try to intimidate them in any other way.

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• He does not single out staff members or try to pit them against each other.

Supervised Exchanges • He does not intentionally break items in front of or belonging to children.

• He participates in exchanges without yelling and or using threats.

• His communication with her is child-centered.

HE COMMUNICATES WITHIN ESTABLISHED BOUNDARIES • He abides by the protection-order conditions.

• He uses established communication methods. For example: if email is court ordered, he does not call or text.

• He communicates within agreed-upon content guidelines.

For example, he discusses children and shared finances, and doesn’t ask her probing questions about her personal life.

• He does not harass, intimidate, or manipulate her or children using any methods or third parties.

• He communicates clearly and honestly.

• He does not use lawyers or family members to harass or intimidate visitation center staff into changing policies.

• He does not use lawyers, therapists, guardians, or anyone else to contact her and manipulate or coerce her into meeting his demands.

• He uses agreed-upon third parties for communication, and follows established boundaries.

• He does not try to sneak notes through the children.

• He sends only notes that contain appropriate information.

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Chapter 6

Disregarding Children

A father who batters often enforces a family structure that serves only his needs and wants. He ignores or forbids children’s activities and experiences that don’t fit within that structure, or he forces the woman he abuses to be responsible for them.

As children grow, they develop autonomous interests, activities, and responsibilities as they grow. They become independent human beings who interact with, depend on, and are accountable to their families, other children and adults, and institutions. They participate in school, church, work, and other communities. They develop close friendships, and learn how to have and be boyfriends or girlfriends.

They are expected to show up on time and prepared for class, practice, rehearsal, work, or other obligations. When they don’t meet those expectations, they face consequences intended to help prepare them for the higher stakes of adulthood. They experience challenges, make mistakes, and sometimes fail in school, sports, creative endeavors, and relationships. Teachers, coaches, Parenting Time Expeditor: and other adults praise, criticize, A practitioner assigned by a and discipline them in many forms. judge to resolve parenting disputes, and authorized to Parents who support each other, make legally binding orders and each other’s relationships without a judge’s review. with their children, can guide kids through all these experiences, helping them learn to navigate expectations, express themselves, and participate in the world. When a violent father disregards his children, he robs them of experiences they need to grow physically, emotionally, and intellectually, and he creates impossible parenting challenges for the woman he batters.

A father who batters enforces a home structure that primarily serves his needs and wants. He ignores or forbids children’s academics, jobs, sports, friends, social activities, camps, artistic pursuits, and other experiences that don’t fit within that structure, or he forces the woman he abuses to be responsible for them. If he won’t pay for extracurricularactivity fees, or basic school supplies and clothes, she must ask friends and family members for help, endanger herself in Disregarding Children

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ways that might include spending money she may be secretly saving, or try to help the kids understand why they just can’t have certain experiences. She will also have to fit her and the children’s schedules around his. For example: if he expects dinner at 6:00 p.m. and Girl Scouts starts at 6:30 p.m., Girl Scouts either doesn’t happen or becomes a miserable experience.

Many mothers who use the Duluth Family Visitation Center (DFVC) describe their own versions of common experiences that go something like this: While she and the children are getting ready for a school concert or awards ceremony, he starts picking on how they look, or sarcastically asking what makes them so important. From experience, they know he doesn’t want them to go, and he is trying to get them to feel foolish enough to stay home. If they ignore or resist him, he becomes more emotionally abusive, starts physically intimidating them, or uses physical violence—whatever he must do to keep them from going. If they manage to go, they are so worn down by the experience that they are less likely to even think about attending the next event. If they don’t go, she has to call the school, lie about why the children weren’t there, and figure out how to help her disappointed, scared, angry kids deal with the experience.

Some men in Duluth men’s non-violence group conversations justify being dictators over their families and disregarding children’s needs by voicing beliefs such as, “I’m the head of the house,” “I’m the king of the castle,” or “I’m the dad, so I get to say what does and doesn’t happen.” A man who believes his rightful place is in charge of his wife or girlfriend and their children will make them all submit to what he says is best— which is usually what works best for him—even if it hurts them.

Visitation center staff frequently see fathers enforce strict gender foles during visits, ridiculing boys for crying or wearing nail polish, and excluidng girls from playing “boy games” such as catch and football with him and male siblings. When they don’t submit to his demands, he punishes them.

I

don’t sign my kids up for anything that might fall on his weekend anymore. It’s just disappointing for them when he doesn’t take them.

—Mother of two, ages 4 and 9 After a mother leaves to protect herself and children from a father who batters, his beliefs about controlling the kids usually stay the same. He will still hurt the her and kids by disregarding the children’s needs and wants in order to meet his own. He will often take the kids to school late and

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sometimes not get them there at all. He won’t support or help in their homework process, and he may forbid them from doing school work during his time with them. He won’t let them go to friends’ birthday parties. He will refuse to adjust his visitation schedule to accommodate summer camp and other fun or formative experiences that threaten his sense of entitlement and control. Because he will probably ignore kids’ games, practices, rehearsals, performances, play dates, doctor’s appointments, or any other commitments he doesn’t care about, she may avoid signing them up for anything that might happen during his time with them. For example: they might not get to be on a soccer team because he won’t let them go to practices and games that happen during “his” time. When he does only what he wants to do, he limits the kids ability to develop a positive self-identity.

When they can’t keep consistent schedules, they lose trust among teachers, coaches, medical professionals, other adults and parents, and other kids.

Many men in the visitation center say they “don’t need anyone telling them how to raise their kids.” For example, at the recommendation of the school, a mother enrolled her child in speech therapy. He screamed at the mother in front of the child, telling her the child didn’t need speech therapy.

He then yelled at the school staff and dedicated his visitation time to telling the child that speech therapy was only for “retards” and encouraged and rewarded her for speaking in a baby voice (the reason speech therapy was recommended).

If anything regarding the kids is his idea or something he wants them to do, he will sign them up, regardless of their desire to participate and her ability to support their participation. For example, a father (who played hockey as a child) signed an 11 year-old child up for hockey without teaching the child how to skate or telling the mother. The child had played soccer and volleyball for years, which he had never supported financially or otherwise. The child didn’t want to play and told her mom that she was embarassed and humiliated, and that she was doing it only to make her dad happy. These activities, which are about him, not the children become constant opportunities for him to keep the kids extra time or to not bring them to appointments or ensure that school work is completed.

He

would tease them about going to school, and about where they went to school. They go to a charter school. A good school, called Edison. He would ridicule the girls for going to “Ed-DUH-son.” He belittled them for academic successes.

—Mother of two, ages 8 and 10 Disregarding Children

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A violent father will often create problems for his children and the woman he abuses by blocking the kids’ potential to make progress and have confidence in school. He may mock their enthusiasm, dismiss their achievements and challenges, and refuse to give them vital support. At the same time, he will expect them to meet demands and make progress, and punish or berate them when they don’t. He will use fear to manipulate them when it serves his needs. They must constantly consider his possible reactions when they think about expressing what they want and need.

When

he had his son on weeknights, he would do things like play video games with him for five hours, and then have him start his homework at 1:00 a.m.

—Mother of two, ages 3 and 8 School can be tough for kids who get unconditional support in non-violent homes. In post separation situations where dad is ignoring or impeding their efforts, it can feel impossible. They may get parental support only from their mom, whose patience and attention are stretched thin by trying to survive a stressful post separation life that includes compensating for the chaos their dad creates. If he has weekday overnight visits, he will often allow or even encourage the kids to stay up far past their bedtimes, ignore their homework, and skip school—instead of helping them complete their work, get a good night’s sleep, and show up to school prepared, rested, and on time. The kids face the consequences at school and,as a result, are anxious and exhausted. Children may have to stay in from recess, miss fieldtrips or lose out on fun classroom activities because their work is not done. She will often be alone in helping them negotiate the long-lasting emotional and developmental effects he creates when he disregards their need for his support and makes it tough for her to support them how she wants to.

He

[her partner’s son from another relationship] was always 20 minutes late for everything—hockey, school, anything—because he wouldn’t bring him on time, and would blame me. After a while, his son didn’t want to spend time at our house, because he arrived late everywhere, and that’s embarrassing for kids. He hated me for all of it.

—Mother of two, ages 3 and 8 When he begins a relationship with a new woman, he will expect her to take care of the children. He will hold her accountable for the children’s feeding, napping, school work and activities during his court-ordered visitation time. If she fails to do any of it, he will let everyone know, including her, that it’s her fault. He might exploit her desire to please him and

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treat the kids well by telling her he fears their mom is a bad parent or person, making her feel responsible for them. Once he has kids established control over her, he can pressure, manipulate, or intimidate her into doing any parenting task he doesn’t feel like doing, and if something goes wrong he can blame it on her.

He will actively work to pit his new girlfriend and his ex against each other, ensuring their time and energy goes into hating each other while he stands idly by, appearing to just be a “good guy in a bad situation.” When his new girlfriend submits to his demands she makes his ex, who is resisting his control, appear even more difficult and self-interested, and more incompetent as a mother, to friends, family members, and practitioners. Maybe even to the kids. If the kids seem well-cared for at their dad’s house and their mom seems like she’s struggling to hold it together, family, friends, and practitioners might see his home as safe and stable and hers as dangerous and chaotic.. To everyone but the woman he abuses, he might seem like a responsible, active parent.

They might start to believe him when he says she—not his violence—was the problem.

don’t want to see him anymore, because I’m sick of being treated like his servant and hearing that I’m dumb because of the school that I go to and the friends that I have.

He needs to learn that he can’t treat me like that.

—Girl, age 10

I

Kids of a father who batters often try to protect themselves by refusing to participate in court-ordered visits with him. Adults who force those frightened, angry kids to spend time with him are colluding with his disregard for their needs. Too often, family-court representatives mandated to focus on children’s best interests create visitation orders that meet a father’s needs but wreak havoc on children’s and an abused mother’s schedules by forcing kids to miss school, practices, games, and other activities, and forcing her to compensate, explain, and adjust on his behalf. Courts often focus more on making sure visitation-time orders are followed than on honoring and monitoring the complex lives of kids from violent homes.

Children’s needs and concerns should be given more importance than court orders, and kids should be supported in making their own choices about if, when, and how long they spend time with the man who abuses their mom.

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ROLE OF VISITATION CENTERS As safe places staffed by caring, respectful, and credible adults, visitation centers exist to interrupt abusive fathers’ disregard of their children’s needs, and to provide space for children’s voices to be heard. When policies MODELING and procedures that fairly represent A CHILDREN-CENTERED POLICY children’s best interests are Visitation center workers need to consistently implemented, kids have model and encourage parenting room to openly express needs and that is positive and productive for concerns to adults who can help children. Every father’s economic them. When a father who used resources, time, and geographical violence begins to care about and proximity should be respected, but meet his children’s needs, a solid children’s needs and safety must foundation for a healthy parent-child take precedence. relationship can be laid.

TIPS FOR EFFECTIVE POLICIES AND PROCEDURES • Schedule visits so everyone who is supposed to be there can participate comfortably. During orientation, gather as much information as possible about his, her, and the children’s schedules. Visits will have the potential to be least disruptive and most productive when everyone sees visitation center workers are trying to respect their time.

• Support and carefully document children’s fears about and decisions to refuse visits. Visitation center workers can be creative in helping children feel safe during on- and off-site visits. For example: if a girl is unsure about being with a father who has abused her mom, ask him to support her in calling her mom during visits. She will know her feelings and safety are important to everyone involved. Visitation center workers can help them all by documenting and supporting the process.

• Visits should always be about quality of time, not quantity, and endangering a scared child amounts to colluding with a father who batters. It also shows a child their voice is unimportant. An abusive father’s attorney can often get his client more visitation time or full custody by portraying a child’s fear-based refusal to visit as a mother’s non-compliance with court orders. Visitation center documentation can help a court see the situation’s reality, so maintaining close contact with everyone, and documenting as many details as possible, is vital when a child expresses fear or refuses to visit.

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• Listen to conversation and observe other cues during visits.

Intervene when children are being criticized or pressured.

Document the intervention and the father’s reaction, and follow up with him to emphasize the importance of positive, child-centered conversation.

• Document all interventions and his responses to show potential behavior changes or problems.

• Help adjust schedules to accommodate special events and unique circumstances such as holidays, weekend sports tournaments, summer camp, or friends’ birthday parties. during visits; the relationship and history between the child Evaluate the father’s request to include guests in visitation on these factors: his consistency with positive interaction during visits; the relationship and history between the child and the proposed guest; his knowledge of the guest and possible safety concerns; the family’s transition participation and status.

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LOOKING TOWARD TRANSITION A major indicator that a father who has been violent is progressing toward safe transition to unsupervised visits and exchanges is that he stops ignoring or trying to control his children’s thoughts, actions, and feelings, and starts guiding their development as unique human beings. If he still believes he has a right to power and control over his children and their mother, he will still treat them as possessions. If he sees them as human beings who get to make their own decisions, he will focus on regarding their needs and safety.

HE FOSTERS CHILDREN’S PROGRESS AND ACHIEVEMENTS BEHAVIOR INDICATORS FOR TRANSITION: HE HELPS CHILDREN SUCCEED • He supports children’s rights and abilities to make decisions.

• He supports children’s academic progress with a positive and structured home environment.

• He recognizes children’s growth, accepts where they are developmentally, and makes adjustments to promote their success.

Off-Site • He helps children reach goals by supporting them in homework, sports, and all other activities and commitments.

POSITIVE ROLE MODELING • He models respectful interaction with the children’s mom, with visitation center workers, and with everyone else.

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• He helps children learn to communicate effectively with peers and adults.

• He demonstrates flexibility by scheduling visitation around children’s and their mother’s schedules.

HE ACTIVELY PARTICIPATES IN PROBLEM SOLVING WITH CHILDREN • He encourages children to follow through with their choices.

HE USES VISITATION TIME TO ACTIVELY ENGAGE WITH THE CHILDREN • He respects children’s communication boundaries during visits. He is supportive, and he encourages and models positive conversation.

• He focuses on building relationships.

• He listens to and validates children’s concerns or wishes.

• He is responsible for children’s care during visits. Children develop senses of self-sufficiency and trust when parents meet their needs.

• He reports important information about children to their mother at the end of the visit, without prompting from visitation center workers.

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Chapter 7 Discrediting Her as a Mother

He will use all aspects of identity that make her vulnerable within a majority culture—including her ethnicity, sexual orientation, race, religion, immigration status, social class, or socioeconomic status—as effective tools for discrediting her. In many cases, he and his legal representatives can punish her by exploiting laws and governmental policies that actually deny her human rights. This ability to use who she is against her limits her options both while they are together and after she leaves.

When a man who batters is with the woman he abuses, his tactics for keeping her vulnerable will often include aggressively discrediting her abilities as a mother—doing and saying whatever it takes to make others, including her own family and support system, believe she is dangerous, untrustworthy, or incompetent as a mom. If he can destroy her confidence and reputation by convincing everyone else she is endangering or mistreating her children—which can be easy, because social and cultural expectations for mothers are usually conflicting, impossible, and judgmental—he can easily turn family, friends, and practitioners against her. For example: when her mom bails him out of jail after he assaults her, everyone will assume something is wrong with her and he must really be a “good guy.” This tactic is particularly harmful as it gives him the support he needs to effectively disrupt her relationship with the children and undermine her ability to parent.

I

had to leave because of his violence. I didn’t want to, because I didn’t have a job, I didn’t have anything, but I couldn’t take it anymore. My kids were in danger, and they are too little for that. I came here [to Duluth from a small town on the Canadian border] to start over. I finally found a job, and he found out and stalked me at work, called my work repeatedly; they fired me because of it. With two children and no job, I had no other options. I had to go on assistance in order to make it. He continued to stalk me, and I got an OFP [order for protection] because of the threats.

Then he filed court papers for emergency full custody of the children. The affidavit said that I “took the party’s children and moved to Duluth with no employment, housing, or plan except to receive welfare—moved to arguably the worst neighborhood, where street crime and violence are most common—and began working at a tattoo parlor.” I didn’t have money to feed my kids, much less get an attorney to prove that I really am a good mom. He told me he’d help out and pay for the kids if I dropped the OFP. I had no other choice.

—Mother of two, ages 1 and 3 Discrediting Her as a Mother

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Long before she musters the courage to leave him, he has convinced her and many others, including their families and friends, their kids, and teachers, physicians, or other practitioners that he “has to do everything” because she’s lazy, a drunk, or “crazy.” He will have spent most of their time together telling her combinations of, “If you leave I’ll take the kids. You’re a bad mom. Everyone knows it. Look at you: everyone knows what a stupid whore you are. How will anyone believe what you say, especially when I’m such a good dad?

What will you do for money?”

He will have spent his time with her subtly or overtly putting her down in front of other people—trying to make himself seem like a decent, hardworking guy who’s just struggling to survive life and take care of his kids despite having to put up with a difficult, incompetent, even abusive woman. Family, friends, or practitioners who spend time around them may be charmed by the way he “teases” her, or feel bad for him and annoyed by how anxious, depressed, flighty, demanding, insecure, angry, or reckless they think she seems. If they know he is abusing her they may believe she is stupid or negligent as a mother for not leaving him while simultaneously accepting his depiction of her and misinterpreting effects of his abuse as flaws in her character. They may believe his abuse is wrong, but also believe she is the “type of woman” who brings at least some of his violence upon herself and probably isn’t a very competent mother.

If she does leave, many family members, friends, and practitioners she is forced to rely on as protectors and resources may already be skeptical of her legitimacy or skill as a mother. Even around people whose perspectives haven’t been distorted by his efforts to discredit her when they were together, she may have a tough time believing in her own parenting ability or their sincerity in trusting and wanting to help her. If he has destroyed her confidence and made good on most other past threats, she has no reason not to assume everyone she talks to thinks she is worthless, “crazy,” or a bad mom. She may need years to come out of the frame of reference and way of thinking he battered her into.

Once she escapes she is vulnerable and exhausted, and she and her children will become a case in social-service systems that provide temporary sanctuary but put her under unexpected and aggressive scrutiny. After she has endured his physical and emotional violence, practitioners, friends, and family members will judge her according to cultural mothering expectations that are impossible for even women who haven’t been battered to meet. As she frequently struggles and falls short, people in her support networks will find it increasingly 74

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easy to believe his claims about what an incompetent mother she is. Practitioners and perhaps her closest relatives and friends—people she should be able to rely on for help—will help in his quest to destroy her credibility, isolate her, and get his way.

I

am an immigrant and he was in the U.S. Navy. He was telling the guardian that he’s worried I won’t teach the kids how to speak English, and that I’ll indoctrinate them into my religious practice. Yes, I speak Russian, but I always talk to the boys in English. I’ve only ever taken them to the Lutheran church—his church—and am the only one involved with their school. He’s always telling the judge, his lawyer, the guardian, anyone who listens, that I am “a stupid Ukrainian woman.” But I am not. I am a mother, and I am raising our boys. All I want is for the boys to know that they have a good dad, a dad that loves them, and all he wants is to make me look bad. He doesn’t care about boys.

—Mother of two, ages 5 and 8 Her post-separation survival (and her children’s) depends largely on fragile perceptions of her credibility among family, friends, and violence-intervention practitioners, and he will make good on his threats to get others to see her as a bad mother. He will use all aspects of identity that make her vulnerable within a majority culture—including her ethnicity, sexual orientation, race, religion, immigration status, social class, or socioeconomic status—as effective tools for discrediting her. In many cases, he and his legal representatives can punish her by exploiting laws and governmental policies that actually deny her human rights.

This ability to use who she is against her limits her options both while they are together and after she leaves.

He will dedicate his time to manipulating as many people as possible into scrutinizing and doubting her as a parent and a person, constantly playing on their internalized cultural notions of motherhood, and telling them she isn’t doing what a good mom is supposed to do. He will try countless methods to discredit her, and in every case, when he gets her allies to doubt or judge her, and when they don’t recognize what he’s doing as a tactic of post-separation violence, they help him isolate and endanger her.

It doesn’t matter what she does or does not do, he will turn her actions against her. He will say she or her new partner abuses the kids. He may try to make himself look good by telling stories about how he’s had to compensate for her irresponsibility or incompetence. He might try to earn

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sympathy and turn mutual friends against her by calling her a whore and saying she cheated on him. He will tell anyone who will listen she is mentally ill, and point out “crazy” behaviors or choices that are actually her responses to his violence. He will point to her depression, anxiety, addictions, struggles, or inconsistent behavior as flaws when they are actually results of his abuse. If she gets a night out with friends, he may say she left the kids at home to go drinking. When he uses those and other supposed character flaws to explain why he abused her, people he has already primed to distrust her credibility and trust his will find it easy to believe he wouldn’t have been violent if she hadn’t been so difficult to deal with.

She may have believed the criminal justice and social services systems, after seeing the damage he does to her and the children, will support her after she leaves his abuse. But when practitioners start asking her about and apparently believing things he says, she will lose trust in their desire or ability to help her. She may withhold information she believes will make her vulnerable to their judgment or his violence. They are likely to perceive her as uncooperative, ungrateful, difficult, mistrusting, secretive, and less worthy of their help or trust, especially if they believe he is being open and helpful and consistent. Every time one of her supporters loses a bit more trust in her she becomes more isolated and his process of discrediting her gains power.

He

hadn’t been in my son’s life basically since he was born. Nothing—didn’t want anything to do with him.

Then I get a new boyfriend, and then he wants to be a dad. I got into a domestic with my boyfriend, and he found out about it. I’d already left him. I already had myself and my son safe, and then he [the son’s father] served me with papers for full custody because of my ex-boyfriend’s violence. He claimed I was mentally unstable and was putting my son in too much danger. Social services took my son away from me. I went from being the only person who took care of him to having to see him supervised two times a week. It didn’t matter that he’d been so violent to me. All that mattered was that he could say I was a bad mom, and they took my baby away from me.

—Mother of one, age 3 He also isolates her by getting the kids to doubt or discredit her. He might barrage them with stories that make him and his parenting seem superior, or tell them scary Red Rocks and Ice, Jane Gilley

lies about court processes and outcomes to intimidate them into silence or manipulate what they say to practitioners.

Regardless of how he turns the kids against her or gets them to say bad things about her to people who make custody and visitation decisions, he doesn’t just ruin her relationships with them. He also—especially if he can get kids to discredit her to friends, family, and practitioners— cuts her off from desperately needed support, creates doubt about her credibility among people whose trust she needs, and disguises his violence and its effects as her bad decisions. She simultaneously becomes more vulnerable and less supported, and the kids can’t trust or have safe, solid relationships with him or her.

In

OFP court he claimed that I had been drinking at the time he beat me, and that he was “just trying to leave.”

I had one drink, but his attorney kept pressing the issue, and claimed I was an alcoholic. I got the order, but the judge also wrote in it that that I had to go to treatment or I’d be in contempt of court.

—Mother of two, ages 7 and 9 In court, he will try to damage her credibility and re-focus scrutiny from him to her. He will tell judges and attorneys stories (which he believes are true) that manipulate facts in his favor and distract the court from his violence: she is falsely accusing him of violence to harass him or manipulate some aspect of the system; there are two sides to every story and hers is just as violent as his; he is the children’s primary caregiver while she spends all her time in bars or the streets; she is an addict; her new boyfriend or husband beats or molests the children, beats her in front of them, deals or uses drugs in their home, or otherwise is dangerous; she is “crazy.”

He will come up with as many ways as he can to show how she is the problem and he is a victim. If he succeeds in minimizing his violence, denying it, blaming it on her, or making her seem like the aggressor, court testimony will become a he-said/she-said game, and authorities who doubt her credibility may endanger her and her children by denying orders for protection and supervised visitation or exchange.

She will be further isolated from and distrusted by authorities, family, friends, and maybe her kids. She may start to feel and act unhinged. She will have to rely on practitioners who, according to her experiences, will probably believe his lies and dismiss her credibility.

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The

guardian report recommended joint custody, because I was “brainwashing” our daughter. The report only cited his references, the guardian only saw me and my daughter together one time, and everything else in the report was information from his family, who hold everything against me. My daughter’s safety is my concern. I’m not trying to withhold visitation. His history of violence against me and others makes him a threat to her, but I guess that’s not important in the eyes of the court. He made himself look like Dad of the Year, but he hadn’t bothered to see our daughter in three years. It only mattered when the guardian was involved.

—Mother of one, age 6 If he can portray himself as Super Dad and her as an unfit mother—which won’t be difficult, as she is already frazzled and fearful— she easily comes across as impatient, ungrateful, and difficult. He can muddle even experienced practitioners’ perceptions and responses. When she talks about his violence and its effect on her and the kids, she will be told to stop focusing on the past because “that was then, this is now.”

Battered mothers frequently tell DFVC staff they are nervous around practitioners. They express justifiable fear of being judged by practitioners who take his claims about her faults and mistakes as facts. Practitioners may use his reports and her nervousness, which can seem like distance or apathy, as bases for decisions that endanger her and the children. A social worker might suggest short-term supervised visitation because “he seems like a guy who just had a bad night,” or a judge might order couples counseling to address the “relationship problem” that she seems to contribute to as much as he does.

Although well-meaning, those decisions ignore his ongoing violence and endanger battered mothers and their children

When

we communicate [via email] he takes anything I say and turns it around to make me look as bad as possible and himself as credible as possible. It allows him to get in writing his twisted version of my parenting.

—Mother of one, age 11 Court-ordered communication with the man whose battering she escaped places an abused mother under intense pressure.

She knows he can twist even her most mundane words into “evidence” he can use to engage practitioners in discrediting her. He will try to and sometimes succeed at convincing them she is turning the children against him, she is angry and holding a grudge, she schedules kids’ appointments during his time to keep them from him, she manufactures concerns about the kids to complicate his life, and she is doing many other things that make her a bad mom and a contemptible woman.

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He might use what he learns in conversations with her to manufacture situations that force her to either say yes to something that creates problems for her or say no and risk looking like she really is trying to spite him. For example, he might ask for supervised visits during times when he knows she works and can’t pick up or drop off kids, which forces her to either change her work schedule (which she probably has already done enough times, because of him, that she is losing credibility and patience from her boss and coworkers) or seem to be disagreeing with him for the sake of disagreeing. If he puts her in those situations often enough, practitioners may begin to doubt her credibility and believe she is creating problems for no reason.

When

I was going to court I wouldn’t admit that I was going to therapy, because they would use it against me, and I had to censor myself in therapy to leave things out of my record. My therapist would ask, “Do you want to talk about this yet?”

—Mother of one, age 3 When she knows he can discredit her with impunity, she must be intensely careful about her every word and action. She may desperately need and want counseling, medication, or other help for dealing with the mental and emotional effects of his violence, but if she acknowledges her needs, he will try to convince practitioners and her allies she is unstable or unfit. He may be able to persuade them that because “she is crazy” his violence against her is justifiable. In custody and visitation cases, and in other court proceedings related to domestic violence, a history of professional counseling or other care often damages a battered mother’s credibility and seems to corroborate a violent father’s claims that she is an unfit mother, even if she was seeking help for problems he caused by physically and emotionally abusing her.

If he repeats the same claims often enough and to enough people, his selective memory or even outright lies may take on the power of fact in anecdotes among practitioners and official documentation. She will be forced to spend time, money, and emotional energy defending herself against, or undergoing tests and evaluations to disprove, things he made up or twisted to punish her. If he tells a practitioner she has bipolar disorder and it gets written down as “She has bipolar disorder” instead of “He alleges she has bipolar disorder,” and no one double checks or cross-references the claim, not only may she have to spend years in the tricky process of trying to convince practitioners she doesn’t have a mental illness, but the focus will be on her instead of his violence.

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In

the beginning, I felt you hated me and thought I was difficult. I had low self-esteem coming out of the relationship. I hated this place, and having to bring [my daughter] here. It was nice to know that she was safe and protected, but I thought he was charming you until he had an incident, and I could see how well the staff understood [his games], and that someone believed me.

—Mother of one, age 6 months ROLE OF A VISITATION CENTER By maintaining policies designed to protect battered mothers and their children and hold violent fathers accountable, a visitation center can help interrupt a violent father’s attempts to discredit the mother who left to escape his abuse. Sharing information with relevant practitioners is critical to that interruption process. Visitation center workers’ unique and credible perspective on visits and exchanges, which comes from having more contact with post-separation families than other practitioners have, means they can focus conversations with colleagues on facts, not a violent father’s manipulative stories. For example: if he spends most of his time in the visitation center maligning his children’s mother, staff can document the behavior and show other practitioners that his

Up, Lori Nae Y. Letica

focus is on creating problems for her and not on meeting his children’s interests.

TIPS FOR EFFECTIVE POLICIES AND PROCEDURES • Document details about staff interaction and communication with all participants. Well-organized notes about phone calls, orientation schedules, visitation arrangements, and other details can minimize the possibility that a violent father’s lies about the woman he abuses will be believed in court.

• Attend and provide documentation for relevant court hearings about protection orders and other matters.

Visitation center staff presence in court reinforces documentation and gives other practitioners opportunities to learn more about the center’s policies and decisions, and about staff interactions with parents and kids and observation of parent-child interactions, all of which can provide context for countering an abusive father’s efforts to discredit the woman he batters.

• Document all staff intervention and interaction with parents. When a violent dad discredits the woman he abuses to staff or his children, staff should take detailed notes about what he said, how they intervened to steer the conversation back to the kids, and how he responded to the intervention.

• Stay in touch with men’s non-violence group administrators and facilitators. Visitation center notes can help group facilitators work with fathers who batter.

When visitation center staff and group facilitators discuss their interactions with a violent father, they can create opportunities to hold him accountable and help him shift his thinking.

• Work hard to make sure all relevant practitioners have the same information, which can help minimize his ability to manipulate practitioners, lie to them, or pit them against each other.

• Connect battered mothers with women’s groups, shelters, legal-advocacy organizations, and other community resources that can expand their support networks. Offer violent men referrals to credible men’s non-violence programs.

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LOOKING TOWARD TRANSITION Many children want to see and form positive relationships with their dad even after he has used violence against their mom.

Contrary to what many violent men tell practitioners, most battered mothers want their children to see and have good relationships with their dads. A battered mom usually just wants her children to be safe around their dad, wants him to meet the kids’ needs during visits, and wants his attention and energy to be focused on building positive relationships with them. Before a transition to off-site visitation or unsupervised exchange can be considered, a father who batters must demonstrate consistent focus on those and other aspects of his children’s wellbeing, and not on discrediting her.

RESPECT MOTHER AS A PARENT BEHAVIOR INDICATORS FOR TRANSITION: HE USES SYSTEM INTERVENTION ONLY FOR CHILDREN’S BEST INTERESTS • He doesn’t make child abuse and neglect allegations against her that visitation center documentation proves false.

• He focuses on children’s health and wellness, not on vilifying their mom.

HE ACKNOWLEDGES HER VALUE AS A PARENT • He doesn’t accuse her of lying when she gives visitation guidelines about nap times, allergies, food precautions, and other aspects of kids’ needs.

HE DOESN’T PUT CHILDREN”S MOTHER DOWN IN FRONT OF THEM • He responds to kids’ questions about their mom with appropriate answers.

• He encourages kids in having safe relationships with other adults, including their mom.

• He doesn’t denigrate her immigration or socio-economic status, sexual identity, race, or other identity traits to children or VC staff.

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RESPECT MOTHER AS A PARENT BEHAVIOR INDICATORS FOR TRANSITION: HE USES SYSTEM INTERVENTION ONLY FOR CHILDREN’S BEST INTERESTS • He doesn’t make child abuse and neglect allegations against her that visitation center documentation proves false.

• He focuses on children’s health and wellness, not on vilifying their mom.

HE ACKNOWLEDGES HER VALUE AS A PARENT • He doesn’t accuse her of lying when she gives visitation guidelines about nap times, allergies, food precautions, and other aspects of kids’ needs.

HE DOESN’T PUT CHILDREN”S MOTHER DOWN IN FRONT OF THEM • He responds to kids’ questions about their mom with appropriate answers.

• He encourages kids in having safe relationships with other adults, including their mom.

• He doesn’t denigrate her immigration or socio-economic status, sexual identity, race, or other identity traits to children or VC staff.

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Lori Nae Y. Letica

Chapter 8 Disrupting Her Relationships with Children

In a family broken by the violence of a father no one can trust and everyone fears, a battered mother and kids may share especially strong bonds that he resents and sees as disloyalty, especially during court-ordered visits. He may dismiss their needs in order to get their compliance and anything else he demands. When they want to contact her—or even just mention her—during “his” time, he may hide their cell phones, forbid them to use his phone, and deny them all other access to her. Under those violent forms of pressure, children learn to obey their dad or suffer consequences against themselves and their mom, and they often struggle to feel safe with him or trust her.

I

never screamed when he was beating me and the children were home. I didn’t want them to hear me in pain. I didn’t want them to know it was happening, to think they could act that way too. Now they come home from visits and scream and yell at me if I don’t give them exactly what they want.

—Mother of two, ages 2 and 4 When a violent father lives with the woman he batters and their children, his abusive authority over them all prevents, damages, and interrupts her ability to form strong, authentic relationships with her children. He will disrupt her ability to nurture by forbidding her to nurse, pick up a crying baby or have access to a child who needs comfort. He will force or coerce her into physically punishing the children or doing and being other things to them that she would never choose. He will belittle, mock, and degrade her in front of them. He will undermine her parenting decisions to show them she doesn’t know what she’s doing. When he decides the children are ill-mannered, dirty, worthless, or generally no good, he will tell the children it’s all because she is a bad person and an incompetent mother. When the children are praised or complimented, he will take credit for persevering as a father against what he calls her laziness, addiction, control, ungratefulness, “craziness,” or other faults he may also say she is passing on to the kids. The more he says such things, the more likely her supporters are to believe him and question what her relationships with the children should be.

I

called 911 because I wanted him to go to jail so I could just be at peace with my kids. –Mother of two

He disrupts her relationships with her children in overt and subtle ways that resemble how he discredits her as a mother and undermines her ability to parent, but are specific in their intense focus on severing bonds. When he is intent on disrupting mother-child relationships his time, attention, and Disrupting Her Relationships with Children

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energy are devoted to pitting she and the kids against each other, creating chaos, and making it impossible for her to build and maintain trusting, loving bonds with them. He demands she and the children to have allegiance to him only. He achieves his objective of punishing her with this tactic after she leaves when the children choose or have no choice but absolute loyalty to him, when they see him as a victim who needs their emotional allegiance, and when they believe their mom is worthless and to blame for his violence and for the family being split. They may simultaneously hate him for his controlling and violent behavior while blaming her for not stopping it.

His

violence was so bad I had to leave. He was going to kill me and the kids. He always said he would.

The judge still gave him unsupervised parenting time. The kids would come back and tell me he made them kill animals by breaking their necks, and would make them watch pornography. They came back angry, violent with each other and towards me. I couldn’t do anything to discipline them at home. It was getting out of hand. I called social services and they did an investigation and didn’t find anything on him. The kids told social services that I was abusing them—that I was the one laying hands on them. Social services took my children away and placed them with him. He was supposed to give me visitation, but he didn’t, and no one was able to make him. I didn’t see my kids for over a year, and by the time I did he had filled their heads with so many stories they were terrified of me.

They didn’t even want to see me. It’s been three years since I’ve seen my kids. He took them from me. The only thing that really mattered to me, he took.

—Mother of three, ages 4, 8, and 11

He

tells the boys that mommy steals all his money [because he pays her child support] and, “She will have to buy whatever you need.” My boys come back to me and ask why I stole his money. I am sure they imagine me going into his car and stealing his money. They are little boys.

They can’t understand what he is saying.

—Mother of two, ages 2 and 4 After she leaves him, even if she left with the children and is their custodial parent, he can punish her by continuing to prevent and damage her bonds with the kids—an especially cruel way of exploiting her love and concern for them. He may tell them, other family members, friends, and practitioners false but scary stories about her, accuse her of splitting up the family, degrade her struggles and choices, and do anything else he can to get the kids to blame her and ally with him. For example, it is common during a supervised visit in the DFVC for a father to tell his children he will be able to live with them again “when 86

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your mother lets me come home” or “as soon as she gets over herself.”

The less other adults and her children trust her as a mother, especially when she is already under intense stress and aggressive scrutiny, the tougher it will be for her to maintain tight emotional relationships with the kids, the more isolated and vulnerable she will become, and the more unhinged she may feel and seem. As she is struggling to cope with less money, time, and support after leaving, he is attacking her and dedicating himself to making relationships with each other difficult and dangerous for her and the children. While he focuses on coercing the children to ally with him, she must try to fix problems he creates for her and the kids. Instead of getting to build authentic relationships with her children, she has to always be on guard against his attempts to turn them against her. She has to constantly figure out when and how to react to his tactics, when to fight back against him or concede, and what degree of danger she and her kids are in at any given moment. Just like when they were together, he demands and receives all of her attention whether she gives it by complying with his commands or fighting back against his abuse.

He may bribe, threaten, or otherwise manipulate the kids into spying on her for him. He will dig for information, trying to find out where they live, what their daily activities are, and whether she is with another man. He will put children in positions where they have to risk endangering themselves by lying to him, risk endangering their mom by complying with him, or hurt her unknowingly by giving him information about her that seems unimportant to them. They know that when they spend time with him they can never acknowledge anything positive about her. They know that when they are with her they have to be cautious because he will punish them for saying anything about him, or visits with him, that he thinks will give her power to use against him.

As

soon as it was ordered that he have unsupervised visitation, he really sunk in his teeth. He’d tell our daughter [who was 10 years old] that I was sleeping around during our relationship, and that he had to leave because I was doing such bad things to him. She came home after visits with all of these questions about me. She really didn’t know what to think. Then I had to figure out what to say to her about all of it.

—Mother of one, age 11 His constant digging for information and lying about her give the kids reasons to doubt her. They will begin to question Disrupting Her Relationships with Children

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whether or not they can trust what she says and does and whether they are safe with her. They will start to frequently accuse her of being what he has told them she is. If he refers to her as a “dumb bitch,” so will they. However he sees her and talks about her, so will they.

They

come home exhausted, refusing to eat any food that I make them because it’s “healthy,” and totally out of control. My youngest has nightmares and my oldest routinely is sent to the principal’s office in the week following a weekend with their dad. My rules mean nothing to them, and just lead to more fighting. I’m exhausted from trying to hold everything together.

—Mother of two, ages 7 and 11 After she leaves, he may also control and disrupt relationships between her and the children by being extremely permissive and maintaining very few boundaries during his time with the kids. When he lets or makes them break her rules by watching movies or TV shows intended for much older audiences, swearing, drinking or smoking, eating nothing but junk food, participating in adult conversations and situations, staying up far past their bedtimes, being on a computer or playing video games for hours, driving before having a license, or doing anything else she forbids because she believes it is inappropriate or unhealthy, they can start believing he is fun and she is mean. Or they may resent her, or feel abandoned and unprotected by her, because she sends them to spend time in what feels like scary, uncomfortable chaos.

After coping with that kind of environment, they may return to her whiny and demanding, speaking and acting impatiently and disrespectfully—either because they are taking on his sense of entitlement and his dismissal of her, or because they don’t have the emotional perspective or vocabulary to express the misery and confusion they are feeling. They might hit and scream to get their way, or cry, say they hate her for various reasons, slam doors, and refuse to follow her rules. In the midst of her own sense of chaos, fear, and frustration, she has to be as patient as possible in re-instilling manners and socially acceptable behavior, a process that strains her, them, and their relationships, and takes time they could be using to build bonds instead of make repairs.

Victory! History! Lori Nae Y. Letica

She

came home angry, yelling, screaming, fanatical after every visit. She would pick fights with her older sister. She’d even be violent towards her after a weekend with her dad. She never hits anyone, ever, but after time with him she’d take it out on her sister. I asked her why she was so angry, and she told me that he spends the weekend making fun of her while he buys her sister presents, lets her eat whatever she wants, and showers her with attention. She said she was angry because she was jealous and hurt after three straight days of that treatment from her dad. She didn’t understand why he didn’t love her like he loved her sister.”

—Mother of two, ages 7 and 12 He may also pit children against each other, favor and dismiss them, or impede their relationships with their mom based on his perception of their loyalty to him and rejection of her. He can use supervised visits to coerce kids into turning against her, her supporters, or their siblings. He may reward kids who badmouth her to her face or to other adults, who physically abuse her, who side with him in arguments, and who help him mistreat other children. He may dismiss, torment, or threaten kids who don’t help him. He may simply ignore kids who aren’t biologically his. The more he mistreats their kids and recruits them in mistreating her, the more he disrupts her relationships with them, manipulates her emotions, and makes it possible to get what he wants: her submission or destruction.

They

would wait by the window for his car to pull up for the visit. They’d get so excited, and then he’d never come. They’d ask me why not, and I didn’t have an answer. I couldn’t tell them the truth. I had to try and make something up, then they’d blame me. They’d be so mad at me because he didn’t show up. It took years of this routine disappointment and frustration with me before they realized that it was him, not me. In the meantime, it was so hard for them to trust me.

—Mother of four, ages 8, 10, 13, and 14

The

kids told me that they wouldn’t go on visits because he wouldn’t let them talk to me. They promised me they would go [so she wouldn’t be held in contempt of court for withholding visitation] when I bought them cell phones. He took their cell phones and locked them up for the entire time they were with him. They would ask him to call, and he’d laugh at them and tell them they couldn’t.

They wanted to call me because he was abusing them. [He had recently thrown one down the stairs and left another in the middle of the woods as punishment].

—Mother of three, ages 7, 10, and 12 Disrupting Her Relationships with Children

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Once a visit and exchange schedule is set, he might skip or cancel visits at will or demand schedule changes that disregard her and the children. Every time he endangers or causes problems for her or the kids, she has to decide whether to resist or submit. Does she risk contempt-of-court charges by letting the kids stay home when they say they’re scared to visit him, or does she risk social-services reprimands by forcing them to spend time with him? Either way, she, the kids, and practitioners trying to protect them are limited or endangered by and forced to be responsible for the results of his violence, and her relationships with her kids are strained. She has a similar set of decisions to make and consequences to consider—on top of handling last-moment adjustments that add stress and exhaustion—every time he decides not to follow the schedule.

Trying to maintain relationships with her kids will be just one of many struggles she faces amid the constant stress and scrutiny he creates.

They

came home and just clung to me. I asked them what was wrong, and they said, “Dad told us God’s going to take you away from us because you left him.”

They were...so worried I was going to leave them.

—Mother of three, ages 3, 5, and 8 Children bond with parents they can trust—parents who tell them the truth, comfort and protect them, help them feel strong when they are afraid, set and maintain boundaries for them, take care of them when they are sick, make decisions in their best interests, and are just present. In a family broken by the violence of a father no one can trust and everyone fears, a battered mother and kids may share especially strong bonds that he resents and sees as disloyalty, especially during courtordered visits. He may dismiss their needs in order to get their compliance and anything else he demands. When they want to contact her—or even just mention her— during “his” time, he may hide their cell phones, forbid them to use his phone, and deny them all other access to her. Under that pressure, children learn to obey their dad or suffer consequences against themselves and their mom, and they often struggle to feel safe with him or trust her.

Imaginary Monster, Lori Nae Y. Letica

He

would stand in the [visitation] center screaming at the top of his lungs that he didn’t want to go see his dad, because his dad wouldn’t listen to him, [and] would make him do things he didn’t want to do. I had to send him though. I had a court order, and I had to do it. He would come back from visits and hit me, yell at me. I asked him why he was acting like that, and he told me daddy told him it was okay to hit me, it was okay to yell at me. He was so frustrated, so confused by what was happening. As soon as visits stopped, he stopped hitting me. He could trust me again.

—Mother of two, ages 2 and 4

I

had restrictions on when I could and could not see her, and he got to decide when [and] how long, and could change it all last-minute. I had to just go numb.

—Mother of one, age 4 Supervised visits can be an opportunity for a father who has used violence to work on developing safe, supportive relationships with his children. But when he still values authority at any cost—if he would rather control his children and punish their mom more than build his own relationships with kids and support hers—he will believe kids and visitation time belong to him, and he will not tolerate any fear, ambivalence, or hostility they feel about seeing him.

He may punish children or their mom when kids arrive at visits late or leave early, or when they need to change or skip visit times because they are sick or have other needs. If the kids refuse or resist visits, he will get angry and accuse her of coaching or bribing them to ignore him. If an infant cries during a visit, he may become frustrated and claim she made it happen to ruin his time. He is likely to resist or ignore kids’ immediate needs during visits—dirty diapers, hunger, illness, etc.—because he sees them as things she should have taken care of.

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Every time he makes a visit difficult for a child, he creates potential friction in the child-mother relationship. Kids who don’t want to go on visits with him develop resentment, anger and frustration toward their mother for sending them. Battered moms who keep scared kids away from assigned visits risk being in contempt of court and losing custody. Either way, his actions threaten her relationships with their children.

ROLE OF THE VISITATION CENTER they come home telling me about what fun they had with their dad. They get to actually spend time with him, and he has to actually focus on them. They don’t come home telling me promises he’s made to them like buying them ponies or taking them on a big trip.

—Mother of two, ages 5 and 8

Now

Visitation center policies and procedures must account for an abusive father’s attempts to disrupt relationships between the woman he batters and their children. Interrupting that and other post separation violence tactics is essential in working toward long-term safety for battered moms and their kids.

Almost all mothers who use the DFVC tell staff they want their children to have relationships with their fathers. Many children from families split by a dad’s violence ask their mothers when they can see him again—even if they’re afraid of him. They all want him to have the chance to be a safe, supportive dad, so when they express serious concerns about him spending time with kids, they most often have good reasons: his history of using physical and sexual violence to get what he wants, which is usually submission; his threats to kill or abduct the children if she leaves him; his neglect and other abuse of the children when the family was together; his continued use of tactics on the Using Children Post Separation Wheel.

A Bad Seed, Lori Nae Y. Letica

Supervised visitation provides a safe, consistent environment for a dad who has used violence and his kids to start getting to know each other and to start creating the potential for solid relationships. Through intervention, documentation, and education, visitation center workers can interrupt postseparation power-and-control tactics, protect battered mothers and their children, hold fathers who have battered accountable, and help fathers develop non-violent beliefs and behaviors.

TIPS FOR EFFECTIVE POLICIES AND PROCEDURES • Create guidelines, including these, for appropriate parentchild conversation during visits and exchanges: • Conversation must be loud enough for staff to hear.

• Whispering and other secretive talk are not allowed.

• Conversation should focus only on the present, not on lamenting the past or making promises about the future.

• Conversation about the children’s mother is prohibited, because it often quickly leads to him making derogatory remarks about her. If she comes up and he seems to get stuck there, staff should help redirect the conversation or, if necessary, gently interrupt it and speak to him away from the kids.

• No conversation about visitation concerns or legal matters in front of children.

• Document all conversation interventions—what he said, how children reacted, how staff intervened, how he responded to the intervention—and use the information to set boundaries for future visits.

• During staff conversations or interventions with a father, focus on helping him see visits as opportunities for building relationships with his kids.

• Help fathers answer children’s questions appropriately.

• Document schedule changes, change requests, and other details that can show a court who is and isn’t withholding or disrupting visitation.

• Expect parents to call the center if they are running late or must cancel, and encourage 24-hour notice.

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• Create a gift policy and consider guidelines including these: • Children should get gifts only on their birthdays and other traditional gift-giving holidays.

• All gifts should be non-violent and foster parent-child interaction.

• All gifts can go with the child to each parent’s home.

LOOKING TOWARD TRANSITION A father who has battered starts showing he is ready to begin transitioning toward unsupervised visits when he consistently and willingly focuses on building healthy, positive relationships with his kids and actively supporting their relationships with their mom.

HE BUILDS AND SUPPORTS HEALTHY RELATIONSHIPS BEHAVIOR INDICATORS FOR TRANSITION: HE SHOWS CHILDREN THEY CAN SAFELY LOVE AND TRUST BOTH PARENTS • He focuses conversations with children on their needs, school experiences, friends, etc.

• He appropriately acknowledges and redirects children’s questions about their mom.

• He does not coerce or force children to ally with him.

In the Night, Lori Nae Y. Letica

• He does not speak poorly about the kids’ mom to them or to visitation center staff.

• He asks questions that are genuinely based in getting to know his kids, not in gathering information about their mother.

• He doesn’t make promises or offer bribes for children’s loyalty.

HE SUPPORTS CHILDREN’S NEED FOR CONTACT WITH THEIR MOTHER • He lets them call her.

• He doesn’t hide or steal their cell phones.

• He doesn’t ridicule them for wanting contact with her.

HE MAINTAINS A RELIABLE AND COOPERATIVE VISITATION SCHEDULE • He shows up on time for visits or exchanges.

• He alerts staff members and other approved adults if he’s running late.

• He is flexible about how children’s needs and schedules affect visit times.

• He is flexible about make-up visits.

• He gives children time and space away from visits.

• He is willing to work within their fears and concerns instead of claiming they are evidence she is sabotaging his relationship with them.

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Lori Nae Y. Letica

Chapter 9

Endangering Children

Many children who visit a violent father return to their mother with severe ear infections, pink eye, colds and the flu, pneumonia, asthma flareups, and other preventable or easily treatable illness or injuries that he ignored or didn’t notice. She may spend time and money she can’t afford getting emergency-room care for maladies that, if noticed and treated responsibly, would not have required crisis treatment.

I

now feel like I wish I would have stayed. I had more control [over how the kids were treated while she was] in the relationship. If I was still with him, I would be able to protect my children better, because I would know where they were and who was with them.

—Mother of two, ages 7 and 10 Before and after a battered woman leaves the man who abuses her, he is likely to see her and their kids as “his”—as possessions that exist to be and do what he dictates. He may care or know very little about keeping the children safe, and he will probably refuse to participate in meeting their basic needs. Rather than focusing on the child’s wellbeing, he will dedicate his attention to arguing for “his rights” and “to do whatever he wants” during his time. Whether he intentionally or unintentionally endangers the kids, he will actively argue with anyone who suggests the children are unsafe or uncared for.

One

of my daughters has started her period and feels like she has no help at his house. [My daughters’] dad and his girlfriend don’t let them bathe or brush their teeth. He uses the excuse that someone else is using the shower so they can’t use the bathroom. Toothbrushes I send are lost, and he won’t buy them new ones. When I pick them up, I have to take them straight home [and] feed and bathe them, because they are hungry, tired and smell.

—Mother of two, ages 9 and 11 Very often, he will endanger children by withholding or forbidding access to things they need for basic physical, mental, and emotional wellbeing. When he does that, she spends much of her time worrying about, trying to compensate for, and getting blamed for damage he inflicts on the kids’ minds and bodies. When they are with him, he may not let them eat, brush their teeth, bathe, wear clean Endangering Children

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clothes, take care of their hair, or otherwise keep themselves comfortable and together. He might deprive them of sleep, peace and quiet, or general comfort. He may neglect other basic or special needs, but do so cleverly enough that practitioners might see her as vindictive or hysterical for asking them to investigate.

I

recently picked up my 10-year-old daughter at the exchange site where her father had left her outside in the freezing cold [A fast-food restaurant parking lot]. My daughter was throwing up and said she had been for over 24 hours.

She was complaining of pain and looked very ill. I took her to the emergency room, and she had emergency surgery for appendicitis. The ER nurses and doctors berated me, asking why I didn’t bring my daughter in sooner. The appendix was about to rupture, and they got to her just in time. When I reported this to child protective services, they said there was nothing they could do. My daughter does not want to go on overnights with her dad anymore, yet she will have to because of a court order. I knew this would happen, and nobody listened to me.

—Mother of one, age 10 If the kids visit him only on weekends or occasional evenings, she can usually compensate for his neglect with her care. She can ensure they get the necessary food, sleep and bathing the vast majority of the time, making his neglect difficult to substantiate. If his neglect is frequent or aggressive enough and she is the primary parent, she may not be able to keep up. Despite her best efforts, the kids may be chronically sick, depressed, anxious, dirty, malnourished, or otherwise physically and mentally unwell. She will be help responsible by pracititioners, teachers and others for these symptoms of his neglect. Their relationships with him, her, and other adults may suffer. Constantly miserable or demanding kids can challenge the patience of even non-abusive adults.

Despite all of this, he will not face consequences, and can, in fact, remain on a trajectory of increased visitation time.

Individually, each incident will be seen as “not enough to do something about” and she will be viewed as constantly trying to control his time with the kids. This mentality by practitioners ensures that his neglect goes entirely unseen, even when documentation exists to the contrary.

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My

son is on antidepressants that need to be taken every day. When he’s at his dad’s house, my son tells me that his dad only gives him his medication twice over the five days that he is with him. I’ve passed notes, had the doctor write and call him, done everything to try to let him know how important it is that our son gets his medication. My doctor told me that the medication isn’t going to help him if it’s inconsistent. I don’t know what to do.

—Mother of two, ages 3 and 5 When a dad endangers his kids their academic, athletic, and artistic motivation will decrease, and their social confidence and interest in things they normally enjoy will suffer. Friends and classmates will be less likely to support and spend time with them. Their ability to learn and grow will be interrupted, leaving them ill-equipped for progressing with their peers.

Their shame, confusion, and other long-term emotional damage may take the form of believing something is wrong with them—that some deficit or fault within them makes their dad not care about them and makes their mom send them to stay with their dad. He may say all those problems are her fault because she’s a bad mom. Endangering their kids is one way to teach her that kind of lesson.

He

brought her back to daycare at noon. Daycare called me and told me I had to come get her because she was so sick. She had a fever, and her tonsils were so swollen that I had to take her to urgent care. We spent the afternoon at urgent care, and they were able to give her medicine to help her. The doctor told me I should have brought her in sooner, but I didn’t have her, he did. He didn’t notify daycare that she was sick. They figured it out and called me. When I told him she was in urgent care, all he said was, “Thanks for the message.” He didn’t even ask about how she was doing, or indicate that he knew she was sick when he dropped her off at daycare.

—Mother of one, age 6 months Many children who visit a father who has abused their mom return to her with severe ear infections, pink eye, colds and the flu, pneumonia, asthma flare-ups, and other preventable or easily treatable illness or injuries that he ignored or didn’t notice. She may spend time and money she can’t afford getting emergency room care for maladies that, if noticed and treated responsibly, would not have required crisis treatment.

They may also be in emotional distress from existing in neglect, scary and confusing situations, and chaos, and she will have to help them emotionally recuperate during time she could be getting to know them and helping them grow.

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stressful visits, their trust and respect for her may disappear.

They may actually begin to ally with him. Or they may trust no one and doubt their own perspectives.

She

came back to me and her arms and entire body was covered in bed bug bites. She told me her dad had left her off at his friend’s girlfriend’s house for two days.

She didn’t know anyone there, and when he picked her up he didn’t notice or help her with the bedbug bites. She begged me not to drop her off with her dad again because of this.

—Mother of one, age 4

The more she shows up in the ER or her family physician’s office with kids whose health has been neglected and mismanaged, and the more illnesses, injuries, and other health issues the kids have, the more practitioners, friends, and family members may scrutinize her, doubt her credibility, and distrust her.

have to bring my baby into the ER regularly after visits with his father because of serious asthma complications. He never gives him his medicine. The ER doctor reported me to CPS, who came and took my child from the ER and put him in emergency foster care. I went almost two days without my son and talked to everybody I could. I was able to get him back after some very persistent and well done advocacy by my mom, who is well known in the community.

—Mother of one, age 1

I

Sometimes a father who batters will intentionally withhold vital medications and treatments from children simply to spite their mother, leaving them vulnerable to asthma attacks, infections, the effects of diseases and disorders, or other problems that are painful and scary for her and the kids.

He

was on probation, and was not supposed to drink. He had been drinking when he picked up our son at

Rust and Wood, Jane Gilley

daycare. I received a call two hours later saying that he had rolled the car going 87 mph, with our five-year-old son in the front seat. His blood alcohol content was .27. Fortunately, neither was seriously injured. Before this I had expressed concern to the G.A.L. [guardian ad litem] regarding his drinking and driving, and had requested on-site visitation.

The G.A.L. told me I was “making mountains out of mole hills.” It took an episode as serious as this for my concerns to be taken seriously, and [for] supervised visitation [to be] recommended.

—Mother of one, age 7 Too often, practitioners minimize and dismiss a battered mother’s concerns about an abusive father who uses drugs and alcohol, who leaves kids alone, who neglects kids’ health, or who otherwise endangers kids during his assigned parenting time. Doubting her claims until worst-case scenarios come true is irresponsible, and it endangers her kids. It also gives kids another reason not to trust adults who they have no choice but to rely on, and who claim to care about protecting them and acting in their best interests but sometimes do neither.

He

is a predatory offender. He physically tortured a man and spent time in prison. Since he got out, he still deals drugs and hangs out with friends who are violent criminals. He takes pictures of our daughter with wads of money in her hands, and posts them on Facebook, even after he was threatened and our daughter was included in that threat. This is why I let him move back in—so I didn’t have to worry about where she is, and this way I could watch her.

Now that is being used against me.

—Mother of one, age 4 A father obviously endangers his children when he deals and does drugs in their presence, commits violence in front of them, unsafely uses and keeps guns around them or gives them guns to shoot without supervision or proper instruction, lets them ride ATVs without helmets or drive cars and trucks without knowing how to, and forces or allows them into other reckless situations. Practitioners, friends, and family members might blame her for “letting” the kids go on dangerous visits.

doesn’t have a car seat, and wouldn’t use one.

—Mother of one, age 6 months

He

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He is also likely to endanger children by refusing to install legally required child-safety seats in his car or truck. Sometimes he will expect the woman he abuses to provide them. When DFVC staff ask to check vehicles for proper seats, fathers often argue that they have the right to transport their kids any way they choose. One father preparing for off-site, unsupervised visits through the DFVC Transition Program was asked, with plenty of forewarning, to be at his next visit early so staff could check his safety seat. The outdated seat he showed up with (despite having a solid full-time job and the means to pay for an appropriate one) was unsafe and illegal. He yelled at staff who required him to buy and properly install a legal seat before taking his child.

In Praxis International’s On Safety’s Side, Martha McMahon and Ellen Pence say, “To claim neutrality is to in effect reinforce battering and abuse. Visitation centers cannot be non-engaged or indifferent to the tactics of abuse without reinforcing that abuse“(20).

I

had full custody of my two-year-old daughter. I brought her to him for a visit. He never gave her back. I kept trying to get her, but he cut me out and I couldn’t. I have a mental illness, and when this happened I just kind of broke down. I went into the hospital for help. After a few days I got out, and he had filed custody papers. I got a “free” lawyer, and she told me to use the visitation center for supervised visits, and prove that I was stable and could be a good mother. He was the abusive one, and he took her from me. He kidnapped her. I didn’t see her for months. Now I had to see my daughter at the visitation center.

I did go to the center, and now have off-site visits, but he has physical custody. I was doing great until he took her from me.

Nobody would help me.

—Mother one, age 3 Surprisingly often, fathers who batter endanger and take custody of children by simply keeping them instead of returning them after visits. A violent father who steals children can often convince practitioners that the woman he abused abandoned the kids, or that he had to keep them because she is incompetent. If she responds aggressively or fearfully, he and his attorney or other supporters can convincingly characterize her as unstable. If she doesn’t receive or understand court papers, have an attorney, or know where to seek help, practitioners might believe she is difficult and careless.

Supervised visits can help mothers re-establish contact with children who were stolen by fathers. They can also help prevent fathers who batter from stealing kids.

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ROLE OF THE VISITATION CENTER Visitation centers do not strive for neutrality. In accordance with the six guiding principles for supervised visitation and safe exchanges established by the United States Department of Justice Office on Violence Against Women, visitation centers intentionally advocate for the safety of battered mothers and their children. In order to fight battering and abuse, to engage in challenging abuse tactics, and to protect children, visitation centers and their workers must create safe visit, exchange, and offsite transition environments by accounting for violent fathers’ abusive behaviors.

At

least when she came back dirty and with bedbug bites, you [visitation center staff] could see it and could document it. You saw it firsthand, and because someone other than me was saying it, they [other practitioners] finally believed me that he was neglecting her. —Mother of one, age 4

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TIPS FOR EFFECTIVE POLICIES AND PROCEDURES FOR SUPERVISED EXCHANGES • Ask to see a father’s driver’s license and proof of valid vehicle insurance before he leaves with children. Without insurance or a valid license he cannot take children off-site.

• Require him to have a legal, age-appropriate, properly installed car seat for every relevant child before he takes them off-site.

• Provide on-site visit options for a father who cannot meet license, insurance, or car-seat requirements.

• Ask the children’s mother for names and contact information of drivers who can pick up children if their father can’t or won’t.

• Document the make, model, color, and any other defining characteristics of the car he puts the kids in. This information will be important if he kidnaps them.

• Call law enforcement to perform a sobriety test before letting him leave with children if he seems drunk or high.

• Ask him about his plans for his time with the children. Share the information with their mother and document it.

• Check in with children before and after every visit. Have a chat about how the visit went, what they did, etc. Document any concerns or other information that seems unusual or important.

• Document his ability to focus visits with the kids on them.

• Document information gathered during orientation and other interactions with both parents about her safety concerns for visits and both parents’ short- and long-term supervisedvisitation goals.

• Report children’s concerns to relevant practitioners. If visitation center staff are allies with and voices for children, they validate kids’ concerns and help protect them.

• Make and give appropriate referrals based on concerns that arise during or because of visitation.

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LOOKING TOWARD TRANSITION hear from people, “Your kids are old enough. Why can’t they just go from one car to the other?” It’s so much more.

It’s not about that. That would not solve the problem. It is so great to be here [at the visitation center]. So validating.

—Mother of three, ages 11, 12, and 14

I

Keeping children safe requires knowing and being prepared to respond to their needs. A father who batters often doesn’t know or care about how to do those things. He probably dictated a family structure in which the woman he abused was responsible for all child care, and will believe in that structure even after she leaves him and is the custodial parent. He may expect his post-separation time with their kids to be free from feeding, changing, playing games he sees as silly, or doing anything else he doesn’t feel like doing and can’t control. He will see her telling him about the children’s medication needs, food allergies, diet restrictions or other needs as an attempt to control him and sabotage his visits.

Determining whether he can and will keep his children safe is critical in transition planning. Supervised visits provide visitation center staff with opportunities to monitor and document some indicators of his attention and concern to the children’s safety. When he progresses to off-site visits, he will have more responsibilities—and more opportunities to show his non-violent behavior is lasting—in environments that may be much less predictable or supportive. If he struggles to focus on meeting kids needs and keeping them safe off-site, his visits should be moved back to the center.

KEEP CHILDREN SAFE BEHAVIOR INDICATORS FOR TRANSITION: • He responds to children’s illnesses and injuries with appropriate medical care and medication.

Supervised Visitation • He responds to injury or illness in the center with appropriate care and concern.

• He responds to children’s illnesses that cause visit cancellations with genuine concern.

• He voluntarily pays his share of children’s medical care.

• He learns about and provides needed care for children’s special needs.

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Supervised Exchanges • He immediately responds to injury or illness: takes children to the doctor; uses appropriate over-the-counter medication and home care; gets visitation center staff help in return kids to their mom if necessary.

• He makes sure children take all prescribed medication as directed.

• He makes sure children attend all doctor, dentist, and therapy appointments while in his care.

• He works with personal care attendants, nurses, or other healthcare professionals who help kids with special needs.

HE ENSURES THAT CHILDREN ARE SAFE AND RESPECTED IN HIS CARE Supervised Visitation • He lets children’s comfort levels dictate progress and boundaries while reestablishing his relationships with them.

• He does not belittle children for being nervous, not wanting to hug him or share personal information, or other forms of hesitancy in building a relationship with him.

• He meets children’s basic needs—food, toileting, etc.— during visits.

• He models positive and safe means of conflict resolution and behavior redirection.

Supervised Visitation • He keeps children away from dangerous activities.

• He keeps children away from known sexual offenders.

• He uses known and safe babysitters and child care.

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HE PLANS FOR THE SAFETY NEEDS OF THE CHILD Supervised Visitation • He ensures children’s food allergies are accounted for.

• He accounts for allergies when providing diapers and clothing.

• He engages in only non-violent relationship-building activities with children.

Supervised Exchanges • He uses a safe and legal car safety seat.

• He applies sunscreen and insect repellant.

• He dresses children appropriately for the weather.

• He requires kids to use helmets and other necessary safety equipment.

• He follows safety guidelines for riding off-road vehicles, shooting guns, etc.

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A Duluth Family Visitation Center guide to transition planning

Chapter 10 Guide to Transition Planning

A transition model based on an abusive father’s behavior change creates more possible long-term safety for the woman he batters and their children than a time-defined model creates. Supervised visitation is not punishment and should never be presented punitively. It is a valuable chance for a father who has used violence to start developing positive relationships with his children—to progress from controlling his partner and children to supporting them.

Every agency, organization, and practitioner serious about long-term safety for battered women and their children must hold violent men accountable. Advocates, officers of the court, social workers, police and probation officers, therapists, visitation-center workers, and all practitioners must help each other protect battered women and their kids by insisting that men who batter stop using violence and other controlling tactics. The Duluth Family Visitation Center (DFVC) and its Transition Program are grounded in that paradigm, and this chapter, like the rest of this manual, is based in the experiences and perspectives of DFVC workers.

All DFVC and Transition Program policies, procedures, and decisions are designed to protect vulnerable women and children by holding fathers who batter accountable. The DFVC Transition Program is based in the philosophy that a violent father’s visitation privileges should be eased or restricted only according to his behavior, and never according to the amount of time he has been under a court order to participate in supervised visitation.

No transition process is linear. Every family’s process from supervised visits to unsupervised visits or exchanges will include unpredictable periods of progress and regression.

Every transition process must account for the unique ways men’s violence against women and children affects each family split by battering.

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STAFF REQUIREMENTS FOR SAFE TRANSITION PLANNING Implementing an effective transition program designed to foster long-term safety for battered mothers and their children requires careful decisions about every aspect of a visitation center (VC) including its policies, procedures, and physical layout. All aspects of how a VC functions must be driven by interrupting abusive fathers’ post-separation violence, and by helping fathers who have used violence find non-violent ways of thinking and behaving. Without a well-trained and solidly supported staff, none of that is possible.

Our DFVC experiences tell us visitation center workers can do their jobs most effectively when they have these qualities and opportunities: CRITICAL ANALYSIS AND DIALOGUE Basic domestic violence training sessions, which can help VC workers start to understand battering as a result of cultural beliefs that support men’s violence against women, only go so far. We need regular opportunities to build perspective and critical-analysis skills through dialogue among ourselves—and with men’s non-violence group facilitators, advocates, and other practitioners—about how social standards, oppressive hierarchies, and other aspects of culture support men’s violence against women. We also need chances to help each other understand how a man’s violence that started when he and the woman he batters were together looks and functions in different ways after she leaves him.

TRAINING VC workers need direct training in working with fathers who batter. We need help understanding beliefs that support battering. We need to know about the obvious, subtle, shortterm, and long-term damage that men’s emotional and physical violence creates for women and children. Anyone who works with children in chaos and crisis needs information about childhood development and guidance about applying the information to their work. We must have training that helps us understand how our own families and cultures affect our responses to domestic violence and various forms of parenting. The more we learn and experience, the more we need opportunities for training that helps us process and apply what we know.

PASSION FOR COLLABORATIVE SOCIAL CHANGE We exist within a tradition of social and system changes, started by the women’s movement of the 1970s and 1980s, that have made safety for women and children the focus of responses to domestic violence. To lead more social change, 110

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we must be passionate about relationships among ourselves and our work, the people we serve, and all other batteringintervention practitioners. Close relationships with families in crisis give us valuable information and experiences that we can use to help other practitioners see how and why intervention systems and custody-and-visitation decisions often endanger women and kids by failing to account for men’s post-separation violence and its effects. These working relationships and the support they create are essential for long-term social change.

COHESIVE WORK ENVIRONMENT Every VC staff must be a strong team bound by mutual trust, humility, and honesty. Our emotionally demanding work, often practiced amid chaos and emotional toxicity, can feed resentment, cynicism, and burnout if we don’t all have opportunities to process and express our frustrations and successes. We must support, affirm, and compassionately challenge each other. The more we collaborate to maintain healthy environments, the more our collective creativity, innovation, and problem-solving can flourish, and the more we can help protect battered mothers and their children.

SELF-AWARENESS AND GROWTH Working with abusive men, battered women, and children damaged by domestic violence can teach us a lot about them, ourselves, and each other. We should be engaged and supported in a continual process of understanding how we relate to families we serve. That process should include examining how oppression and privilege function in battering.

We must also constantly pay attention to our own places in privilege and oppression, which is imperative for creating a safe, welcoming, multicultural space that supports every family’s uniqueness.

RESPECT FOR VOICES OF BATTERED WOMEN AND THEIR CHILDREN VCs must be places where women and children—who our cultures often silence and dismiss—are heard, believed, and responded to thoughtfully. Battered moms and their kids are the experts on their own lives, and their voices and experiences must drive every aspect of our work. When we believe we know more about their lives than they know, we collude with violent men’s post-separation battering tactics.

Our programs, policies, and procedures should be based in what women and children recovering from violence tell us they need to feel and be safe. We can learn from them in exit interviews, focus groups, and one-on-one meetings, and by just paying attention.

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BELIEFS THAT VISITATION CENTERS AND COMMUNITY COLLABORATORS MUST SHARE TO CREATE TRANSITION PLANNING THAT KEEPS WOMEN AND CHILDREN SAFE • Women and children have rights to live free of physical, sexual, emotional, and mental violence.

• Men who batter are responsible for their violence and its damage on women and children.

• Battered mothers and their children are not responsible for stopping an abusive father’s violence.

• We are responsible for protecting battered mothers and their children and holding fathers who batter accountable.

• Children’s health and safety depends on their mothers’ health and safety.

• The physical and emotional pain a violent man inflicts on a woman he batters directly damages her ability to parent.

Trying to keep herself and her children safe may consume her time, physical energy, and mental capacity. Until she is free from his violence she will have difficulty meeting the physically and emotionally taxing demands of being the parent she wants to be.

• A battered woman and her children are still in danger after leaving a violent man. He can and will use the children as tools in abusive tactics (which often manipulate practitioners) for maintaining power and control over her.

• Protecting battered women and their kids from abusive fathers’ post-separation battering tactics must be the primary intention of all custody and visitation decisions.

• The more we understand our own and each others’ experiences and beliefs, the better we can collaborate in responses to abusive fathers’ violence that create longterm safety for battered women and their children.

• A transition model based on an abusive father’s behavior change creates more possible long-term safety for the woman he batters and their children than a time-defined model creates. Supervised visitation is not punishment and should never be presented punitively. It is a valuable chance for a father who has used violence to start developing positive relationships with his children—to progress from controlling his partner and children to supporting them.

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TRANSITION PLAN EXAMPLES A commitment to protecting battered mothers and their children and holding abusive fathers accountable guides all aspects of the DFVC Transition Program. The program is designed to foster long-term safety for moms and kids by requiring and helping violent fathers to learn non-violent beliefs and behaviors. This guide is meant to help other VCs start designing their own transition programs based in the same commitment and intentions.

SOME IMPORTANT REMINDERS During a family’s transition toward unsupervised exchanges or visits, VC workers must remain vigilant in holding a father who has used violence accountable for maintaining safe behavior focused on developing a relationship with his kids.

With every attempt to transition out of supervision, he is very likely to ramp up his violence and control tactics. Even if he seemed to have made sustainable changes away from violence during supervised visits, he will try old and new forms of manipulating and intimidating the woman he abused, their children, VC workers, and other practitioners to get his way.

When he backslides, VC workers must stay firm in requiring him to focus on his kids and their needs, and not on what their mom is or isn’t doing. Only VC workers—never the woman he abused or the kids—should speak to him about his behavior. All transition plan expectations should depend on him not being violent. The plan is a conditional agreement that depends on him changing his behavior, acknowledging the impact of his violence, focusing on his kids’ best interests, and meeting VC, court, and other agency expectations.

COURT-ORDERED TRANSITION PLANNING Most families who use the DFVC for supervised visits and exchanges, and who participate in DFVC transition planning, are assigned there as part of civil-court orders for protection in Minnesota’s Sixth Judicial District.

An order for protection (OFP) is a legal method to relieve pressure and fear from See appendix 1a a battered woman by requiring the man for sample letters to who abuses her to leave her alone. In judges or parentingMinnesota, an OFP can also mandate time expeditors. conditions about child support and spousal maintenance payments, chemical dependency treatment, nonviolence programming, which parent stays in the family’s home, and other matters. OFPs usually are initially ordered to last a year or two, and can stay in place for as long as a court dictates. If a man violates the no-contact portion of the OFP against him, he can face criminal charges.

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DFVC staff members attend OFP court to answer questions and meet with parents about visitation options. Because they have established good working relationships with judges, attorneys, and legal advocates, the DFVC transition program is now mandated in many Sixth District OFPs and some family-court orders. Area court-appointed child guardians now include the program in custody and visitation recommendations, and family-court attorneys and mediators are writing it into their proposed orders. DFVC staff members are working to have the transition program implemented as a term of probation. Since court-ordered transition plans carry non-compliance consequences, they are often more effective than voluntary plans in protecting mothers and children and holding men who have used violence accountable.

VOLUNTARY TRANSITION PLANNING Although many parents say they will try to self-manage parallel parenting after their orders to use a VC expire, VC workers should always offer to help parents establish plans for gradually transitioning into unsupervised visits and exchanges. Protecting a mother and children and holding a father accountable can be especially difficult when he has volunteered, and is not required, to take part in a plan.

Voluntary plans are safest when they include fathers who VC workers believe have made tangible, consistent changes into non-violent beliefs and behavior.

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Coming up...Numbers 3 and 4 are examples of voluntary transition plans.

TRANSITION-PLANNING NUTS AND BOLTS

EACH TRANSITION SCENARIO BELOW WILL START WITH THIS ORIENTATION PROCESS Unless otherwise noted, the processes are based on the assumption that a battered mother is the custodial parent and a father who has used violence is the visiting parent.

Transition planning begins during VC orientation:

1

Gather basic custody and visitation information.

• Who has physical and legal custody?

• If the mother does not have custody, what led to her losing it?

• Is the custody order permanent or temporary?

• If the order is temporary, what are its conditions?

• How is court-ordered visitation defined?

• When is the next court date?

• Where do the children live?

• How often do the children see each parent?

• When did the visiting parent last see the children?

2

What other practitioners are involved in the case?

• Is anyone from social services or child protective services involved?

• Is either parent on a service plan to regain custody of children who were removed by social services?

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3

What are each parent’s goals for supervised-visitation?

• What is each parent’s relationship with the children like?

• What roles did each parent play in the children’s lives when they were together?

• How does he want to maintain or rebuild his relationship with the kids?

• What are each parent’s and children’s supervised-visitation concerns?

• What specific indicators will show VC workers, her, and him that supervised visits are going well for him and children?

• How does each parent envision moving toward unsupervised visitation?

• What other family members might be important to include in visits?

4

What are her visitation goals?

• What are her specific safety concerns?

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•

What defines safe visits for her?

•

What other critical issues need to be addressed?

5

How does each parent envision the transition to unsupervised visitation? • What will show each parent the time is right to try the transition? • How will VC staff work with each child to gauge their comfort level about moving to less-restrictive visitation?

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SCENARIO 1: PLAN FOR FATHERS See appendix 1b for transition-plan examples

TRANSITIONING FROM SUPERVISED VISITS TO UNSUPERVISED VISITS WITH SAFE EXCHANGES

1

MEET WITH EACH PARENT When meeting with her, find out what she and the children need to feel and be safe during unsupervised visits and exchanges. In both meetings, get ideas about safe, positive, child-focused boundaries. Document information that can help the VC and both parents promote safety. Take time to think about the facts, discuss ideas with colleagues, and carefully draft a proposal. Staff members who work with the family may have perspective and rapport that provide insights helpful to the transition plan and process. Workers should not finalize or promise plan details in meetings with either parent.

MEET WITH HER FIRST QUESTIONS TO ASK: • What do you and your kids need for safe off-site visitation?

• What would be helpful for you to know about his unsupervised time with the kids?

• What concerns you about unsupervised visitation?

• What shows you visitation time is safe, productive, comfortable, etc. for the kids?

• What shows you visitation time is dangerous, unproductive, uncomfortable, etc. for the kids?

• Who in his social support network seems vital in helping create and maintain safety?

• Who do you have for support?

THEN MEET WITH HIM While VC workers should not tell him what her visitation-andexchange goals and fears are, their plans for achieving those goals and allaying those fears should be the focus of the meeting with him. Gauge his desire and ability to create safety for her and the kids during transition and unsupervised visits and exchanges. Document practical safety measures VC staff can monitor. Set clear expectations and consequences for his behavior. Focus the conversation on children’s best interests 118

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and his opportunities to build relationships with them, nurture them, and promote their physical and social growth.

QUESTIONS TO ASK: • What is he willing and able to do, during every visit and exchange, to promote safety?

• What are his off-site visit plans?

• How will he meet the children’s needs?

• What is he willing to share with her?

• What shows him his children feel and are safe and have a good relationship with him?

• What family members or other adults will be present during visits, and what are their roles in the kids’ lives?

Most tactics a violent man uses to batter a woman when they are together include emotional and physical manipulation. After she leaves, he can manipulate her with some tactics on the Using Children Post Separation Wheel even if he is under court orders to have no contact with her. If he is allowed to have contact with her he can directly exploit her vulnerabilities, especially if she is worn down by fear, anger, poverty, stress about legal matters, and trying to parent amid chaos created by his violence.

If she is exhausted and he seems less violent, he can probably convince her they don’t need to volunteer for a VC transition plan. He may suggest couples counseling, mediation, co-parenting classes, or anything else that gets him away from the VC, where he is constantly held accountable. None of those options is designed to keep her and the kids safe or to acknowledge and hold him accountable for his violence like VC plans are. If a father who has battered seems to have become less violent but resists VC transition planning and tries to convince the woman he abused they don’t need VC help anymore, all practitioners involved should assume he is still a threat.

CAUTION! VC work is not child care or women’s advocacy. It is direct interaction with men who batter. VC staff members must understand battering dynamics.

Every decision made in a VC must be intended to protect women and children and hold violent men accountable.

2

KEEP DETAILED FILES Compile notes from meetings with each parent, documentation from the family’s VC time, court paperwork that orders visitation and transition planning, and information from conversations with guardians, attorneys, social workers, men’s nonviolence group facilitators, and other relevant people. Clear, concrete information will be helpful in creating a safe, credible transition plan (which is just one of many good reasons to maintain detailed files).

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3

DON’T GO IT ALONE! The stronger a VC’s network of community agencies, organizations, and practitioners is, the more effectively the VC can protect battered mothers and their children. Solid documentation and planning, and relationships built through one-on-one time with each parent and child, help create a credible base from which to collaborate with practitioners outside a VC. When considering how to interact and collaborate with other practitioners, find answers to these and other questions: • Which community practitioners understand her and the kids’ safety requirements and have a vested interest in holding him accountable?

See appendix 1c for email guideline examples.

• What will be non-VC practitioners’ roles? If probation prohibits him from drinking, will his probation officer share urinalysis information with VC staff? If his men’s nonviolence group facilitator says he is disengaged and resistant to change, how will that information see appendix affect the plan?

1d for DFVC communication • Make sure outside practitioners guidelines. know the plan’s details and understand what the VC can and can’t do to protect her and the kids and hold him accountable.

Relevant non-VC practitioners who don’t participate in the plan should be kept informed about its details and progress.

VC workers have unique opportunities to help interested but perhaps misinformed practitioners understand the realities of battering and of visits among violent men and their children.

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4

WRITE THE PLAN The Using Children Post Separation Wheel should be the basis for defining expectations and guiding the writing process. Remember that VC plans must focus on protecting battered women and their children and holding violent men accountable, not on trying to achieve something that might look like agreement between a violent father and the woman he battered. When “agreement” is the goal, a woman who is still vulnerable because of a man’s violence will often feel pressure to meet practitioners’ standards for credibility and cooperation by saying yes to plans that sacrifice safety for her and her children. During the process many practitioners, including visitation center staff, will push her to compromise— not him—because she offers less resistance than he does.

She is easier to push. Safety-focused VC plans are developed and implemented with battered women and according to their conditions for keeping themselves and their children safe. In a VC plan, protecting a battered mom and her children takes precedence over giving a violent father what he wants. For example: If an exchange location is convenient for him but unsafe for her, it will not be in the plan.

Make sure the plan clearly states detailed conditions that address these and other safety-based questions and issues: • In what specific ways will he meet long-term safety goals and concentrate on her and the children’s safety during unsupervised parenting time?

• How will he maintain the non-violent behavior he used in supervised visits during unsupervised visits?

• Can trusted family members or friends be integrated into the transition process in ways that increase her and the children’s off-site safety?

• Address her and kids’ specific safety concerns by creating concrete, objective safety expectations.

• Clearly state that progress toward increased unsupervised visitation time is based on children’s comfort, his plan compliance and non-violence, and other specific factors.

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• If a protective order is active, show how its conditions will be part of the plan.

• Make it clear that if off-site visits are unsafe, if he violates other expectations, or if children refuse to leave the center with him, visits will return to or remain in the VC. • Show how non-VC practitioners will participate, and how the VC will share information with them.

• Show how the Using Children Post Separation Wheel guides behavior expectations.

• Show how VC staff check-ins with parents and children will happen during transition.

• Describe plans for continuing VC staff check-ins with parents after visits and exchanges have become fully unsupervised. Give details about where VC staff will check in, what questions individual check-ins will include, and other aspects of check-ins, and be very clear in saying that VC-family contact is crucial in maintaining safety when visits and exchanges happen without witnesses.

• Make sure both parents and at least one VC staff member sign the plan.

• Set clear, detailed plans for how each parent will communicate with children, the other parent, VC staff, and any other relevant practitioners or transition participants.

See appendix 1c for email guidelines

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5

PAY SPECIAL ATTENTION TO COMMUNICATION In the DFVC, a father who has used violence and the woman he battered usually have little if any direct communication with each other when an order for supervised visits is still active.

During the transition from supervised to unsupervised visits, protection orders may remain in place for a long time, may be about to expire, or may have just expired. VC staff should discourage direct communication between parents while a protection order is in place and ask non-VC practitioners participating in the plan to do the same. If transition is courtordered before an order expires, work with each parent to develop safe methods for sharing information about the children. Communication strategies—just like every other part of the plan—must protect her and the kids and hold him accountable.

ADDRESSING COMMUNICATION DANGERS SOME SAFETY AND ACCOUNTABILITY POSSIBILITIES AND REMINDERS: • Email can be an effective way for parents to gradually re-establish direct communication with each other if messages meet safety and accountability guidelines approved by the woman who has been battered and VC staff. The plan should name VC staff and non-VC practitioners who must be carbon-copied on all messages and list other conditions intended to facilitate accountability and documentation. It should also list detailed consequences for his messages that harass, threaten, or coerce her or violate other stated conditions.

• At the DFVC, parents use family-specific notebooks that stay in the center to share children’s needs and visitation details—when he changed diapers, where he took the kids, what the kids ate, if the kids took naps, etc. All DFVC transition plans clearly list consequences for notebook messages that violate the plan’s safety and accountability conditions.

• Discourage phone calls between parents. Phone contact often quickly becomes harassment and is difficult to document. The plan should clearly state who, in addition to VC staff, each parent should immediately call in case of childcare or other emergency. If legal orders or her safety prohibit him from calling her, the VC must be a reliable Guide to Transition Planning

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resource for messages between them during off-site visitation. • If direct communication with him compromises her or children’s safety, make sure VC staff can reliably pass messages about children and visits between parents. • A transition plan is conditional: it describes what will happen if the process functions according to stated conditions and expectations. When needs and circumstances change, so should the plan.

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6

TRY IT OUT Once a transition plan is in place, test it gradually.

• Prohibit visiting parents from driving anywhere with children for their first off-site visit.

• Start with short off-site periods—maybe 30 minutes to an hour. If children and moms say and show that visits are going well, gradually increase the time.

• Have unsupervised visits begin and end at the VC. Check in with her, him, and especially the children to see how they’re feeling and whether they need anything from staff before or after visits.

• Have him and the children return to the VC at least 15 minutes before the visit’s scheduled end so staff can check in with them, document and address concerns, and give him time to write her a note about the visit.

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SCENARIO 2: PLAN FOR FATHERS TRANSITIONING FROM SUPERVISED TO UNSUPERVISED EXCHANGES Voluntary and court-ordered exchange-transition plans look slightly different from visitation-transition plans, but the process is still guided by the tactics on the Using Children Post Separation Wheel. If unsupervised exchanges go poorly, supervised visits or exchanges should be reinstated. Trusted third parties—partners, family members, or friends of either parent—are common exchange facilitators.

1

MEET WITH BOTH PARENTS INDIVIDUALLY VC workers should not finalize or promise plan details while meeting with either parent. Use meetings to gather information, then take time to think about the facts, discuss ideas with colleagues, and carefully draft a proposal.

MEETING WITH HER Questions to ask: • What do you and your kids need for an exchange to be safe?

• What locations feel safe? (Police departments, school parking lots, fast-food restaurant parking lots, day care sites, and churches are common exchange locations.)

• What helps you feel safe in a certain location? Lots of people? Good lighting? Access to certain resources?

• What locations are or feel dangerous? Why? • Who can make exchanges on your behalf if you feel uncomfortable or endangered?

• Should a third party be at the exchange? Who? • What information about the children should he receive during exchanges? (VC staff should use her wants, his history, and court-order conditions to decide what gets shared and how. Children should never be responsible for conveying information between him and her.)

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• If she has to miss or be late for an exchange, how would she prefer to let him know? If he has to miss or be late, who will let her know?

MEETING WITH HIM Use information from meeting with her to guide questions and proposals to him. Do not suggest or accept options that will compromise her safety.

Questions to ask: • What defines a safe exchange?

• What will he do to ensure exchanges are safe for her and the children?

• What exchange locations seem safe? Why? • Should a third party be at the exchange? Who? • How should information about the children be exchanged?

• If he has to miss or be late for an exchange, how would he prefer to let her know? (Do not propose options that she says are dangerous.)

2

COMPILE INFORMATION • Look for common points. If none exist, transition may be inappropriate.

• What seem to be agreeable and safe locations?

• Who will participate in the exchanges?

• Who are acceptable third parties?

• What information will be shared, and how?

• How will changes in exchange procedures and conditions be made?

• Which other practitioners will involved? How can they help protect her and the kids and keep him accountable?

• Will his probation officer share urinalysis and other information? Will it go directly to her, or through VC staff?

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• How can social services help protect her and the kids and hold him accountable?

• How can children’s therapists help protect them and her?

3

WRITE THE PLAN A credible, effective transition plan can be as short as a single paragraph or as long as multiple pages. Every plan will be unique to the people it serves and will be based on conditions specific to their safety needs, behavior expectations, and practitioner relationships.

See appendix 1a for examples of plans for transitioning into unsupervised exchanges. Make sure the plan clearly states detailed conditions that address these and other safety-related topics: • Acceptable exchange locations.

• Exchange times.

• Requirements and acceptable topics for email, phone calls, VC notebook messages, and other communication methods.

• Acceptable third parties and their contact information.

• Procedures for changing exchange times or locations.

• Consequences, including reinstating supervised visits or exchanges, for violating plan conditions.

• Once she, he, and VC staff approve plan, have everyone sign it.

4

TRY IT OUT No first try is perfect. No plan is permanent. Maintain close contact with both parents and help them make adjustments.

Share what is and isn’t working with VC colleagues and relevant non-VC practitioners.

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SCENARIO 3: PLAN FOR BATTERED MOTHERS WHO HAVE LOST CUSTODY

Some fathers who batter become primary parents. We have seen mothers lose all parenting rights. When a battered mom’s contact with her children is limited to court-ordered supervised visits, VC staff should maintain the same focus as when violent fathers are ordered to use the VC: protecting her and their children and holding him accountable.

They must help her maintain her bonds with the children, account for his damaging influence on those relationships, and support her ability to parent safely and free from his threats. The Using Children Post Separation Wheel tactics give him powerful leverage for manipulating judges, social workers, children’s advocates, and other practitioners who make custody decisions into seeing her as an inept or even violent mother. VC staff have unique responsibility and opportunities to help other practitioners see—through careful documentation—the reality of his post-separation violence and its effects on her and their children. At the DFVC, behavior of battered mothers who have custody is usually documented in much less detail than behavior of fathers who have lost custody because of using violence. But when a violent father has custody, DFVC staff keep careful notes about how his past and current abuse are affecting his kids and the woman he is still abusing. They keep track of how often he cancels visits and the reasons he gives for cancelling. They pay attention to and document children’s safety, her safety, and the kids’ reactions to living with him and not her.

1

COMPILE INFORMATION BEGINNING WITH ORIENTATION Establishing a clear picture of the family’s history and current situation before visits is vital. Work hard to understand the context in which she lost custody. Was it because a man other than her children’s father abused her? Did she use violence against the children’s father? Is she part of an open social services investigation or custody-and-visitation case?

Stay constantly focused on the VC mission to protect her and the children and hold the man who battered her accountable for his violence. In a case where he could get permanent

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custody if she violates court orders, protecting her will include clearly documenting her behavior and activities, helping her meet all court-order and service-plan conditions, and making sure all practitioners who work with her have current court-order and VC plan information. Tailor VC behavior-change goals in the VC plan to issues outlined in court orders and child-protection service plans.

2

DURING SUPERVISED VISITATION • Document his use of the Using Children Post Separation Wheel tactics against her.

• Check in with her, him, and the children frequently.

• How is visitation going?

• How are the children doing?

• What is going well?

• What needs improvement?

• What are your safety concerns?

• Stay in contact with relevant non-VC practitioners.

• Provide visitation updates.

• Raise and address concerns about visits or kids.

• Find and capitalize on opportunities to discuss battering dynamics.

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3

MEET WITH HIM • Ask how visits have been going.

• Have his concerns been addressed?

• How are the children doing?

• What are the children saying about the visits?

• Do the kids seem like they’re looking forward to seeing their mom outside the VC? • What does he think the next step would be?

• What are his ideas for moving to unsupervised visitation?

• Does he have concerns?

• How would he like to address those concerns?

• Where would he like the first off-site visits to happen?

4

MEET WITH HER • Use information from conversation with him to seek common ground.

• How does she feel about visits so far?

• Is she ready to try an off-site visit?

• What are her concerns, and how would she like to address them?

• How would she prefer to address his concerns?

• What would a safe first off-site visit look like? Where would she take the kids? What would they do?

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5

WRITE THE TRANSITION PLAN Start by finding ways to maintain the children’s best interests within common ground identified through conversations with him and her.

• Require that her first few off-site visits start and end with 20 or 30 minutes in the VC, which would let staff check in with everyone about how off-site time is going. Checkins help staff gather and document concrete information that can be valuable in helping her build a case for more parenting time.

• Make sure the plan clearly states communication conditions. A father who batters will often harass and intimidate the woman he abuses through phone, email, or face-to-face contact. If she feels unsafe communicating with him, VC staff members should act as liaisons between them.

• Clearly state the visit schedule and procedures for changing it.

• Include relevant non-VC practitioners in the process.

• Have both parents and visitation center staff sign the plan.

If he or children’s other guardians resist, document and discuss their reservations using agreed-upon guidelines.

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6

TRY IT OUT Make adjustments as necessary. In our experience, it can be diificult to get the custodial father to consistently provide visits and he will often garner system support for his actions. Be firm on consistency as you are moving to a new plan. He will often want to change the plan after the first or first few visits. Unless there is a legitimate safety concern, for the child be clear on giving a new plan a solid trial period.

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Appendices ALL names and case-specific information have been changed or modified.

Appendix 1a.

Sample letter about the Transition Program to a judge or practitioner.

(Copy letters to all relevant parents, guardians, and attorneys. Include court file numbers.)

Letter #1 (Summarizes visitation and identifies the transition program as a viable option for transitioning to unsupervised visitation.)

Name of judge, parenting-time expeditor, etc RE: court file#, mother’s name, father’s In a court order, father was granted supervised parenting with his daughter every other Sunday from 1:00 to 3:00 pm at the Duluth Family Visitation Center. When father began supervised visitation on [date], father and daughter had not seen each other for two years. Daughter was apprehensive, clinging to mother and saying she did not want to stay. DFVC staff member and mother encouraged daughter to stay, and offered many options to ensure comfortable visits. Daughter has become more comfortable, and is excited when father’s son attends.

Father-daughter visitation relationship has progressed. Daughter shows growing comfort with father, who has spoken with staff members about increasing visitation time and moving visitation off site.

Staff members suggested the DFVC Transition Program, which facilitates positive, child-focused communication among fathers, mothers, and children, so children’s needs are properly prepared for and taken care of during current and future visitation. Father and mother have agreed to participate, and have started staff-monitored email communication about their daughter. Parents and staff members have discussed four-hour visits including on- and off-site time.

Available visitation options include using the DFVC for supervised visits and exchanges, and transition planning to work on improving communication about addressing daughter’s needs. Twohour supervised visits go well, and suggest success of a slow transition to increased parenting time that includes off-site visits and supervised exchanges. Continued DFVC support has great potential to build positive interaction and communication among parents and daughter, and to help create a transition that meets the daughter’s needs.

Respectfully submitted, Staff member name CCed to all parties and their attorneys

Letter #2 (Summarizes visitation and suggests options for safe, child-focused visitation between the father and children.)

Date: Honorable Judge _______ RE: court file #, mother’s name, father’s name Father was ordered to use the Duluth Family Visitation Center (DFVC) for supervised exchanges as a condition of an order for protection against him. He has used DFVC services for exchanges, and has chosen on-site, supervised visitation for all of his Wednesday visitation time, and for most of his Sunday time.

Some consistent themes of his on-site visits cause concern 1. Little to no interaction with his sons, who often play by themselves or try to engage other children.

When he does interact, usually with the youngest son, the oldest son plays by himself. Staff members have encouraged father to interact with both boys, and the oldest son to play with his father. Father often says his oldest son just a mama’s boy, and keeps ignoring him.

2. Noncompliance with center policies designed to increase mother’s safety and decrease chances that parents will see each other. For example: He does not wait the ten minutes required before he sees the boys after she drops them off, or to leave the center after she picks them up, despite being asked to on many occasions.

3. Oldest son’s growing disinterest in seeing father. He has refused visitation several times, telling staff members he does not want to go. When staff members and mother encourage him, he refuses and gets upset. Documentation shows he is more comfortable seeing his father when visits are on site.

4. Failure to check or change youngest son’s diaper, often leaving it dirty.

5. Aggression: repeatedly yelling at staff members and stomping around the center when other families are present, which creates an unpredictable and unsafe environment for his sons and other children.

Most recently, on Wednesday, May 12, 2010, when father was asked by staff to check and change his two-and-a-half-year-old son’s diaper, he grabbed the boy, stormed to the bathroom, closed the door, and yelled, “You would poop your pants right now, just to get me in trouble with your mom! Why would you poop your pants right now?” He stomped out of the bathroom, and held the diaper to the staff member’s while yelling, “See, it’s not dirty!” The boy was crying, stiff, and scared. Staff members had to calm the boy.

Such behavior is grounds for suspension from the center. Father’s last scheduled visit was canceled because of an impending court hearing. His on-site behavior raises concerns about off-site contact with his children, and supervised visits could be an opportunity for his relationships with them to become more positive.

Due to increasing safety concerns with off-site visits, the DFVC agrees to provide supervised on-site visits and will schedule them if the father commits to following DFVC policies and being respectful.

DAIP offers Men’s non-violence groups specifically for fathers.

Respectfully submitted CCed to all parties, attorneys

Appendix 1b.

Sample Transition Plans Each of these plans, created for unique circumstances and visitation phases, meets specific children’s needs and mothers’ safety concerns. Sample plans can be valuable guides, but they should not be used as formulas or templates.

Plan #1 Terms of Transition Agreement The order for protection for the mother, on behalf of her children, expires on ___________. After careful consideration, Duluth Family Visitation Center (DFVC) staff members, the mother, and the father, agree on these terms of communication, on-site visitation, and transition to off-site visitation.

Supervised visitation between the father and children at the DFVC will continue. As the mother’s and father’s schedules allow, visits will increase from one two-hour visit per week to two.

The oldest child’s therapist will determine when the child resumes on-site visitation, based on these conditions: • The child says or shows she wants to resume visitation • The child’s therapist determines visitation is appropriate • The child’s mother says the child seems ready for visitation No timeline is attached to these conditions. The father has the therapist’s contact information.

• The father’s transition to off-site visitation depends on meeting these conditions: • Demonstration of positive parenting skills with his two youngest children, and mindful attendance to their physical and emotional needs • Safe, civil communication with his partner.

• Only email messages, and only about finances and the children.

• If the children tell their mother they want to call him on a holiday or birthday, the mother will call, and the children will talk with him briefly.

• Verbal affirmation of his sobriety to DFVC staff at least once per month • Commitment to pay the mother $50 for children’s needs at least once every two weeks. (He says this amount will grow as his budget allows, and he will pay her at visitation through DFVC staff members.)

DFVC staff members will continue to work intensively with the mother, father, and children to ensure safe visitation, and to plan the transition to off-site visitation when the above conditions have been met.

Both parties have these terms with the transition specialist, and acknowledge that transition to offsite visitation depends on meeting the terms. Both parties understand there is no set start date the off-site visitation, and agree to keep working with the transition specialist to ensure that all visitation decisions are based in the children’s best interests and the mother’s long-term safety. ______________________ Mother’s signature ______________________ Date:

______________________ Father’s signature ______________________ Date:

______________________ DFVC staff ______________________ Date:

Plan #2 Transition plan for visiting father and child: Duluth Family Visitation Center December 29, 2010 Sunday and Friday visitation will continue, with a transition to combined on- and off-site visits.

• Father can take child off site for one hour, after 30 on-site minutes in which a staff member checks in about child’s or father’s concerns or other issues • Father will return with child at least 30 minutes before the visit ends, so a staff member can check in again, and address concerns or questions that arose during visitation • Father agrees to notify staff members where he will be taking his child • Father agrees to abide by his child’s dietary restrictions and NOT feed the child wheat or dairy, and will tell staff members about anything the child ate, during visitation • Mother will send the child to visitation in weather-appropriate clothing, and father agrees to return the child in the same clothing, in the same condition as when they left the visitation center.

• Father agrees to continue building a positive relationship with his child, and will not use visitation time to speak negatively about mother.

• Both parties agree to maintain a consistent visitation schedule • Parents will not directly communicate with each other • DFVC staff members will maintain communication with both parents and the child’s therapist.

• Both parents understand that if the father violates these agreed-upon stipulations, on-site, supervised visitation will be re-instated.

______________________ Mother’s signature ______________________ Date:

______________________ Father’s signature ______________________ Date:

______________________ DFVC Staff ______________________ Date:

______________________ Therapist signature ______________________ Date:

Plans #4 and #5 (These plans show the transition process that occurred over a series of months and the subsequent agreements that followed in accord with the terms of the first agreement being met.)

October 5, 2011 Re: name of parents Court File #: Transition Plan for father and child This agreement is in regards to transitions between father and child. There will be a mix of onsite and offsite visitation, both supervised and unsupervised: 1. Father and child will begin a new schedule of visitation, beginning on 10/5. See supplemental attachment for new schedule.

2. Starting on 10/5/2011, father and child will stay onsite for the first half hour of the visit, leave the visitation center for an unsupervised visit for one hour, and then return onsite for the last half hour.

For the first visit father will not transport child.

3. The period of onsite/offsite visitation center will begin at the visitation center (VC). Father will only be unsupervised with child in periods before and after being at the VC (on the Wednesday visitation days). The period of onsite/offsite visitation will be a trial period and, should safety concerns arise, Wednesday visitation will resume supervised onsite.

4. Every other Saturday father will be able to visit child supervised by his parents at his parent’s house. Mother will arrange with father’s parents to either: • Drop off child at their house with father not being within several blocks of the vicinity • Meet father’s parents at a neutral setting (such as a restaurant or gas station) to exchange child.

5. Mother will arrange specific times with father’s parents to drop off child and father will visit only on Saturdays and must remain at his parent’s residence with Hanna in order for supervised visitation to occur. Times of visitation will depend on how long Hanna stays on Saturday for the day.

Visitation time will be at least 4 hours.

6. Mother will arrange with father’s parents when/how she will be picking up child Saturday afternoon/ evening. If mother is to pick up child at father’s parents house, father must leave his parents house at least 15 minutes prior to pick-up.

7. If child is to be transported by car from the DFVC during the periods of onsite/offsite visitation – staff MUST see a valid driver’s license, car insurance, and complete a car seat check from the individual transporting her.

8. All aspects of the harassment order will remain in place. Should the harassment order be violated all visitation will return onsite at the DFVC. Father will not be present for any exchanges occurring outside the visitation center.

Both father and mother understand that should father not adhere to the agreed upon stipulations in this transition plan, visitation will return onsite, supervised. _________________________ Father _________________________ Date:

_______________________ Mother _______________________ Date:

_____________________ DFVC Transition Specialist _____________________ Date:

Updated Transition Plan Date Court File #: Transition Plan for Father and Child This agreement is in regards to transitions between father and child. Currently there is a mix of supervised and unsupervised visitation being upheld by the October 5, 2011 contract signed by all parties. This agreement is an extension of that contract: 1. Numbers 5, 6, and 7 of the first agreement will remain in full effect.

2. Father is currently visiting child every other Wednesday with exchanges at the DFVC. These are 2-hour long visits. This is in accord with the current exchange schedule 3. On the Saturday visitations when father sees child at his parent’s house, he is able to transport child to his house. Child will continue to sleep at her grandmother’s house. Mother will continue to arrange pick-up and drop off with father’s parents as outlined in the first transition agreement Father and mother understand that should father not adhere to the above stipulations that visitation may return to onsite, supervised. ______________________ Mother’s signature ______________________ Date:

______________________ Father’s signature ______________________ Date:

______________________ DFVC staff ______________________ Date:

Plan #3 (This plan for transitioning from supervised to unsupervised exchanges was created in response to both parents, who had been using the DFVC for four years, wanting to try off-site exchanges.)

Date: DFVC staff members have spoken with both parents many times, and the mother says her safety concerns have been addressed, her children are doing well, and she would like to try off-site exchanges, which would work better with her and her children’s schedules. The father agrees that offsite exchanges will work better for the children, and for his schedule.

• Exchanges will happen in the McDonald’s parking lot, during established times • Parents will not directly communicate at exchanges • Parents will communicate only by email messages that are CC’d to visitation center staff members, and that follow agreed-upon guidelines • If messages become harassing, threatening, or coercive, email contact will end, and exchanges may move back on-site • In an emergency, or if an exchange time needs to change at the last minute, a text message is acceptable • Mother and father agree to text only in these cases • If exchanges become unsafe or otherwise violate agreed-upon standards, they will go back to being supervised at the DFVC • Mother and father agree to check in with DFVC staff members regularly, and to use staff members for resolving child-related concerns, questions, and issues that cannot be resolved over email _________________________ Father _________________________ Date:

_______________________ Mother _______________________ Date:

_____________________ DFVC Transition Specialist _____________________ Date:

Plan #4 (For a mother who started visiting on site then transitioned to unsupervised visits, and was ready for transitioning to unsupervised exchanges. The move to unsupervised visits was verbally agreed upon, and this plan came from many conversations among staff members, the custodial parent (her abusive former partner’s sister), and her.

Date: The mother has been using the DFVC for two years, first for supervised visitation, then for supervised exchange for her six-hour, off-site, Sunday visits. Staff members have worked intensively with her, and have documented her consistent visitation. She has willingly shared her off-site visitation plans with staff members and the custodial parent (the mother’s abusive former partner’s sister). Staff members who have been checking in with her daughter have no visitation-time concerns, and have noticed the mother-daughter relationship grow during DFVC time.

After meeting with both the mother and the custodial parent, staff members have this plan for transitioning to off-site, unsupervised exchanges: • Six-hour Sunday visits will continue • The custodial parent says that after one month of consistent Sunday visits, she will consider adding six-hour Saturday visits.

• Mother will continue consistent visitation • If she has to miss an exchange, she will immediately notify the custodial parent by text message • Mother will continue to update the custodial parent about visitation plans at the exchange • Mother will continue to call and chat with the child Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, at 7pm • Exchanges will occur at the mother’s house, and contact between her and the custodial parent is allowed.

• Mother and custodial parent are committed to maintaining contact with DFVC staff members, and agree on returning to DFVC if off-site exchanges go poorly.

________________________ Mother’s Signature ________________________ Date:

_______________________ Custodial Parent’s Signature _______________________ Date:

_____________________ DFVC Transition Specialist _____________________ Date:

Appendix 1c Email communication guidelines.

These case-specific examples give a general idea of what to consider when arranging email contact between parties.

Email #1 Hello, [mother’s name] and [father’s name]! This is the test message I said I’d send. Please let me know that you got it, and whether you agree to the guidelines described below.

Here are the email guidelines I came up with after talking with both of you: • Emails should only discuss kids, visits, and what they require.

• For now, don’t discuss scheduling changes in email messages. Let’s run that information through the DFVC, and wait till communication becomes more comfortable before we try it out in email • CC me on every message • Keep all messages respectful, child-focused, and positive Please let me know if I missed something.

Once I hear back from you both, and have your agreement to the guidelines, we can get started.

Email #2 Hello, [mother’s name] and [father’s name]. One key piece of your participation in the DFVC Transition Program is communication between you, about [child’s name or children’s names]. One effective method for starting that communication process is email messages, CCed to me, that meet the guidelines listed below.

Please read through the guidelines, and let me know if you agree with them, if you have questions, or if you would like to add anything.

Email guidelines: • All messages will be respectful, child-focused, and CCed to center staff • Messages should be sent Monday through Thursday, to correspond [mother’s name’s or father’s name’s] Internet access at work • Respond to messages that request information within 48 hours • Respond with single, short messages (not long messages or a barrage) Please respond to let me know you got this message, and if you agree with these guidelines, if you have questions, or if you would like to add anything.

Appendix 1d Communication Notebook Guidelines These DFVC guidelines can be modified to fit the needs of other centers.

Communication Notebooks After using the center for exchanges (and visitation, in some cases) for a while, some parents exchange information about their child in a spiral-notebook communication log. Some families use their log for other appropriate communication, but center staff members do monitor every log. Using a log is often a visiting parent’s first step in demonstrating that they can meet children’s needs during visitation.

Communication Log Guidelines • Parents will use spiral notebooks that stay at the DFVC and are passed from parent to parent by staff members • Staff members monitor notebook contents. Uncivil, inappropriate content will be reported.

• Notebooks are available for court purposes.

• Notebooks are not for parents to make demands on each other This log is for sharing information about your child with each other. This information usually includes: • Activities and events the child has participated in • Health or diet concerns • Medicine schedules • Nap times, sleeping routines, and other habits • Special requests and descriptions of needs.

• Homework assignments.

The need to discuss other topics may arise. Keep in mind that all discussion regarding child support, health insurance, court orders, etc. must be appropriate. Most families are able to exchange information about children with civility, and in children’s best interests.

Parent Signature:

Date:

Parent Signature:

Date:

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