Season 6 Episode 16: Centering Survivor Voices: How Scottish Services Shift Blame, Raise Fatherhood Standards & Heal Families

Partnered with a Survivor: David Mandel and Ruth Reymundo Mandel

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Blame doesn’t make families safer—clarity does. We sit down with Scottish survivors and practitioners from Equally Safe Falkirk to explore how a survivor-centered, perpetrator-focused, child safety–driven approach changes practice, confidence, and outcomes. You’ll hear how validation replaces tick-box culture, how naming protective parenting restores mothers’ confidence, and how raising standards for fathers reframes accountability as a set of concrete parenting choices.
Nicolla and Emma walk us through building a service with lived experience at its core—co-designing groups like Serenity and Women Unite, challenging harmful language. While survivors Steph and Lita share raw, powerful stories of experiencing moving from professional and systemic victim-blaming and invisibility to being believed and partnered with. Their accounts reveal what happens when professionals consistently pivot back to the perpetrator’s behavior, document survivor strengths, and stay curious instead of prescriptive. The result isn’t just better engagement; it’s safer children, stronger parenting, and more effective multi-agency work.
We also dig into the tough stuff: working with fathers who cause harm without colluding, addressing trauma and substance use without excusing abuse, and building the skills to challenge, contain, and guide change over time. Tools like the Choose to Change Toolkit help dads interrupt escalation, but the heartbeat is consistent messaging: Your behavior is a parenting choice with consequences for your child’s physical and mental health. Leaders will hear a clear call to invest in rigorous training, align language across agencies, and normalize accountability for fathers as a core child protection standard.
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Now available! Mapping the Perpetrator’s Pattern: A Practitioner’s Tool for Improving Assessment, Intervention, and Outcomes The web-based Perpetrator Pattern Mapping Tool is a virtual practice tool for improving assessment, intervention, and outcomes through a perpetrator pattern-based approach. The tool allows practitioners to apply the Model’s critical concepts and principles to their current case load in real

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

1. Welcome, Land, and Intent (00:00:00)

2. Mission: Fix Systems, Not Survivors (00:03:35)

3. Scotland’s Holistic Practice Partners (00:07:00)

4. Meet Equally Safe Falkirk (00:08:15)

5. Survivor Journeys Begin (00:13:56)

6. Validation, Trust, and Real Support (00:19:21)

7. Seeing Mothers’ Strengths (00:25:01)

8. Harmful Responses From Systems (00:31:01)

9. Shifting Responsibility to Perpetrators (00:36:51)

10. Practitioner Perspective: Clarity and Change (00:41:41)

11. Designing Services With Survivor Voice (00:47:31)

12. Working With Fathers Who Cause Harm (00:53:01)

13. Substance Use, Trauma, and Accountability (00:58:51)

14. Raising Standards for Fathers (01:04:31)

115 episodes

#Society #Parenting #Relationship #Politics #Kids And Family #News #Ruth Stearns Mandel & David Mandel #David Mandel #Ruth Stearns Mandel #Abuse #Domestic Violence #Child Abuse #Coercive Control #Trauma #Systems #Consent #Sexual Abuse #Allie