In the past three decades, Connecticut, like other states, has struggled to respond effectively to the rise of reported child abuse and neglect cases. To help adequately address the myriad needs of victims and their families, as well as to increase successful investigation and prosecution of offenders, communities around Connecticut began to form multidisciplinary teams in the hopes of enhancing a coordinated response to reports of child abuse and neglect.

Connecticut currently has 15 Multidisciplinary Teams around the state that meet to provide consultation and comprehensive assessment in child abuse and neglect cases. Teams meet regularly to discuss cases, promote coordination between agencies, identify service gaps and enhance professional skills and knowledge of individual team members. Team members include representatives from DCF, law enforcement, prosecutors, victim advocates, medicine, mental health, Family Relations, and juvenile and adult probation, among others.

Most teams prioritize sexual abuse and severe physical abuse cases for review, although some teams will also discuss severe neglect cases on occasion. Current research suggests that domestic violence is often present in homes when a child is critically injured or killed and that domestic violence perpetrators are also at increased risk of being physically and sexually abusive to children in the home. In response to this data, the Middlesex County Multidisciplinary Team (MDT) made a commitment in 2004 to regularly include domestic violence cases for review.

In order to gather qualitative data about the integration of domestic violence cases into the MDT practice, David Mandel, the Statewide Service Administrator for DCF’s Domestic Violence Consultation Initiative distributed a survey to Middlesex MDT members.  Completed in the fall 2009, the survey polled team members about their perceptions regarding the value of the team’s commitment to reviewing domestic violence cases where children were involved.

Highlights from the survey include:

• 100% of respondents indicated that their agency has benefitted from the teaming of serious domestic violence cases.
• 100% of respondents indicated that increased skills and awareness regarding domestic violence positively impacted how they handled sexual and physical abuse cases.
• Over 81% of respondents identified that they felt that teaming domestic violence cases resulted in increased safety for families.
• Teaming of domestic violence cases at MDT has helped identify service gaps and provide solutions. Due to the inclusion of domestic violence cases being discussed at MDT, team members were able to identify those children in homes, where domestic violence is present, who needed specific supports and services.

The Safe and Together™ model’s critical components form the foundation of good assessment practice for domestic violence as a factor in cases involving children.  The first two critical components focus on the perpetrator’s pattern of coercive control and the actions taken to harm the children.  This means going beyond the common practice of starting and stopping our assessment with the most recent incident of physical violence.  The critical components direct us to take a comprehensive view of perpetrator behaviors. For example, it’s important to look at the perpetrator’s pattern of behavior across multiple relationships, not just the most recent one.   This can provide us with crucial information about dangerousness e.g. he was more violent with his last partner, and his parenting e.g. did he used his other children against his last partner?  It also provides a counterweight to the tendency to become fixated on a survivor’s history of abuse.   It’s the perpetrator’s pattern of coercive control and actions taken to harm the children, not the survivor’s history of abuse, that is more foundational and directly relevant to our assessment of child safety and risk.

From a child welfare point of view, it is essential also to look at the perpetrator’s full range of violent controlling and abusive behavior in order to have the fullest possible understanding of the impact of those behaviors on the children.  Often the child welfare assessment of the relevance of perpetrator’s actions focuses exclusively on the following three points:   1) Did the children see the violence? 2) Did they hear the violence? and 3) Could they have been physically harmed by the violence?  While it’s clearly important to answer these questions, it’s equally important to understand that domestic violence perpetrators commonly engage in a wide range of behaviors that harm children, e.g. using them to spy against their own parent, emotionally manipulating them or interfering with their basic care.   Failing to identify the comprehensive nature of a perpetrator’s impact on children means we often fail to connect children’s symptoms, like aggressive behavior with siblings, with the perpetrator’s behaviors.  Also our underestimation of the perpetrator’s role in harming children often leads us to blaming the survivor, often the mother, for the children’s problems.  We assume she’s the one who has failed to get the children to therapy versus identifying how the perpetrator may have sabotaged the therapy through emotional manipulation of the child.

George Holden in his paper “Children Exposed to Domestic Violence and Child Abuse: Terminology and Taxonomy” (originally published in Clinical Children and Family Psychology Review, V.6, No. 3, September 20003) does an excellent job illuminating the pathways by which domestic violence perpetrators harm children.   Beyond pointing out that the terms “observed” and “witnessed” inaccurately describe the experience of children in relationship to the perpetrator’s behavior, he goes on to outline a 10 point taxonomy of exposure which describes the different ways perpetrators may harm children through their violent and abusive actions.  The types of exposure he identifies include prenatal exposure, intervention in the violence, being victimized directly, being forced to participate in the abuse, observing the immediate aftermath, and being impacted by the medium and long term aftermath. This is in addition to seeing, hearing and learning from others about the abuse.   Holden goes on to identify other variables that might impact the experience of children such as the types of violence, e.g. psychological versus physical and the relationship of the perpetrator to the children. He also goes in depth with the types of psychologically abusive behaviors a perpetrator may engage in. He concludes his paper by writing  that “If we are to understand how such exposure affects children, then we need a richer conceptualization and assessment of the nature of the exposure and the characteristics of the domestic violence.”   The first two critical components of the Safe and Together™ model provide the foundation for this richer and more comprehensive assessment framework.

Staff Attorney

National Center for Adoption Law & Policy at Capital University Law School

www.ncalp.org

Statewide expansion of the Ohio Intimate Partner Violence Collaborative (OIPVC), featuring training in the Safe and Together model of child welfare response to domestic violence,  is well underway.  Expansion is a two tiered process consisting of certifying trainers and training counties.  In Year 1 (July 1, 2011 to June 30, 2012) David Mandel and Associates (DMA) will train two multi-county cohorts while simultaneously training Ohio based trainers to become certified in delivering the Safe and Together training.  In Year 2 (July 1, 2012 – June 30, 2013) DMA will continue to coach and mentor the Ohio certified trainers as they take on the role of training new counties in the model.

In 2011, after a competitive application process, four trainers began the process of becoming certified.  This month, eight additional trainers began their certification training, bringing the total number of Ohio based trainers to twelve.  The trainers include child welfare county agency and state staff and domestic violence advocates who attended the full Safe and Together training module prior to the application process.  Trainers selected will participate in DMA’s “train the trainer” module, which is focused on developing skills in a number of areas, including: training, consultation and mentoring, communication, cross system collaboration, critical thinking, audience engagement, and model history and development.  Much of the skills training is taken simultaneously with the trainers’ observation and/or co-training of a county cohort.  Additionally, trainers are required to complete online reading materials and a series of thought provoking questionnaires, to enhance their core knowledge base of domestic violence and partner roles.

In addition to certifying the trainers DMA staff also began training new counties in 2011.  In October, Trumbull and Tuscarawas began Safe and Together model training, which was completed in February.  The next cohort of counties to be trained is Licking, Guernsey and Washington.  Thanks to new funding from the Children’s Trust Fund, an additional three counties- Athens, Hocking and Lucas, were added to the training schedule during 2012, bringing the total number of counties to be fully trained by the end of 2012 to fourteen.  In addition, The HealthPath Foundation of Ohio has again committed funding to support the Ohio Domestic Violence Network’s participation in the project to assist with community readiness and post-training sustainability.

County cohorts participating in Safe and Together training will receive a nine day training package, plus a community partner training day and two onsite technical assistance days for each individual county.  Supervisors will receive an additional two days of supervisor training.  Training enhancements also include a series of conference calls with DMA offered to the counties throughout the training period.  It is anticipated that by the end of 2015, all 88 Ohio counties will have the opportunity to receive the Safe and Together training as part of ongoing efforts to support the enhancement of differential response practice.

For more information contact:

by Jenifer S. Thompson

Staff Attorney

National Center for Adoption Law & Policy

at Capital University Law School

jthompson2@law.capital.edu

303 East Broad Street

Columbus, Ohio 43215

614.236.6539

www.ncalp.org

MEMORANDUM

To: All Staff

From:Joette Katz, Commissioner

Date:Monday, March 21, 2011

Subject:Domestic Violence

As the Department continues to evolve, it is important to validate and

build upon our existing strengths and partnerships.   Almost five years

ago, in response to its deepening understanding of the devastating and

pervasive impact of domestic violence on children and families, the

Department reached out for assistance from Connecticut domestic violence

experts. In partnership with these individuals and agencies, we launched

the Domestic Violence Consultation Initiative with the purpose of

improving our capacity to identify and respond to domestic violence.  Over

the past five years through the efforts of our staff and our community

domestic violence consultants, we have achieved significant positive

changes in our domestic violence practice. These changes reflect the

values and efforts that I will continue to support and expand upon as we

move forward.

The principles of this Initiative approach are consistent with a focus on

child well being, family centered practice and differential response.

Whenever possible, we should be attempting to keep children safe and

together with the non-offending parent in families experiencing domestic

violence. Partnership with domestic violence survivors should be our

default approach in these cases because these partnerships are the most

efficient and effective means to meet the safety and well being needs of

children. The vast majority of domestic violence survivors are devoting

tremendous energy towards the safety, stability and nurturance of their

children. We need to validate, support and build on these efforts,

wrapping our arms around domestic violence survivors on our caseloads, not

passing judgment on them.

We also need to use every tool at our disposal to intervene with domestic

violence perpetrators to reduce the harm they inflict on children and

families.  This means actively engaging perpetrators, developing

meaningful plans that address their behaviors, making referrals to

services that are aimed at addressing domestic violence, and coordinating

with criminal court and law enforcement.   Staffing cases at your local

multi-disciplinary team, attending a criminal court domestic violence

docket meeting, providing service providers with the specific information

we have gathered about the perpetrator and filing neglect petitions

focused primarily on domestic violence perpetrators are all steps we can

take, when appropriate.

As DRS and the Practice Model roll out, I am committed to maintaining the

progress the Department has already made in the area of universal

screening and assessment for domestic violence in all our cases regardless

of the presenting issue.   I am especially interested in focusing on our

adolescent cases, where it is so important for us to be screening for

dating violence victimization and perpetration. I also will be looking to

our partners in the community-law enforcement, the Judicial Branch,

battered women’s advocates, mental health providers, batterer intervention

programs, and others to continue to enhance our abilities to reduce the

harm created by domestic violence perpetrators.

Lastly, I want us to consider the impact of domestic violence on children

from a holistic perspective.  We need to expand beyond an incident based,

safety focus to include the chronic behavior patterns of perpetrators like

undermining a partner’s parenting and interfering with the normal routine

of children.  A domestic violence assessment focused on a range of tactics

that impact both safety and well being over time is often central to a

meaningful understanding of the behavioral health, substance abuse and

mental health needs of our families.

As part of this holistic approach, we also need to strengthen our

understanding that the well-being of children in homes is closely tied to

the well being of the parent who is a victim, usually their mother.   To

demonstrate my commitment to this perspective I have ordered the first

special review of a recent case involving the murder of a mother by a

father where the children were neither physically harmed nor direct

witnesses of the homicide.  There is no way to deny the devastating, life

shattering impact of this event on these children.  We need to learn from

this tragedy how best to respond to families where children have not been

physically harmed but there is severe violence directed at one of their

parents by a caretaker or partner.

The Department has already taken strong strides in the area of domestic

violence. It is now viewed as a national leader in the area of child

welfare and domestic violence. I want to commend all our staff and our

domestic violence consultants and promise continued support for their

efforts.