In this episode of Partnered with a Survivor, David and Ruth speak with Dr. Norell Rosado, child abuse pediatrician at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, about the limits of how child maltreatment is identified in medical settings. While bruises and broken bones often drive diagnosis, neglect remains the most common form of maltreatment—and many serious harms leave no outward sign.

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

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

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

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

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

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

What happens when men are finally invited to speak from the heart? We sit down with Kenneth Braswell, founder of Fathers Incorporated and author of Too Seasoned To Care, to explore fear as a learned behavior, anger as a secondary emotion, and why safety and healing must stand side by side.

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

The conversation opens with end-of-the-year reflections and personal milestones—international book releases, masterclasses, collaborations, and community work—and quickly moves to a timely, thorny question: Can we talk honestly about male violence without “shaming” men?

A stadium’s worth of men—every year. That’s the scale of new IPV use suggested by Ten To Men, Australia’s landmark longitudinal study of male health. We sit down with Karlee O’Donnell, a researcher with the Australian Institute of Family Studies, to unpack what the data really says about how depression, suicidality, paternal warmth, and social support shape men’s risk—and what actually works to prevent harm.

A woman calls for help after being strangled in her own home. He shows a scratch; she leaves in handcuffs. From that moment, the system that promised safety starts to mirror the control she’s trying to escape. That’s the hard truth we face with researcher and practitioner Lisa Young Larance, whose new book, Broken, gathers the long-view stories of 33 women navigating coercive control, wrongful arrest, child protection, court, and probation.

A clear map beats chaos when lives are at stake. We sit down with Dr. Kate Fitz-Gibbon to draw a sharper line between “losing control” in life and being coercively controlled by a partner, and we keep children at the center where they belong. Through careful research and straight talk, we unpack why men’s and women’s experiences of intimate partner abuse often look different in impact, fear, and loss of liberty—and how that difference should guide courts, police, and service providers in mapping patterns and identifying who is the victim and who is the perpetrator.

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.

Meena Kumari, a domestic abuse practitioner with 21 years of experience in the UK, shares how the situation for migrant survivors has deteriorated rather than improved over her career. Where once migrants needed to wait two years before applying for indefinite leave to remain, they now must wait five years—creating a dangerous window where abusers can exploit immigration vulnerabilities through coercive control.

Religious teachings wield profound influence over family dynamics and human behaviors, sometimes enabling abuse under the guise of spiritual teachings and guidance. This raw and revealing conversation confronts the troubling legacy of religious parenting methodologies that promote violence, rights removal, and coercive control rather than nurturing safe, consensual connection.

When a perpetrator targets a family pet, they’re sending a clear message about what they’re capable of—and revealing a dangerous pattern that threatens everyone in the home. This eye-opening conversation with Maya Badham, founder of the Centre for Animal Inclusive Safeguarding, explores the deeply troubling intersection of animal abuse and coercive control.

Counselor and researcher Jaime Simpson joins us to dismantle myths about consent in faith settings, drawing from her study Broken, Shattered & Spiritually Battered: Groom Pastors Who Prey on Adult Congregation Members. Focusing on evangelical and Pentecostal communities in Australia, her findings reveal systemic grooming—romantic, therapeutic, and spiritual deception—layered with isolation, boundary violations, and theology-based coercion and systematic collusion with perpetrators to hide their criminal behaviours and shield them from accountability with the use of spiritually based forgiveness rituals. 

In this powerful conversation, therapist and trauma survivor Oli Doyle joins David and Ruth to challenge conventional therapeutic wisdom that keeps trauma survivors stuck in cycles of shame and self-blame. Together, they explore how true healing begins with recognizing the remarkable resilience that allowed survivors to endure seemingly impossible circumstances.

What does it take to transform domestic violence practice in an organization? In this illuminating conversation with Safe & Together Institute’s Systems Change Champion Kyra Feetham from the Centre for Women & Co. in Queensland, Australia, we explore the power of language, values alignment, and relationship-building in creating sustainable change.

When Kelly Daley, Community Connection Practitioner at Upper Murray Family Care, stood to accept her Champion Award for case practice in the Asia Pacific region, she was not just celebrating professional achievement—she was honoring a deeply personal journey of healing and transformation. Working across three agencies to implement the Safe & Together Model framework with children and young people affected by violence, Kelly has pioneered practice that shifts focus from managing children’s behaviors to holding perpetrators as parents accountable for the trauma they’ve caused.