Exploring families through a social entrapment/coercive control framework

Centring Children’s Safety and well-being – responding within the context of family violence

This workshop will focus on children’s safety and well-being within the context of family violence; together we will explore the theoretical and practice issues for supportive conversations with children. We will provide an opportunity to begin exploring practices for having conversations that centralise safety and well-being, manage risk, consider our ethical accountabilities, and our duty of care.

Working with fathers who perpetrate intimate partner violence

This workshop explores the how-to of conversations with men around responsible fathering, based on ethics, values and aspirations. We will explore working with fathers who are perpetrators, naming and detailing the hopes of men, partners and fathers; moving beyond good intentions to daily practices of respect; considering responsible fathering interventions that appreciate connections between fathers’ relationships with their children and men’s behaviour towards their children’s mothers; and exploring moving from fathered centred parenting to child-centered parenting.

Working with Mothers and their acts of care, safety and protection, and resistance

We will explore the many ways that mothers’ actively respond to protect their children when they are being subjected to control, abuse and violation by their children’s father. As systems, we must strengthen the ways in which we make visible, in every part of systems, mothers’ acts of care, her actions to prioritise children’s safety and protection, and ways in which they resist violation for safety and the dignity of themselves and their children. Supporting mother-child relationships and connections is critical in interventions with the family.