Most AI in social services promises efficiency and speed. The Safe & Together Institute cares about something much harder: helping practitioners make behaviourally accurate, domestic abuse–informed decisions when the stakes are child safety, custody, and survivors' lives.

In this special episode, Safe & Together Institute cofounders Ruth Reymundo and David Mandel introduce what they've spent the past year building: the Safe & Together Digital Coach and Insight Engine. Developed through SafetyNexus—their technology development company and sister organisation to the Safe & Together Institute—this guardrailed, practice-first AI platform is designed to help professionals apply the Safe & Together Model long after the training ends.

The conversation begins with a moment many practitioners know well. You leave training energised and inspired. Then you return to a desk full of complex cases, competing priorities, limited supervision, and organisational pressures. Suddenly, applying what seemed so clear in the training room becomes much harder.

The Digital Coach is designed to bridge that gap. Acting as an on-demand Safe & Together–trained guide, it helps practitioners map perpetrator patterns, strengthen survivor partnership, document child impact, prepare court-ready communication, practice difficult conversations through private role-play, and work through challenging cases without losing sight of perpetrator accountability.

Ruth also shares the founder story behind SafetyNexus—what frightened her as she watched social-care systems rapidly adopt AI, and why, as a survivor, she believes technology must never reinforce victim-blaming, perpetrator invisibility, or biased decision-making. Together, she and David explain how the platform's guardrails, survivor governance, and practice framework set it apart from generic copilots, transcription software, and "shadow AI" tools.

The episode also explores the Insight Engine, which helps practitioners, supervisors, and leaders identify practice-quality trends, strengthen supervision, measure improvement over time, and better understand the real impact of their work—without replacing professional judgement or turning AI into the decision-maker. Along the way, Ruth and David discuss governance, ethics, worker wellbeing, and why responsible AI should support—not replace—the relationships, critical thinking, and accountability that good practice depends on.

If you're curious about what responsible AI can look like in child protection and domestic abuse practice, listen now, share the episode with a colleague, and let us know what you'd want a digital coach to help you do next.

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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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Is working with your partner a recipe for exploitation or one of the healthiest ways to build a meaningful, independent, well-resourced life? Many people hear "family business" or "couples in business" and think nepotism, blurred boundaries, and women being taken advantage of.

Ruth and David are joined by Rigour and Flow hosts Aiwan Obinyan, filmmaker and founder of AiAi Studios, and Dr. Tamanda Walker, sociologist, researcher, and co-founder of research consultancy Roots and Rigour. These two couples who build businesses together talk candidly about what makes shared work healthy or extractive.

They dig into cultural differences in work: why family business is honoured in Nigerian, Botswanan, and Latin traditions rather than treated as a red flag and how social, family, and religious conditioning can turn work into identity, compulsion, or escape. They separate work that's extractive from work that's additive and question the "we're a family" language corporations use to mask power dynamics, abuse, and exploitation.

The four discuss how gender and sexuality shape how each couple is read differently. For a man and a woman working together, the suspicion is nepotism and a woman assumed to be there only because of her partner. For a same-sex couple, the calculus shifts: as two Black queer women, Aiwan and Tamanda expected heavy backlash but found it came more around race, colorism, and truth-telling about the exploitation of African people rather than gender. And they found that their partnership can sometimes be idiolised as the progressive representation people are hungry for. Underneath both is a shared commitment to telling the truth in partnership, even when it's uncomfortable.

The two couples close with the work-life boundaries that actually protect the relationship and the rest: living by agreement, renegotiating those agreements as life changes, staying free to change roles rather than being reduced to a role and a task, and even establishing safe words for shutting down shop talk.

If you've ever thought mixing love and business is dangerous, or you're building a mission-driven company, family business, or podcast with your partner and want healthy work-life boundaries, this one is for you.

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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.

Visit the Safe & Together Institute website.

Start taking Safe & Together Institute courses.

Check out Safe & Together Institute upcoming events.

Reproductive coercion rarely announces itself with a dramatic confession. More often, it shows up as a pause in the exam room, a quiet "I don't really have a choice," or a new mom who seems exhausted beyond what postpartum should demand.

Ruth and David sit down with LC De Shay (also known as the Digital Dominatrix), an international gender and migration psychosocial analyst, reproductive health specialist, and full spectrum doula, to name what so many families are living through and what too many systems still fail to catch. They dig into the behavioural landscape of coercive control around sex, contraception, pregnancy, and parenting, including why survivors may not recognise or disclose coercion without the right language and the right questions.

LC shares how clinicians can miss obvious signals when screening becomes a checkbox and why open-ended, concrete prompts can surface what "Do you feel safe?" never will. Ruth, David, and LC also talk about the perinatal period and postpartum window as a time of elevated domestic violence risk and how partner behaviour can shape maternal health, breastfeeding, infant feeding, and child development while professionals keep placing responsibility on mothers alone.

From migration-related vulnerability to workplace pressure, from school systems to child welfare responses, David, Ruth, and LC map the "whirlpool" of entrapment that keeps people stuck. They also confront how high-control religion, Quiverfull culture, and trad wife messaging can frame reproductive coercion as virtue, while "progressive" judgment can unintentionally shove survivors back into isolating communities. And they make space for a crucial nuance: Men's pain under patriarchy can be real, but it never justifies violence, and accountability means redirecting anger upstream rather than dumping it onto women and children.

If you care about reproductive safety, health, autonomy, trauma-informed care, maternal health, and practical domestic violence prevention, this conversation gives you language you can use today.

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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.

Visit the Safe & Together Institute website.

Start taking Safe & Together Institute courses.

Check out Safe & Together Institute upcoming events.

What if the most important fact about your partner’s violence risk is sitting in a police database you can’t access?

In this episode, David and Ruth dig into Clare’s Law, the UK’s domestic violence disclosure scheme, with researcher Dr. Katerina Hadjimatheou, and they get honest about what information sharing can do when coercive control runs on secrecy, grooming, and lies. They talk about why convictions alone rarely tell the full story, how serial perpetrators move from relationship to relationship, and why survivors often say a disclosure helps them finally see the pattern and stop blaming themselves.

Ruth, David, and Dr. Hadjimatheou also compare two very different real-world implementations: England and Wales, where the experience can be inconsistent and sometimes isolating, and South Australia, where a specialist domestic violence service wraps disclosure in a trauma-informed support process. That difference matters. Many people requesting disclosures have never contacted a domestic violence service before, so the moment of disclosure can either become a doorway to safety planning and autonomy or a terrifying information drop with nowhere to put it.

Then they name the hard part: systems can misuse a safeguarding tool. They unpack how child protection agencies can pressure mothers to seek disclosures and turn results into a “test,” and they discuss risks like mislabeling and perpetrators gaming the system. If we want disclosure schemes to improve survivor safety and perpetrator accountability, we have to design them around consent, support, and pattern-based understanding.

Subscribe, share this with someone who needs it, and leave us a review: where should disclosure sit in your community’s approach to domestic abuse?

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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.

Visit the Safe & Together Institute website.

Start taking Safe & Together Institute courses.

Check out Safe & Together Institute upcoming events.

A coercive control law can be groundbreaking and still leave survivors asking, “Why doesn’t life feel safer?”

David and Ruth are joined by Dr. Marsha Scott, CEO of Scottish Women’s Aid, to talk about Scotland’s hard-won reforms and the uncomfortable truth behind them: Legal change is only the beginning, and implementation is where domestic abuse reform succeeds or fails.

They dig into what makes Scotland’s coercive control framework so influential, including its course of conduct focus and why impact matters more than trying to read a perpetrator’s “intent.” Dr. Scott shares what the law has changed in public understanding and what has not changed yet in courts, sentencing, and survivor trust. Ruth, David, and Dr. Scott also get practical about what closes the implementation gap: infrastructure, better evidence, skilled supervision, and real accountability when systems keep defaulting to old habits.

Then they turn to family court, child protection, and child contact decision-making, where children’s rights can get lost and where poor documentation can make the perpetrator disappear while the survivor is judged through a deficit lens. They talk about reports, mental health models, and what it takes to pivot practice toward perpetrator patterns as parenting behaviours with measurable harm to kids.

If you care about coercive control, children’s safety, and systems change that actually sticks, hit subscribe, share the episode with a colleague, and leave us a review on your favorite podcast platform.

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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.

Visit the Safe & Together Institute website.

Start taking Safe & Together Institute courses.

Check out Safe & Together Institute upcoming events.

If your picture of domestic abuse is still “bigger person equals perpetrator,” that assumption can derail safety planning in minutes, especially in same-sex relationships and LGBTQ families.

In this episode, Ruth and David sit down with Dr. James Rowlands, sociologist and founder of the Dyn Project, to explore what actually helps practitioners identify abuse more accurately: tracking patterns of coercive control, listening for fear and entrapment, and documenting real behaviours instead of relying on identity-based assumptions.

Ruth, David, and Dr. Rowlands unpack the tension many professionals feel between maintaining a gender-based violence lens, recognising gendered double standards, and being inclusive of queer survivors and male victims. While “gender-neutral” approaches can sound fair, they can also flatten power dynamics, erase social context, and obscure the role gender norms play in abusive relationships.

Together, they examine the “public story” that often steers professionals toward proxies like size, presentation, or stereotypes instead of evidence-based assessment. They also discuss how abuse tactics can look different in LGBTQ relationships, where outing, community stigma, and questions around “who counts as queer” can become tools of coercion and control.

The conversation gets practical, too. David, Ruth, and Dr. Rowlands explore why LGBTQ survivors are often missed in MARAC referrals, how generic risk checklists fail without LGBTQ-specific prompts, and what domestic homicide and death reviews can get wrong when queerness is treated as the explanation rather than focusing on perpetrator behaviour and systemic failures.

They close with concrete questions practitioners can ask to build trust with survivors, along with guidance for navigating biased or unsafe professional responses.

Subscribe, share this with a colleague or friend, and leave a review so more people can find these tools. What’s one assumption you’ve seen cause harm in a domestic abuse response?

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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.

Visit the Safe & Together Institute website.

Start taking Safe & Together Institute courses.

Check out Safe & Together Institute upcoming events.

Systems don’t just “break” on their own. They do what they were designed to do, and too often that means extracting money, labor, and dignity while claiming to keep us safe.

In this episode, David and Ruth sit down with Trisha McOrmond, a Red River Métis systems thinker, to explore what it means to navigate belonging when it’s been fractured by family separation, colonisation, and institutions. They talk about the tension of feeling responsible to advocate, serve, and tell the truth without speaking for an entire community. They dig into why speaking from “I” and lived experience isn’t selfish, it’s accountable, and how the “royal we” can obscure harm in leadership, training, and professional spaces.

Trisha shares what decolonising thinking means to her: shifting from a scarcity worldview—where you “arrive here wanting” and must prove your worth—to a relational one, where you “arrive here wanted,” and community organises around care, children, elders, and basic needs. That shift reshapes how we understand capitalism, business as service, and the subtle ways institutions protect capital, property, and liability over people.

They also connect these ideas to domestic violence and child welfare systems. David, Ruth, and Trisha explore how deficit-based frameworks get weaponised against victims and targeted communities, how DARVO shows up at scale, and why asking “what will make this better?” can sometimes open doors that “what will make you safer?” closes.

If you care about systems change, targeted communities, First Nations perspectives, institutional trust, and building safety through relationships, this conversation is for you.

Subscribe, share this with someone doing hard systems work, and leave a review so more people can find the show.

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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.

Visit the Safe & Together Institute website.

Start taking Safe & Together Institute courses.

Check out Safe & Together Institute upcoming events.

Ruth and David are recording from Okayama, Japan, and the shift you’re about to hear is bigger than language.

Professor Kanako Masui of Nihon Fukushi University joins David and Ruth to explain why so many domestic violence and child protection systems get stuck asking the wrong questions and how the Safe & Together Model helps professionals see what’s been in front of them all along.

Kanako shares her journey as both a former practitioner and a researcher who has interviewed domestic violence survivors, including adults who grew up with domestic abuse in childhood. That experience led her to a hard truth: When we focus on “why she didn’t leave” or “why she didn’t protect the kids,” we blur accountability and miss the survivor’s real, often invisible protective efforts. Ruth, David, and Kanako dig into how a perpetrator’s pattern of behaviour as a parent drives harm to children, how to document those choices clearly, and how to work with survivors with dignity and respect while keeping child safety at the center.

They also talk about what implementation looks like on the ground in Japan—from cross-agency collaboration with child guidance centers and women’s support centers to large seminars reaching hundreds of practitioners—and the intensive work of translating the Safe & Together material and David's book into Japanese so teams can share a common model and language.

Kanako closes with a message to helpers who feel isolated and a direct message to survivors: You are not to be blamed.

If you want practical, trauma- and domestic abuse–informed ways to improve domestic violence intervention, child welfare decision-making, and perpetrator accountability, listen now. Subscribe, share this with a colleague, and leave a review telling us what language you want to change first.

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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.

Visit the Safe & Together Institute website.

Start taking Safe & Together Institute courses.

Check out Safe & Together Institute upcoming events.