Partnered with a Survivor: David Mandel and Ruth Reymundo Mandel

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. We sit down with LC (also known as Digital Dom), an international gender and migration psychosocial analyst, reproductive health specialist, and fu...

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 c...

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...

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...

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....

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 s...

The most useful conference debriefs aren’t about highlights—they’re about what shifts in you when you listen closely. From the Sydney coast, Ruth and David wrap up a three-and-a-half-week Asia Pacific tour and talk through the moments that changed the temperature in the room at the Safe & Together Institute's 2026 Asia Pacific Coercive Control & Children Conference. They start with gr...

Domestic abuse gets dangerously easy to miss when our systems can only imagine one story about who victims are and what abuse looks like. David and Ruth sit down with Luke Martin , a UK-based domestic abuse trainer, consultant, and independent victim advocate, to talk about the people most likely to be misunderstood in plain sight: LGBTQ+ survivors, including those in same-sex relationships, who f...

Artificial intelligence is already in social work and child protection, and its use is deepening. The question is: How safe, effective, and equitable is it?  In this episode, David and Ruth talk with Dr. LaSharia Turner and Dr. Helen Fischle from Alabama A&M University about what ethical, human-centered, AI-driven tech should look like in social work education and frontline practice. As agenci...

What if medicine is trained to see bruises and fractures—but misses the injuries that leave no visible mark? 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 bo...

We start with a snow-bright morning and end with a sharper lens. We sit down with advocate and system 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...

What happens when David turns the tables on Ruth and interviews her—seven years into their shared body of work? 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 experien...

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. Ins...

Mist, wind, the volcanic island of São Miguel, and a hard look at the words and jargon that decide families’ futures. We begin in the Azores, Ruth’s ancestral home, where arguments for European westward expansion took shape after Bartolomé de Las Casas reported the finding of two “dead Amerindian" bodies—and where mainland-imposed poverty, illiteracy, and family separation set conditions that...

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 ho...

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. From Crown Heights to Sheepshead Bay, we trace how Brooklyn’s beauty and danger taught vigilance, how redlin...

The house looks perfect from the street—until you step inside and feel the air shift. 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...

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? We take a stand for courage, honesty, and clarity using global data, real cases, and practical frameworks to show how accountabil...

A stadium’s worth of men—every year. That’s the scale of new intimate partner violence 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 w...

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 ar...

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 l...

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...

The weaponisation of immigration status has become a powerful tool in the arsenal of domestic abusers. For migrant survivors, the choice between enduring abuse or risking deportation represents an impossible dilemma that traps them in dangerous situations. Meena Kumari, a domestic abuse practitioner with 21 years of experience in the UK, shares how the situation for migrant survivors has deteriora...

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. Ruth shares her pers...

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. The weaponization of animals...