Beyond Crisis and Separation – A Resolution Approach to Domestic, Family and Sexualised Violence

 

Domestic, Family, and Sexualised Violence (DFSV) is one of the most persistent and complex challenges facing families, communities, and the practitioners who work alongside them. In New Zealand and Australia, we have made real progress over the decades. Women’s Refuge, rape crisis centres, men’s behaviour change programmes, and stronger policing responses have all played their part. But I keep coming back to a question that I don’t think we have answered well enough. What happens after the crisis phase? What happens when a woman who has left a relationship where there has been violence starts to wonder whether there is a path forward, for herself, for her children, and perhaps even for the relationship itself?

Mike Cagney and I have spent considerable time wrestling with this question. Our thinking has led us to what we call resolution work, a third phase of intervention that we believe is largely underdeveloped across our field.

 

The Problem with How We Currently Work

Most DFSV services operate in silos. There are programmes for men who use domestic, family and sexualised violence. There are support services for women and children who have experienced it. Occasionally, child protection services are involved too. Each agency does its part, and I want to acknowledge the real commitment and skill that sits within each of these. But rarely do those parts come together in a way that keeps survivors genuinely at the centre.

The consequences of this fragmentation are serious. Research has shown that women’s and survivors’ voices are frequently excluded from risk assessments and communication pathways in New Zealand family violence collaboratives. Men who demonstrate little genuine change in treatment can slip back into families. Men who do engage meaningfully are often given no clear pathway to communicate that to those they have harmed. Survivors are left making critical decisions without the information they need to make them well.

And then there are the children. The most vulnerable people in these situations are routinely silenced. Their needs go unacknowledged. Their voices go unheard. We owe it to them, and to ourselves as a field, to do better.

 

What Is Resolution Work?

We see the possibility of a three-phase model of DFSV intervention.

Phase one is crisis. When abuse is exposed, the priority is safety and separation (if acute risk exists). This is the domain of police, protection orders, Women’s Refuge, and emergency child protection responses.

Phase two is individual interventions. Survivors access support and education programmes. Men engaging in DFSV ideally attend mandated or voluntary behaviour change programmes. This is where most current services sit.

Phase three is resolution. This is the largely underdeveloped phase, and the one I want to focus on here. Resolution work involves bringing together the fragments of a family’s experience to assess what is possible and safe. The focus is on privileging the voices of survivors, both adult and child, and building genuine, durable accountability from those who have caused harm. Families are never pushed toward a particular destination.

The word resolution is deliberately chosen. We use the idea of re-solution, establishing new solutions, to signal a process that is future-focused, survivor-led, and grounded in real safety rather than bureaucratic compliance.

 

The Real Picture: A Case That Challenges Us

To illustrate why this matters, consider a scenario that many of us will recognise.

A woman who has survived DFSV comes to you for help. Her eight-year-old son has just completed a children’s programme. She has legal protection orders in place. But lately, she has been spending time with her ex-partner. He has been attending an intervention programme. She feels hopeful. She asks whether you can support her son to have contact with his father, and whether there is help available to explore what a future together might look like.

How do you respond?

Do you advocate strongly against reconciliation? Do you feel frustrated or worried? Do you unconsciously shut her down? Our own ideology as practitioners, or our agency’s position, can lead a survivor to feel judged, pushed too fast toward joint counselling, or blamed for having legitimate hopes about her family. None of those outcomes serves her.

 

System Review Meetings: Accountability in Action

One concrete innovation that Mike and I highlight in our work is the System Review Meeting. This is a structured forum, developed originally in community-based sex offender programmes, that brings a man who has abused together with representatives of survivors, or survivors themselves where it is safe, along with support people and relevant agencies.

In these meetings, the man is required to account for the work he is doing in his programme. Where he is struggling. Where he has gained insight. What safety strategies he now has in place. The aim is to create direct accountability, a genuine facing up, rather than the abstract accountability of completing a course and receiving a certificate.

The safety planning that results goes directly to the people who have most at stake. Survivors get real information on which to base their decisions.

I want to be honest about the limitations of these forums. Children are rarely well-represented, and women can still be sidelined. These processes are a step in the right direction but not the whole answer.

 

A Spectrum of Resolution Practices

Resolution work does not start with bringing a family together in the same room. It begins with careful, paced, indirect work and only moves toward more direct contact when safety indicators genuinely support it. The spectrum moves from indirect feedback such as letters of responsibility and video messages from the person who has abused, through to messengers and emissaries representing survivor voices, then System Review Meetings, then relationship and couple work with practitioners who have real depth in DFSV dynamics, and finally whole-family engagement and therapy.

At each stage, the pace is set by the survivor. Timing, readiness, and safety are everything.

 

What Ethically Aligned Practice Looks Like

There are some principles I think are non-negotiable for practitioners navigating this work.

• Treat the survivor’s inquiry as valid. When a woman asks about reconciliation or contact for her child, that deserves respectful engagement. We need to be open to her aspirations and her fears without being naive or collusive.
• Keep survivors at the centre. The first layer of work is always about the man’s accountability to those he has harmed. Children’s voices must be actively sought, not passively waited for.
• Use clarification and tentative steps. Before any direct work occurs, individual work should establish what safety would actually look like in concrete, behavioural terms. What would the survivor need to see to believe that change is real? What is the man’s readiness to genuinely engage in accountability?
• Reflective practice is essential. This work is complex and unpredictable. Agendas shift. Lapses occur. New needs emerge. Practitioners and agencies need to meet regularly, consult, and avoid knee-jerk crisis responses where they are not warranted.
• Collaborate openly. Agencies need to step out of their silos, acknowledge their own biases, and establish genuine partnerships with each other and with families. Limited confidentiality, transparent communication, and a shared focus on safety are non-negotiable.
• Be open to a range of outcomes. Resolution work may end in separation, or in the father having contact but not living with the family, or in the child living with extended whānau. The goal is a process that allows the family to arrive at decisions that are genuinely safe, whatever form those decisions take.
• Value what the family already knows. Professionally-led processes generate resistance. Treating families as partners, with their own knowledge, capacity, and agency, is more likely to generate lasting change.

 

The Cultural Dimension: Whānau Ora

For Māori families, who make up around half of those accessing DFSV intervention services in New Zealand, culturally appropriate, family-centred approaches are foundational to the work. The Whānau Ora framework, which takes an empowerment approach to whole-family and community wellbeing, aligns closely with the resolution model. DFSV is understood as an outcome of broader disadvantage, and lasting change requires working with the group, not just the individual.

 

What This Means for the Field

I want to be frank. This is emerging work and there are real risks. Poorly managed resolution processes can re-traumatise survivors, shift responsibility onto women, or give men engaging in DFSV unearned credibility. These risks must be taken seriously. And continuing to work in silos, leaving survivors without the information they need, and rendering users of DFSV invisible carries serious risks of its own.

The key insight of the resolution approach is that a man can complete a programme, receive his certificate, and return to his family with no meaningful accountability to the people he has harmed. A woman can access all the support services available and still be making decisions blind. A child can be the subject of multiple interventions and still have no voice in what happens next.

Resolution work aspires to close those gaps. When families make decisions, they deserve to do so with real information, genuine accountability, and their safety properly structured and supported. That is what we owe them.

 

This post is based on “The Next Step: A Resolution Approach to Dealing with Intimate Partner Violence” by Mike Cagney and Ken McMaster, published in No To Violence, Male Family Violence Prevention Association, Spring 2013.

 

 

Published on Wednesday, May 20th, 2026, under Family violence, What Ken thinks

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