Safety Planning Toolkit
While surviving intimate partner violence is often portrayed as an individual act, it requires community organizing and mutual aid. This 52-page toolkit from Survived and Punished discusses safety planning during intimate partner violence as informed by the perspectives of abolitionist organizers. Hyejin Shim wrote the resource with contributions from Aracelia Aguilar, Mouna Benmoussa, Rachel Caidor, Shira Hassan, Yves Tong Nguyen, Keisa Reynolds, Red Schulte, and Tamika Spellman. The resource also includes an informative video from the toolkit launch.
Safety planning is the process of developing a plan that can increase the safety of a person surviving violence and abuse. It includes determining risks, identifying resources, and assessing options that reduce harm. Too often, however, safety planning does not consider the risk of criminalization of survivors, the role of community in supporting survivors, and the desire of some survivors not to solicit police intervention. As feminists and abolitionists, the contributors acknowledge that the presence of police and the threat of criminalization can complicate experiences of intimate partner violence.
The toolkit begins with an overview of intimate partner violence. Intimate partner violence is a pattern of actions taken with the goal of maintaining power and control over a partner. Intimate partner violence can take many forms that include isolation, verbal abuse, financial abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, coercion and threats, and using institutional power and/or community norms. It can occur in any community, even activist communities.
Next, the contributors address the ways that we can support survivors. Because those who perpetrate abuse may attempt to isolate survivors, it is important that we stay connected to them. We can listen to survivors, share what we observe, and ask questions that can challenge abusive narratives. The toolkit includes examples of words and phrases that we can use when speaking with survivors about their relationships.
Safety planning does not always include escape as there may be barriers with housing, transportation, healthcare, and childcare. Financial abuse often occurs alongside other forms of abuse. This can affect what safety might look like. For example, one may choose to stay with the partner perpetrating abuse rather than give up their housing.
For marginalized communities, like people of color and undocumented people, safety planning must also include accounting for the presence of police. As such, one must be prepared to navigate legal problems like arrest, loss of child custody, criminalization, incarceration, and deportation.
The toolkit includes safety planning workshops that are adapted from Just Practice that detail factors to consider with safety planning such as risk assessment, options for intervening or escape, options for healing/support, follow-up, and next steps. Survivors and their community can set immediate, secondary, and long-term goals.
Remember that survivors still need support when they decide to stay; however, it’s important to set boundaries. When organizing for survivors, we might need the support of others. We should also consider our safety as those who perpetrate abuse might also seek to harm us.
Safety planning is not just a thing where you sit down and tell someone what to do, especially if they are people who do sex work or engage in any kind of criminalized labor. Do you actually know their needs and options,and the risks involved? In every experience possible of doing survivor support, it’s more about listening, being there, being a resource for them.
SOURCE: Survived & Punished • AUTHOR: Hyejin Shim • LAST UPDATED: May 1, 2022
