Envisioning State Systems That Support Mothers Who Have Experienced Intimate Partner Violence: A Critical Examination of Current Policy, Practice, and Motherhood Narratives

Intimate partner violence (IPV) victimization often brings women into contact with various state surveillance systems. For mothers, this often includes the criminal legal system, child protective services, and family courts. Contact with these systems subjects women to strict evaluation of their parenting based on established - and often unacknowledged - narratives of "good" motherhood. These narratives and expectations drive decision-making by jurists and individual workers, and are embedded within organizational policy. For instance, jurists and workers often hold IPV survivors accountable for their own victimization by framing children's exposure to violence as their mother's failure to protect them. These standards are not empirically linked to child safety and positive developmental outcomes, nor do they reflect women's varied lived experiences of mothering. Under the constrained contexts of IPV and state surveillance, women's choices and range of available options for mothering narrow.

When mothering expectations are enforced via multiple intersecting and coercive state systems - often with conflicting mandates, goals, and imperatives - mothers become entangled within them and risk losing custody of their children. That is, women's inability to meet demands of one system often increases interaction with and sanctions from another system due to competing and conflicting expectations. For example, the child welfare system (CWS) frequently requires that mothers separate/leave an abusive partner, while in child custody cases in family court any act perceived as impeding the other parent's access to the child(ren) can result in mother-punishing orders and even negate mothers' claims of IPV and child maltreatment (CM) by fathers. Systems involvement resulting from IPV victimization can also threaten mothers' material safety - such as entry on a maltreatment registry, and criminal legal system involvement and supervision limiting employment and housing options. For others, separation requirements, and ongoing civil legal costs increase financial burdens. Under these circumstances many mothers are less able to provide housing, and take on additional work - limiting time with their children and their ability to attend time -intensive ordered services.

This roundtable discussion brings together four researchers with varied and intersecting practice backgrounds and systems-focused research agendas to discuss: 1) the notion of oppressive gendered parenting expectations, 2) how expectations manifest in the specific and overlapping contexts of the family and criminal legal systems and child protective services to punish and disadvantage mothers, and 3) how we can address these harms via applied research that brings mothers' perspectives to bear on transforming current systems' responses. Panelists each conduct research demonstrating how policies, practices, and processes within systems harm women and children experiencing IPV and CM, respectively. The scope of this research spans the CWS, family courts, and criminal legal systems and utilizes administrative data, community-engaged program research and evaluation, and qualitative research with survivors of IPV. Panelists will draw on this experience in a discussion that seeks to envision solutions that transform systems responses to mitigate harms and increase the health and wellbeing of mothers and their children.