Supervised Visitation Initiative

SVI provides support to staff of supervised visitation programs and their partners on a variety of topics ranging from the intersection of domestic violence and custody to working with all members of a family in the aftermath of violence to designing and maintaining services that centralize safety and address domestic violence. We provide this support through national conferences, audio trainings, phone consultations, and on-site technical assistance. Our assistance is tailored to meet the needs of each program we work with, including those programs that have been in operation for years and those that are just forming. The knowledge gained by the programs will ultimately benefit families who have experienced domestic violence and who are accessing visitation services.

In addition to providing technical assistance, staff of the SVI garner the collective expertise of the practitioners we support to inform policymakers on this issue, as well as our own work. We administer surveys, conduct interviews, and convene roundtables with practitioners and other experts in the field to identify emerging issues, the challenges faced by supervised visitation programs, and the promising practices they are creating. We use this information to ensure our technical assistance is timely and relevant to practitioners and we share it with government officials to inform their efforts to enhance supervised visitation for survivors of domestic violence and their children.

Why We Need This Program
Survivors of domestic violence and their children often experience increases in violence when they are seeking to gain independence from their abusers, especially during divorce and custody proceedings. Moreover, persons who batter often use access to the children as a means to continue to control, stalk, and intimidate victims. Increasingly, courts across the United States are ordering supervised visitation of children when these dynamics are occurring. As staff of these supervised visitation programs deal with complicated and potentially dangerous situations, they need to understand the dynamics of battering so they can respond in ways that account for the safety of victims of domestic violence and their children.

For more information, contact program director Ona Foster.