Safety Planning

Safety planning is a process that involves ongoing assessments of risks, resources, and priorities and the creation of strategies to maximize safety and to pursue goals in this context. Although they may not use the term safety planning, people who experience threats to their safety, including those who are being or have been abused, engage in this process on an ongoing basis as they try to establish and sustain lives of well-being for themselves and their families. Generally, if threats persist, their plans evolve over time to include [Page 621]responding to immediate crisis situations as well as exploring resources aimed at reducing or preventing future risks. Because most safety planning has been developed in the context of domestic violence services and the majority of survivors who seek help from these services are women who have male abusive partners, the female pronoun is used in this entry; however, the gender of both the survivor and the abusive-violent partner is of course a consideration that will affect safety plans.

Safety planning has been used most commonly to describe a process used with survivors of domestic and sexual violence. In the early days of specialized crisis services (the 1970s and 1980s) in the United States, domestic violence advocates, in particular, encouraged survivors to develop safety plans to escape future violent situations. Such plans usually included arranging for safe and accessible places outside of the residence to store the identification papers, keys, money, contact information, and minimal essential clothing that would be needed to flee from an abusive episode. Plans also sometimes included coded signals to friends or family so that they could call for help or provide an emergency place to stay.

As domestic violence policies changed and the range of services expanded during the 1990s (and later), survivors with more complex needs began to contact programs. They were also increasingly likely to connect with specialized advocates outside the program context: in court, at a hospital or welfare office, and through child protection agencies and others. Advocates also became increasingly aware that many survivors of domestic violence did not want to leave their abusive partners, at least not in the short term, but wanted to remain in the relationship and have the violence end. These changes in services and survivors' needs and/or desires called for an expanded approach to safety planning.

Contemporary safety planning involves an advocate working with a survivor of domestic and/or sexual violence to address needs for safety in a comprehensive way, including physical, sexual, emotional, psychological, and economic dimensions. It begins with a conversation to learn more about how the survivor understands her situation: what she wants to do about the relationship, how and when the violence-abuse occurs, what she has tried to do about it and how her strategies have worked, what resources she has (friends, family, financial, housing, transportation, and others), and what she most hopes and fears. Answers to these questions determine the starting point for safety planning. Everyone's safety plan will differ and will change with new circumstances. The survivor's age, primary relationships, gender, sexual orientation, race-ethnicity, economic situation, and access to an array of resources will all affect what the most effective safety plan will look like.

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