Providing Intervention
Intervention with clients experiencing domestic violence should focus on the following: protection, problem-solving and healing the impact of the abuse experience.

Protection
Working to ensure a client’s safety involves several types of assistance: safety planning, suicide risk assessment, and lethality assessment. In addition mental health workers will want to discuss other protective interventions such as medical or legal.

(Since it assumed that community mental health workers already have skills in conducting suicide risk assessment, this module will focus on safety planning and lethality assessment.)

Safety Planning involves working with the client to develop strategies to escape, avoid or survive future abusive incidents.

Each battered woman’s safety plan is unique but there are some common aspects:
   • Safety plans seek to reduce or to eliminate risks presented by the batterer.
   • Safety plans may include strategies for remaining in the relationship or leaving.
   • Safety plans may have short-term and/or long term time frames.
   • Safety plans will need to be modified as a result of changes in circumstances.

As a mental health worker you can offer a client experiencing domestic violence an opportunity to enhance their safety plan. To initiate this dialogue, use the following Response to Violence Inventory as a way to assess what strategies have worked and which have not worked in the past for your client.