What we talked about
Liz Ortenburger, CEO of SafeNest in Las Vegas, explains how Nevada’s largest domestic and sexual violence nonprofit works across three “buckets”: prevention, protection, and empowerment. She shares why SafeNest is different:because prevention includes working not only with survivors, but also with abusive partners and youth at risk of repeating the cycle.
Show notes
Liz Ortenburger argues that the domestic violence movement has been failing survivors for fifty years by focusing almost entirely on survivors while leaving abusive partners to the criminal justice system, a system that, in Las Vegas, produces 22,000 domestic violence charges annually but lacks the tools to actually change the behavior driving the violence. SafeNest is one of the only organizations in the country simultaneously running crisis shelter, responding on police calls, and running therapeutic programs for abusive partners, all under the same roof.
What we covered
- SafeNest uses a danger assessment lethality scale with 11 points to triage who gets a shelter bed; only survivors scoring 8 or higher, meaning the probability of being murdered by their intimate partner is extremely high, are admitted to residential programs, which shapes how the organization prioritizes its most intensive resources.
- The adverse childhood experience (ACE) score, a 0–10 scale measuring trauma before age 18, is the single strongest predictor Ortenburger cites for adult violence: a score of four or higher dramatically increases the likelihood of becoming a perpetrator or victim of violence, incarceration, substance abuse, homelessness, and serious medical conditions, yet it is almost entirely absent from how school systems and public health frameworks operate.
- SafeNest’s prevention work builds “hope scores,” a separate evidence-based scale measuring whether a person can envision a better future and believe they have the power to reach it, men in the abusive partner program regularly tell therapists they wish they had learned in fourth grade that their reactions to anger are a choice, not an inevitability.
- A key exercise in SafeNest’s 26-week abusive partner program is a 30-second silence during which participants are asked to recall a time they got very angry, then the therapist asks: “Who got you angry?” The point, that the participants made themselves angry, is described as a revelation to most men who have never been taught that their emotional responses are within their own control.
- Ortenburger identifies a structural flaw in how domestic violence law has evolved since the 1970s: mandatory arrest and no-drop prosecution policies, introduced as feminist protections, have effectively removed survivors from having any voice in their own legal process, and approximately 63% of SafeNest’s residential clients return to their abusive partner, a number she frames not as failure but as evidence that survivors want a relationship without violence, not necessarily the end of the relationship.
- Las Vegas had 42 domestic violence homicides in one recent year compared to one in San Diego, which has a million more residents, a disparity Ortenburger attributes partly to San Diego’s ability to use hearsay evidence in court (which Nevada does not permit), meaning Nevada survivors must personally testify against abusive partners to secure convictions, creating enormous pressure to recant.
About Liz
Liz Ortenburger is the CEO of SafeNest, Nevada’s largest nonprofit addressing domestic and sexual violence, based in Las Vegas and serving primarily Clark County’s approximately 2.3 million residents. She has spent more than two decades working in the domestic violence field, moving from direct work with survivors to leading systems-level change in policy and program design.
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/liz-ortenburger-9539aa32
- Website: http://www.safenest.org
Episode 89 of the PreVetted Podcast.
Full transcript
Federico Ramallo (00:00) Welcome back to the pre-evented podcast where we spotlight extraordinary people and remarkable talent reshaping our world today we are joined by
Liz Ortenburger the CEO of SafeNest, Nevada’s largest nonprofit addressing domestic and sexual violence. Liz has spent more than two decades fighting the rights of women and children moving from direct work with survivors to leading large scale systems, change that challenges how communities and policies respond to interpersonal violence. At SafeNest,
Leads Leads Operations builds strategic partnerships and helps design innovative client-centered programs so every person experiencing violence has a path from crisis to confidence and so prevention becomes as important as response. Leads, welcome to the show.
Liz Ortenburger (00:54) Thank you. Thank you for having me.
Federico Ramallo (00:58) I’m honored to have you today, So tell us a little bit more about Safeness.
Liz Ortenburger (01:02) Yes. So SafeNest is located in Las Vegas, Nevada, which is in the larger Clark County, which is really 80 % of the population in the state of Nevada. we are a large agency dealing mostly with Clark County. Every once in a while, we will serve survivors from other regions of the state. But we work in three buckets. We work in prevention, protection, and empowerment. And the thing that makes SafeNest
unique is that in our prevention bucket, we work with abusive partners because we believe very strongly that is where the cycle of violence is broken ⁓ when it has already occurred is with the abusive partner. We also work with young people in that space that are very much at risk of repeating those cycles. All of the data shows a pretty direct line between experiencing violence as a young person and to either being a victim or a perpetrator of violence as an adult.
And then in our protection bucket, we really work like a lot of DV agencies around the country, crisis hotline, emergency shelter. But one of our unique programs in that space is we respond alongside our police department in calls that involve strangulation or assault with a deadly weapon, or if it’s a repeat call to the same household multiple times. My team will actually go out on the scene of that call and work side by side with police to support that survivor’s journey.
And then we work in empowerment, which is our longer term programs, a lot of U visas, T visas, mental health support for years, right? We can be working with clients sometimes for decades, but that is where we do also our housing programs. So we get people out of shelter and into stable housing and career development, all of those things that help not only survivors, but also abusive partners find their full potential.
Federico Ramallo (02:50) That’s very interesting. you can see on the prevention side, you can see the patterns happening. So you can work towards minimizing the event for happening, right?
Liz Ortenburger (02:59) Yeah, so it’s interesting, right? So kiddos, so there’s a scale, an adverse childhood experience score. It’s a zero to 10 point scale that you can take at any age and reflect back on the time before you were 18. And the data is very, very succinct. If you have four or more adverse childhood experiences, your trajectory into being violent, being a victim of violence, being an intravenous drug user, being obese, being unemployed, being homeless, and the list
goes on and on, heart disease, all kind of medical issues, when you have a four or higher adverse childhood experience score, those things are not just a little bit higher.
they are infinitely higher. In Florida, Kaiser Permanente actually did a study with juvenile offenders, right, looking at their adverse childhood experiences, and they really could identify that most of the incarcerated youth, very, very high percentage, had four or more adverse childhood experiences. So when we talk about childhood trauma, it is the number one health indicator that is being
missed but it has the largest consequence for our entire society. It’s there. It’s visible. We can measure it. We can do something with it. The question then becomes in that prevention space, okay so I have kiddos. Most of the kiddos we work with have a scores of
Seven eight they’ve experienced a lot of trauma in their lives. Okay, great So now what do we do to mitigate that trauma and that’s where the scientific work around building someone’s hope and we do this with our abusive partners the kids we work with and our survivors How do we increase your hope score? So again another evidence-based scale in which we’re measuring Your ability to see a future that is better than your present or your past
And how do you feel you can make that happen? Right? So often in society, people well-meaning, well-intentioned folks want to step in and do all the work for you. But what hope really indicates is that no, no, no, you as the victim of those adverse childhood experiences needs to have the power inside you to see a different path. And so we work a lot in the space of building hope in that prevention bucket.
work
in that in all three buckets, but for my kids that are likely to be abusers and or victims because of their childhood experiences, we are so laser-like focused on how are we building that hope score for those kids. And it’s not a huge lift, right? This is what sort of frustrates me about school systems and these large systems that are like, we can’t add another thing to teachers’ plates. We can’t do another thing. It’s like, really? You couldn’t like once a quarter?
the kids read a story about someone who they could relate to who had a difficult childhood who is succeeding today and I don’t mean Oprah or Maya Angelou I mean like the assistant district attorney I don’t think he’s the assistant district attorney anymore but he was the assistant district attorney in San Diego his dad was an raging alcoholic his mother was deported when he was 14 and he had three younger siblings
This is someone my kids can relate to, right? The kids that I work with, it’s like, look at, right? Now this.
gentleman could have folded in on himself. Who expects a 14 year old to raise three younger kids with an alcoholic and probably abusive dad, although that’s not clearly stated in the narrative. He did it. He did it. And he not only did it and went to then college and then law school and then became the assistant district attorney, but he did it by keeping his family together and navigating these very difficult systems that exist for kids in difficult circumstances. Those are the kinds of stories our kids
to hear, right? Like crappy situation for him to be in, not gonna get plucked out by some magical unicorn family that has all this money to sort of solve all your problems. I have to live in this and I still have to have hope and that…
is how we navigate hope with our young people so that they can really fill their metaphorical backpack with all of these tools so that when it is a dark time, gosh forbid mom has a new boyfriend and he’s abusive or your dad’s hitting your mom or your mom’s abusing your dad, whatever the scenario could be, you can pull from that backpack and say this does not have to define me. This does not need to be my trajectory. That’s not a heavy lift to share these stories at
appropriate age, different stories, different age groups with through our education system to help kids connect with something positive, especially for those kids that are suffering.
Federico Ramallo (07:50) right. ⁓ What you are trying to convey through hope is you are not alone. You’re not the first person to experience this, right?
Liz Ortenburger (08:01) Absolutely, yeah, 100%. And it does not, so often I think for young people, you’re growing up inside welfare, moving to apartment after apartment, all of these things that are chaotic in your childhood. And you may not have a loving and caring family unit. That is possible. We see it for a lot of our kiddos, right? You don’t even have that one adult. And so how do you build your way up out of that?
and not let that horrific experiences while your brain is still developing define you. And that’s really what hope is designed to do. It’s designed to kind of embed itself in your frontal cortex as it’s developing your frontal lobe and put celebration and happiness and things in there so that as you build out your brain, really your brain development can pull on different experiences than just the darkness that you might be experiencing.
Federico Ramallo (09:00) Right,
I’ve seen how cold, I don’t know if that’s the right way to express it, how cold the support systems in the US has been, right? I mean, you go through the process, and they’re very detached emotionally, right? And you feel like a little clock inside a big machine. And that feeling is overwhelming. And then if you don’t have a family that…
Liz Ortenburger (09:16) Yes.
Yeah.
Federico Ramallo (09:25) loves you and supports you that becomes much more demeaning. ⁓
Liz Ortenburger (09:33) Right. And when we look at our kids growing up…
in low economic communities that are overwhelmingly black and brown and we look at the schools that they’re in, you know, really the mandate for those schools in our jurisdiction, those are called Title I schools, when we look at the mandate for those schools, it should be that every child in that school has a hope plan, right? Every child in that school should have a goal that they’re working towards and the steps they’re taking every day to get there and every teacher should have access to that. So if that kiddo moves from one school to another, that teacher can look
up that hope plan and connect with you on day one and say, hey, I’m so excited that you’re working towards X, right? And we can adjust those hope plans over the years. One of the things that always concerns me, is particularly with our black youth growing up in low income communities.
They are so often sports is the only sort of vehicle that young men can see to get out of the communities that they’re in and for let’s be honest for decades That’s been the only avenue for low-income black men in particular to move out of their low economic circumstances I think we’ve also seen the music industry sort of tap into this right like great Here’s a you know, here’s this talent but how many men and those boys in those communities are really?
going
to become a famous singer or a pro athlete, right? It’s infanticently small.
But if that’s the only pathway that a young man knows and he realizes in third grade he’s not going to be, you know, the next running back for the 49ers and then he realizes in fourth grade he really doesn’t have any musical talent or he’s not inclined that way, guess where gang membership starts? Same time, right? These are kids that are simply looking for their tribe. Let’s figure out how to make, right? And if they are connected to that hope plan, how can we
make that tribe a positive tribe, right? And the power of just being able to connect young children, fourth, fifth grade, around a desire. Imagine the power of a school if we had hope plans on all these kiddos. And then we took some crafty AI module and said, okay, great, these kind of lump up into six categories. Let’s get all the kids that are excited about arts and culture. Let’s create a group, right? Let’s build a tribe on that and let’s build hope in that and let’s
just do some fun things and give some kids their childhood back, that will be so inspiring, right? So these shifts that we’re talking about to sort of navigate
Kids being robbed of hope are not massive mental health injections with billions of dollars attached. This is simply looking at a framework that already exists, that’s already evidence-based and saying, let’s make some changes to how we’re working with our young people. And when you have that young person who is a delinquent, a bully, all of those kinds of things, let’s connect that kiddo at a young age back to their hope plan.
and then let’s measure the success, right? Measurement is the best tool for sweeping change, but really these are the kinds of things that any educator, any classroom teacher, anybody, any parent can do with their kiddo to help them sort of navigate the world, especially our kids that have high adverse childhood experiences.
Federico Ramallo (12:58) Right, I think that it all starts with hope. I like that word, I’m using it again. And here I’m going a little bit on the tangent, but one of the things that makes humanity, that keeps hope in humanity is that every new baby that’s born has a blank, it’s a blank state. It has no memories, right?
Imagine if we were reborn with our old memories, right? All of the babies would be all grumpy people, right? So how can you teach new tricks to an old dog, right? Kind of thing, right? Because we are already coming with all our baggage, emotional knowledge and all that, right? Whereas we have this amazing mechanism that…
Liz Ortenburger (13:29) Yeah.
Right.
Federico Ramallo (13:44) every new baby is, you know, it’s a new hope for humanity, right?
Liz Ortenburger (13:49) Right, and you know, I often think about people in horrible circumstance. If I was in Palestine right now, or I was, you know, any of the other pic, a tragedy happening around the world, our human instinct is for hope, right? Is for a better, brighter, shinier day. And so if we can connect kiddos to that,
before they’re robbed of that emotion, right? Before they’re robbed of that hope and that trajectory, we will be a healthier society in a generation, right? Because those kids won’t be impacted by all of the negative things. It’s not that they’re not gonna have bad days. It’s not that they’re not gonna have emotions. They’re not gonna have rage. They’re not gonna have anger. But they’re gonna be attached to something that is theirs, that is their hope, right? To lead them forward and with, you know, carrying people around.
them to even if it’s one interaction with a caring person who’s asking them about what their trajectory is that can that can be a lifetime of change for a child any child but particularly child’s kiddos that are struggling.
Federico Ramallo (14:54) right. Interesting. That is very interesting. We were kind of digging into prevention, but out of the three buckets, where do you think, safeness has the most impact in society?
Liz Ortenburger (15:00) Yes.
Yeah, interesting question. So, you know, I think it depends why you’re coming to Safe Nest, right? So if you’re a survivor, we work with about 11,000 survivors a year.
It depends which program you’re entering, right? If you’re coming into my residential program, then we’re providing you the impact we’re making for you is that you’re not being murdered. And I don’t mean that sort of hyperbolically. In order to get a bed in my shelter, we use another scale, a danger assessment lethality scale.
that’s 11 points, you’re not getting a bed in my shelter unless you are in a highly lethal situation. So you’re an eight, nine or 10 or 11 on that scale, which means the danger of you being murdered by your intimate partner is incredibly high. So for that section of the population, we have provided a lethality diversion. The hope is then when you get there, you get connected with a good hope advocate and you start working a plan and you get into a housing program.
So what we’re doing is creating your path to independence and freedom from that abuser. Now that does not automatically mean you’re not going to have that abuser back in your life. There, you know, there is a lot of research around why women don’t leave, why women do leave, why women go back and all of these things. And there I’ve worked with survivors for so long. There are a myriad of reasons why survivors choose
to have that abusive partner back in their life. But the key question there is choice.
And that is our role. Our role is to provide you with all of the options to make that a choice for you. So you are not forced to go back because you’re worried about economics, because you don’t have anywhere to go because your next step would be homelessness. You’re choosing to go back because you believe in something that that relationship has to offer, right? So that’s my residential program. My court-involved programs really were there to help you navigate what can be
incredibly robbing of hope system, right? Like we did some research with our local university a few years ago around what survivors want from the criminal justice system. The first thing they want obviously is for violence to stop.
The second thing they want is to be believed. And unfortunately, right, within our criminal justice system and even our family court system, those two things are not being achieved anywhere in the country. But I would say very, very clearly in Nevada, those things are not being achieved. And so we’re basically, falling short of what survivors want in the legal space. But sometimes it’s still incredibly important that they navigate for either if it’s child custody, divorce, or whatever is going on.
So my advocates are in those spaces to really shepherd you through, to help you understand what is happening, what does it mean, all those kinds of things. And then, know, within our abusive partner space, we do a lot of court mandated program, but we also do voluntary program. You you’re coming to me because you have to, usually.
So welcome aboard. But what my hope is is that by the end of that journey, which is usually 26 weeks, you have learned something about yourself. You have taken some responsibility, if not entirely taken all the responsibility for your behavior, and that you are leaving that program. our data does point that they were leaving that program a more holistic and hope-filled individual than when they came in. And I’ll just say a piece around that really
So what we learn in our abusive partner programs, and this is why you hear me talking about young men, because the trajectory is so clear. When I’m with my adult abusive men and one of my therapists is running a class, things I hear so commonly are, I wish I would have learned this in fourth grade. I wish I would have learned that my emotions, while they come at me, my reaction is my choice.
Hollywood doesn’t teach you this. The internet certainly doesn’t teach you this. As a man in particular, I love that cool guys don’t look at explosions. They just keep walking away from this big massive explosion. All cool and not fettered at all. These are the messages that we tell.
Boys constantly like, no, no, you’re a tough guy. If you need to snap and you need to punch somebody, that’s fine. Right? Like you’re, you’ve got all this macho toughness. We teach this to boys, but we don’t teach them like, actually all of that is your own choice. If you do not want to punch someone, if you do not want to be violent, you do not need to be.
Right? And the simple exercise we do with our abusive partners is just sit there. We sit in silence for 30 seconds, which is always like the hardest part for folks. Like, and then it’s like, think about a time you got really angry. Just think about it. Like think about the smells, think about everything. And we get that whole entire class angry. Right? And then the question is, well, who got you angry? You got yourself angry.
Those are such powerful lessons for folks that have grown up generally in households and lifestyles of abuse and violence that the choice is theirs. And we also know this because when you look at studies of, know, the first thing abusive partners generally do in an abusive sort of episode is they smash the survivor’s phone.
and take the survivor’s wallet, right? Rarely is anything that is the abusive partners ever damaged, right? That’s a choice. Now it might be a split second choice. It might be a choice that is very, very clearly involved in some rage, but it’s a choice. And when you have power over your actions, that in itself is freeing.
I don’t have to behave this way. I don’t have to be this way. This is all a choice, right? And then of course there’s a ton of other things in 26 weeks, but that idea that violence is a choice is so incredibly new to most of our abusive partners. And why are we not teaching that in fourth grade, right? Why are we not teaching the anger scale and what can you do to relieve the anger scale and all of the things associated with that so that,
young boys can make different decisions throughout their lives.
Federico Ramallo (21:35) Amazing. While I was hearing you, was thinking about one of the things we teach my son is this idea of identifying his feelings and being able to identify what they are so that he can process them. And if he needs time, sometimes he gets angry, he can go to his room rather than lashing out.
Liz Ortenburger (22:01) Yes,
absolutely.
Federico Ramallo (22:02) ⁓ And
it’s about that. It’s about, you know, this idea of, if you lash out, if you hit mom, if you hit that, then, you know, that’s your reaction. It’s not, you know, you’re angry. That’s okay. You’re entitled to be angry, but you’re not entitled to hit somebody else. Right. ⁓ So he will go into his room. He would, you know, vent,
Liz Ortenburger (22:15) Yeah. ⁓
Yes.
Federico Ramallo (22:26) And then five minutes later he comes back normally. ⁓ And then I learned to kind of not go to his room and give him the space. And it starts with understanding, identifying your feelings. As a boy we were never told that.
Liz Ortenburger (22:28) Yeah.
Yes.
Right?
Right? And that processing time for him, because he’s growing up in a healthy home, will get shorter and shorter and shorter. Right? So when he’s 25 and at a bar and someone, like there’s an heated incident, adrenaline is rushing, he’s going to have a very different set of tools than someone who grew up in a household where we solve our differences by screaming at each other and then eventually hitting each other. Right? That’s, he’s going to have a very different reaction, which is
We can teach that. That can be a simple…
lesson in schools about that anger and about that emotion and you’re 100 % right. Boys are never given, you know, we say girls are overly emotional. Well, I have worked with young men long enough to see emotion is alive and well in all of our youth as it should be. This is their processing. But for boys, we don’t teach them to deal with that, right? Like how to deal with absolute joy and other than football, right?
or sports, where you can jump up and down and get crazy. But you do really well on a test. There’s emotions attached to you. You’re sad about something. We don’t allow boys the space in society to process. They’re very much supposed to be stoic. And then on the flip side with females,
Federico Ramallo (23:50) You
Liz Ortenburger (24:08) and girls when they’re overly emotional, like, she’s just being dramatic. We discount it. Like we allow you the space to be however you need to be, but then we discount that emotion for you by telling you you’re being hysterical or you’re being overly dramatic, right? We don’t process. No one teaches parents how to, you know, process with your kids. So it’s a really great thing to do with young people. you know, if we could process with bullies, like explain to me how you’re feeling when you’re picking on
someone smaller than you. my gosh, if we could do that in like a half hour session with a school counselor, we could slowly start to just understand what’s going on for these kids. We use a phrase in our youth program, WTF, which means what’s the function, right? What’s the function of the behavior that I’m seeing? Because generally kids aren’t being jerks because…
They just want to be jerks. There’s a function behind that behavior. It is our job as adults in young people’s lives to get behind that, understand what the function of that behavior is, and then just as you’re doing with your son, help them process that feeling.
Federico Ramallo (25:15) Right, right. In the school that my son is now, they’re doing the KiVa method, which is an anti-bullying system. I don’t know how effective it is, to be honest, but so far it’s been okay, where they have monitors, people monitoring the yard, basically. And when they detect that, they kind of, they invite both parties to do an introspection about.
Liz Ortenburger (25:21) Yeah.
Yeah.
Federico Ramallo (25:38) the situation, right? ⁓ I’m butchering the, know, because I’m kind of paraphrasing what they told me, you know, but, but it’s this idea of, of, right. They don’t demonize the bully basically, right. ⁓ and they work towards that, which is what you’re talking about. What is the function of the behavior, right? yes. And then, the, the other thing I was thinking about is, as boys,
Liz Ortenburger (25:39) interesting.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yes.
Federico Ramallo (26:03) They teach us if you cry, you’re weak. And if as a girl, they are overdramatic, as you mentioned. And that also perpetuates on adulthood. There’s this myth about the baby brain. The woman that is pregnant has a baby brain. And that’s myth. But it’s the same idea of, they’re overdramatic. So we should ignore them. ⁓
Liz Ortenburger (26:28) Right, yes. I
mean, we find ways to discredit our feelings in a lot of, you know, sort of different phrases and phraseology and all those things. But yet we don’t teach folks to sit in that feeling, you know. There’s a famous Persian poet, Rumi, who talks about, you know, allow your emotions to come in.
Allow them to just sort of be a guest in your house, right? And allow them to do all the things that they do and then bless them a goodbye. And I love that poem. In fact, whenever I have folks that are going through sort of some massive trauma, loss of a loved one, things like that, I send this poem because we so often want to sort of just mitigate the uncomfortableness of our emotions that we don’t allow ourselves to sit in it. And if you’re, particularly if you’re an abusive partner,
My goodness, you know, I would, we every once in a while will have a sociopath. That is incredibly, incredibly rare. Most of these folks are people that have grown up in very, very difficult circumstances, lifetimes of violence, all of the things. They may be using substance abuse, all this co-occurring stuff.
But they do never get a chance to sit in their feelings about how it felt to abuse their partner. How did it feel leading up to it? How did it feel when you, you know, will often hear the expression I snapped, right?
Let’s walk through this in slow motion and how did that feel, right? Because my goal and my team who does this work every single day, my therapist’s goal is to help you understand three hours before you even abused your partner when your boss was a jerk to you at work.
and you let that percolate, percolate, percolate, percolate, went out, had a couple beers with the buddies at the bar, and now go home and take all of that stress and anxiety out on your loved one and your kids. Let’s talk about how we get to where you and your boss had a difficult conversation and how we process that.
because we’ve got to understand the gateways to our anger in this space and that when we rob men of the ability to support and serve, really we still have a very 1960s, like as much as the feminist movement has helped us gain equality and women are an incredibly important part of the workspace, we still have somewhat of a baked idea and it’s depending on your cultural background, men should provide and support.
that is still, whether or not we all want to agree, it’s still pretty there, right? But what happens then when we rob men of that ability to support their families or their lifestyles or, right, we rob you of that ability?
We have created some anger in that, right, as a society in whole. And when we look at, you know, I encourage people, you look at unemployment rates, don’t just look at the one ubiquitous metric of unemployment across the country. Look in your low income neighborhoods.
and then start to understand we’re robbing people, men in particular, the opportunity to do what society tells men they’re supposed to do. Well, if you’re in that kind of friction every single day,
That is not a healthy place to be, right? So how do we solve for, the feelings of anger and all of these things, but then some of the larger societal constructs that create those situations, how do we solve for that? How do we create job opportunities, right? Once you have an abusive partner charge on your record,
Now we’ve created even another barrier for you, right, to get employed and to get work. So we haven’t done anything to make you less angry, which is why, you know, for our abusive partners, that program is expanding to have workforce development, housing opportunities, and all those kinds of things. Because what I see a lot in my work is my survivors need the same sort of resources my abusive partners need. And so how do we, you know, not that we’re putting everybody together and having a kumbaya moment,
But how do we provide some of that same trajectory for the abusive partner? Because my job at the end of the day is to end the cycle of domestic violence. I can’t do that if I still have an angry abusive partner. This epidemic of violence cannot be solved in a survivor only system. And that’s unfortunately…
what we’ve created. We’ve created the legal framework for abusive partners and the non-profit, supportive, elevating empowerment framework for survivors. It’s not working.
It hasn’t been working since the 70s when we started taking domestic violence seriously. So there’s a whole lot baked in there around just the way that we’ve treated domestic violence, you know, across the framework. And it’s time for change is my, you know, ultimate point from all of that is we have to do this work differently and more cohesively and holistically because abusive partners need different
mechanisms and simply the 26 week of court mandated classes and jail, right, and fines and community service. That’s that that is the basket of things available for an abusive partner. They also neared career coaching. They need support. They need to unpack some of their own childhood trauma. They and they need it. They need to be able to have hope that all of that’s possible. And so largely the movement
that I sit in to the domestic violence movement deals only with the survivor side. And I think those days need to come to an end because survivors are asking for it. Survivors are asking for therapy, for support, for help for their abusive partner. And so we need to listen and we need to create a different framework.
Federico Ramallo (32:39) Right, right, because the survivors, they want to come back with their partners, even if they’re abusive, right? They want a healthy partner, right?
Liz Ortenburger (32:47) Sometimes, yeah,
63 % of our data shows about 63 % of my residential clients will return to their abusive partner. There actually is not a lot of peer-reviewed data about survivor return. There’s a study out of Israel, because it’s incredibly difficult to get the data to put out a peer-reviewed study, because there’s so many things happening in a survivor’s life, and they might return once.
People quote the metric a lot of times. I’ve not seen where it’s cited, but women return seven times before they finally leave. Well, that is, by the way, somebody that has hope that this relationship can work. That’s hope. That’s hope. That’s a hope cycle, right? Now, without any intervention for the abusive partner, though, how are we expecting their behavior to change?
Right? Without understanding all of these things that you and I have talked about, how do we expect that behavior to change? So the domestic violence movement, largely in the nonprofit space, needs to create opportunities for abusive men in particular, but abusive gender non-binary and women as well, to have access to education and therapy and all kinds of things to understand.
How do they become a functioning individual inside of an abusive relationship? Like how do we end the abuse if they want to be together? So yes, survivors do return to what effect? I would say it’s probably between 50 and 65%. We know a lot of that is economically driven. As a survivor, you may not have the resources to take care of the kids, if they’re included, right, to stay housed, all of those kinds of things.
I can’t solve for that. Like largely I don’t have that kind of a budget. But could we offer, and we do offer classes to abusive partners so if they engage we can inform the survivor, fantastic your abusive partner’s engaged in classes. Now let’s see where we get to that. That can build a hope framework for that partnership. And so yeah there are other ways to do this than.
Survivors have to leave and abusive partners need to be incarcerated. That’s not largely not working So let’s create a different framework and let’s stop flooding our court systems with cases of misdemeanor domestic violence so they can actually focus on felony domestic violence, which includes assault with a weapon and Strangulation which are markers for homicide. That’s what our court system needs to deal with in Las Vegas. That’s about 3,000 cases a year give or take
out of 22,000 domestic violence cases. So I’ve got 22,000 domestic violence charges a year from police to the courts. Only 3,000 of those are felony, which has a strangulation or marker.
All of these other misdemeanor cases are largely going to be pled out, pled down, very few convictions. They’re going to be pled into the classes for a small portion of them. But there’s not a lot. The criminal justice system is not equipped for this. If I hit you, if I’m drunk and I drive my car and I hit you, you’re a victim of my stupidity. And then I have to
Deal with that, right? But you and I do not need to have Thanksgiving dinner together. We do not need to exchange children. We never need to see each other again, right? Probably relieving for someone who has been hit by a drunk driver. But in domestic violence, the courts are unable to mitigate the relationship.
They don’t know how to deal with this in a way, right? In a context of which these two people may or may not end up together. And we see all kinds of things happen. We see survivors recant. We see survivors become a witness for the defense and say what a great guy he was and she made it all up. This is all indications of a system that’s not working. So yeah, there’s some new trajectories to work in that space.
Federico Ramallo (36:52) Right, and the worst outcome, as you mentioned, is the abusive partner in jail because now you have a split family. But the relationship continues even though the abusive partner is in jail, right? And the best outcome will be for the family to be able to remain together and happy, right?
Liz Ortenburger (37:11) Yes, yes, that’s the win. The worst case scenario is homicide, which we do unfortunately see a lot of, but what’s happening is…
I believe, you know, we could, if we could get misdemeanor domestic violence, low-level first-defense domestic violence out of the court systems, then leave the court systems to deal with your repeat offenders and your strangulation and assault with a gun, generally. Households that have guns are much more dangerous for survivors. Deal with that epidemic.
and allow the misdemeanor space, particularly first offense misdemeanor space, to be dealt with in a very different, not even, should not, don’t even put it into the court system. Get it out of the courts, right? Like what are alternatives? And we’re starting to see some…
exciting developments in that space in terms of like not restorative justice because nobody restorative justice means a survivor would have to take some responsibility really that would be unfair but restorative programming
coming out of the Office of Violence Against Women. So we’ve applied for a grant in that space. It’s my hope that we can get some money to do some more work because if we can get to households where there’s been a 911 call but no arrest, so the justice system isn’t involved yet, my goodness. think we can start, that’s our low-hanging fruit. We can start to work in a very different way. It just takes some resources to get a program like that up and running.
Federico Ramallo (38:45) Because you can work on the prevention before it even hits the court.
Liz Ortenburger (38:50) Yeah, yeah, which
would be great.
which would be phenomenal because I think we can navigate all kinds of things in that space. always, you know, I shared earlier in the podcast that in order to get a bed with me, you have to really be fleeing lethal domestic violence, right? You’re in danger of being murdered. But the reality is that costs me and the agency and society because we’re a nonprofit, tens of thousands of dollars to mitigate the trauma, housing, all of the things needed in that space, particularly if there’s kids, right?
I could house people or work with people when their domestic violence is a one or a two on that scale. My goodness, right? That’s hundreds of dollars, right? So even if, you know, for those that are financially inclined, the return on the investment in working with folks that have experienced low-level violence versus people that have experienced, you know, years of violence, there’s no question. It’s a better way to do this. In the same way…
as an abusive partner, know, your behavior is not, this is not a happy couple, your behavior’s not great, you’re starting to use coercive control, you’re starting to use some of these mechanisms of domestic violence. Before you slip in to like, this is the full way I need to operate, if we can deal with that much earlier in that DV trajectory, great.
We can solve this thing for a lot less investment and work with a lot more couples.
Federico Ramallo (40:15) Right, right,
because we were talking about before that, we’re not taught about understanding our feelings. We’re not taught about how to have a healthy relationship with a partner on both boys and girls, right? ⁓ And then that becomes an escalation of abusive behavior, codependency that, you know, it’s this little snowball that grows, grows, grows until…
Liz Ortenburger (40:29) Yeah. Yeah.
Federico Ramallo (40:43) becomes a violence episode,
Liz Ortenburger (40:44) Yes.
Absolutely, yeah. And you know, that is all possible to mitigate, right? And certainly, we’re not gonna have 100%. That’s not possible probably, but I have hope that one day maybe. But yeah, but so much of that is about shifting the way, so really when you look at the domestic violence movements before the 1970s, really it was like,
turn a blind eye, it’s a private matter, it’s happening behind closed doors. The 1970s to really the…
huge crime bill, the omnibus crime bill that Clinton’s put out in 1994, we had a lot of movement. But unfortunately in this space that movement included mandatory arrest, no drop prosecution, and even in doing all of that what we did as a feminist movement was we removed survivors. Survivors don’t have a choice as to whether or not the district attorney moves forward with your case. Survivors don’t have a choice as to whether or not an arrest is made.
Survivors have been removed from having choice about their abusive partner for decades in this movement. what we’re seeing is for our, particularly for our low income survivors in this space, that has been hugely catastrophic. And when we look to our prison pipeline and our mass incarceration,
this is one of the feeders, domestic violence, right? And gosh, wouldn’t it be crazy to take all of the survivors that have an incarcerated partner and ask how many of you want your partners to be incarcerated? That number would be incredibly small, incredibly small. And so the courts have robbed survivors of their voice, right? So we are…
The criminal justice system is often acting as another abuser. Just, you have no choice, you have no pathway. This is not up to you, this is now up to the district attorney and the police and everybody in that chain, your voice no longer matters. How do we restore survivor voice to that process? I think that’s where we start. And then the more prevention work we can do, but then for those survivors that are criminally involved.
The question starts to become, is there strangulation? Is there assault with a gun? If those things exist, we do need to take this incredibly seriously. And if the survivor doesn’t want to move forward with charges, that’s probably when I would say the state does need to move forward with those charges. But that’s not the majority of domestic violence, right? And so how do we…
put survivor voice back in there. And then also survivor education. Most survivors do not realize if they’re being strangled as part of their domestic violence, their chance of being murdered is going up every time, right? On one strangulation, it’s 750 % more likely to be murdered. And then it goes up every time you’re strangled. Those are also your mass shooters and those are your cop killers. That is a highly lethal.
group of abuse of abusers and that is not the same as the majority of what we’re dealing with where we don’t know how to fight and we start screaming at each other and then we start hitting each other alcohol may or may not be involved police show up i’ve got marks on me you don’t have any marks on you you’re the one going to jail right
That’s, we haven’t segmented much. We have a felony and we have misdemeanor, but within the actual dynamic of how this whole thing rolls out, we’ve done one thing consistently. We’ve removed survivors from having any kind of voice in the legal process.
Federico Ramallo (44:33) Right, right. And the nerve for that argument to happen, both are involved, right? But then the man is usually the one that goes to jail, right? ⁓
Liz Ortenburger (44:43) It’s
so interesting. So we’re starting to see more work on bi-directional violence, which if you listen to the Johnny Depp, Amber Heard case, Like bi-directional violence, both parties are acting violently, right? As women, I think we have been somewhat secure in our space of like, well,
because of the police bias of, how does, wait, he’s way bigger than you, how would you abuse him, right? Like there’s a whole lot of sort of subtext in the domestic violence that our black and white criminal justice and law enforcement world, we’re not meant to deal with. So we are seeing, we did see actually there’s really since the 90s been an increase in dual arrests, particularly in states that have a mandatory arrest policy.
with I show up and I have done ride-alongs with the police and got, you know, they do a phenomenal job because sometimes you get up to this scene and it’s chaos, right? Everybody sort of, know, Hollywood has done us no favors in the depiction of how these things work. You roll up on a scene, everyone’s out, right? The neighbors are out, dogs are running around like it’s a spaghetti bowl of craziness. And these poor officers are trying to sort of piece together.
what happened and so they if they I believe in our jurisdiction if they see marks on both parties they will take both parties to jail but so 30 percent of our arrests last year had were female arrests so yeah it’s sort of
shifting. Now I will say I think that’s disproportionately unfair to black women who generally fight back differently than white and brown women in the space of domestic violence. There’s a there is a and not not just fight back differently but also an additional sort of societal bias that black women can be violent right. So all of this is playing into two probably young officers, patrol officers responding to a domestic violence scene and trying to
understand what happened and then make the right call and do they every time? No, but they really, everything I have seen by police is they really try to. They really try to understand what happened, make sure that their notes are good because they know that’s going on with the case. law enforcement, think, is just in a really tough spot because
Public policy has said mandatory arrest. And then we’ve put the DAs in a difficult spot because we say no drop prosecution. And all of that becomes difficult. And then in a jurisdiction like Las Vegas, we do not have a hearsay exception. So everything that goes to that court has to be first person. It cannot be a detective heard or.
somebody put into the report, the survivor has to come forward and really testify against that abusive partner, which is why? Like there’s no million dollar pot of money. There’s no upside for me testifying against my abuser unless, you know, the circumstances of my…
situation or that I, you know, I’m scared for my life and I have the resources to support myself with him being incarcerated, it is very hard to get survivors to, you know, think about a survivor, right? There’s an arrest at your house. Your husband is arrested. Now, if your family lives close by, everybody’s descending. In-laws, family.
Everybody, depending on the family history of violence, the messaging may be very different. It may be, look, your dad did this to me, but we got through it. Drop the case, don’t press charges. Pretty common, actually, right? As we think about like…
the upheaval of the criminal justice system in your space. there’s, you know, that’s all a way of saying it’s so incredibly complicated case by case that these sort of sledgehammer laws of mandatory arrests, no drop prosecution, and everything that VAWA entails really have not done a lot to bring survivor voice into the mix, but also really create a safer community. Our levels of domestic violence are not.
Federico Ramallo (48:33) Right.
Liz Ortenburger (48:52) precipitously lower than they were. I think depending on what metric you look like. I just read a 25 year study on VAWA and it very much is explaining how we can’t really tell you if it was successful or not successful because there’s no clear metrics. So that’s sort of all the confusion in the space. Like we really don’t have the answer but I think it is time for us to start trying something different.
Federico Ramallo (49:18) right. Yes, because if the woman testified, you know, she has the guilt of splitting up the family, right? ⁓ And even if she’s protecting herself and her family, still the resentment on the political family and everybody involved, I mean, I cannot fathom, you know, that situation. It’s very difficult.
Liz Ortenburger (49:26) Yeah. Yeah.
Federico Ramallo (49:41) So I can understand why a lot of victims would not testify. But then on the other hand, the repeat offense would continue.
Liz Ortenburger (49:51) Right, potentially, right? That’s
where working with the abusive partners really comes in, right? And that’s, in fairness, that’s what the court mandated program is designed to do. It’s like, great.
problem again is we’ve taken a sledgehammer approach and said, is how batters intervention programming works, this is how we’re gonna do it, and then we sort of failed to look at the research coming out of Australia and England and the United States, what actually makes a batters intervention program successful? And then let’s mandate some of those things. There’s a lot of research to show running a survivor class alongside the abusive partner class
really helpful so survivors learn what the abusive partner is learning so that when an abusive partner starts to use tactics like walk away de-escalate it doesn’t turn into a space where then the survivor is not feeling heard because this is how we’ve always engaged and now you’re not even listening to me and now I get violent right like I’ve seen that happen so so
Federico Ramallo (50:50) Right.
Liz Ortenburger (50:54) How do we deal with this, how do we create options that aren’t so binary for folks that are suffering inside this space to buy into that would decrease levels, certainly low levels of domestic violence so that we can carve out those high risk cases for the courts? I think that’s…
Really the option that we have, we’re spending billions of dollars as a nation on domestic violence every single year. And really it’s not a deterrent. We’re not seeing deterrents from the court system or the arrest. We’re not seeing prevention. Our levels of domestic violence are still very high. Some jurisdictions, San Diego in particular, has had some success with homicides and what they’ve done in the homicide space. So that’s an interesting sort of micro
micro
market, San Diego, I think, had one homicide last year. They have a million more people than Las Vegas. We had 42 last year, 56 the year before, just domestic violence. understanding what San Diego is doing is incredibly important. California, of course, is financed a little differently than Nevada, so there’s some things there. I also know they’re able to use hearsay inside their courts, which we do not have an option to do.
helps, particularly with an unwilling survivor. If we’ve got strangulation records and we have things that she said to detectives or her testimony on the scene, all those kinds of things can still be admitted into evidence, that’s incredibly helpful.
Federico Ramallo (52:30) I am appalled by everything I’m hearing because it’s very interesting and disturbing at the same time, right? But I think it’s important that we talk about. I was reading Warren Farrell has a book called The Boy Crisis where he talks, I’m bashing probably what he said, but he talks about that, the lack of a father.
Liz Ortenburger (52:38) Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Federico Ramallo (52:52) figure it’s the reason why 90 plus percent of men are in jail right ⁓ and and I think when I’m hearing you I’m thinking that’s there is a relationship with this that that’s kind of the where the beginning is right and the you know in low-income families there is a lot of
Liz Ortenburger (52:59) Mm.
Federico Ramallo (53:14) single moms, split families, ⁓ where there’s also some level of violence or abuse because the relationship kind of still going, right? ⁓ But basically what he was talking about is finding a father figure, even in those situations. It could be a coach, it could be somebody else in the family, right? But this idea of bringing the kids, having a father figure for the kids, because that’s…
Liz Ortenburger (53:17) Yeah.
Yeah.
Yes.
Federico Ramallo (53:38) in all markers, they have a better life, right?
Liz Ortenburger (53:40) Yeah.
Yeah, that’s very true, right? And we know from research with boys and girls, our big brothers, big sisters, Getting men to step up to support boys is a much harder lift than getting women to step up and support girls. And so…
You know, that’s sort of the action plan for any low income community, any group that’s trying to serve a low income community should be how are we getting adult male role models and connecting them to our boys. In our shelter, our shelter’s actually run by a man, which is very unusual in the domestic violence space, but one of the things that we talk about a lot is that not only our young boys, but our young girls need to see strong, healthy men.
And when you’ve grown up in an abusive relationship, that is a premium. And so, you know, 100 black men and some of these other gentlemen by choice is a great nonprofit here designed to connect boys with adult role models. I will also say within the coaching dynamic, there is a phenomenal curriculum called Coaching Boys Into Men by Futures Without Violence.
Every coach should get involved with that curriculum because what happens for coaches is, you know, two boys are talking about a party they were at over the weekend in the locker room.
That coach, like maybe using some pejorative language around women, that coach has an obligation to step in, although what we find is many of our coaches don’t know how to have these difficult conversations. And so what we don’t correct, we condone. And that is a really critical thing for all of us in the youth space. Like when kids are doing something they shouldn’t be doing, particularly in the way they’re speaking about…
women or kind of all of that context, if we don’t correct that behavior, we’ve condoned it. And coaches are in the hot seat, unfortunately for them, because they are often the most trusted male role model in a boy’s life. And if not more than dad, pretty darn close sometimes, right? And if there’s no dad present, for sure.
those coaches have a really important role to play, but we haven’t equipped them, right? Their athletic education has not equipped them for how to have these difficult conversations. And certainly that futures without violence curriculum is phenomenal. Really, really helpful. Getting school districts to adopt that and allow agencies like mine to come in and train on that curriculum would be a phenomenal.
opportunity. I but I cannot, I got my private schools and my charter schools to buy in. Our Clark County School District has yet to buy into it but we’re getting there. I think you know we can’t continue to have these high levels of domestic violence in our society and not say how at every juncture are we trying to make this better. So hopefully, new superintendent so I have I have hope.
Federico Ramallo (56:53) Right, right. Yes, I think that would be very impactful on the young men and women as well. Yes. The teenagers, they stop listening to their dads, right? Their parents, right? I think it’s after 13 years old, we have a 3 % influence, the parents, right? The dad in particular. So they listen more to peers and they listen more other…
Liz Ortenburger (56:59) Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Yes.
Yeah.
Federico Ramallo (57:17) other father figures that coach or ⁓ other leaders because they’re looking for to disconnect. I’ve been growing up to be my dad, now I want to go the opposite direction. So they’re looking for other figures to kind of other roles to emulate. ⁓ So I think that what you’re describing will have a significant impact on the…
Liz Ortenburger (57:20) Yeah.
Absolutely.
Federico Ramallo (57:43) the teenage, right? ⁓ Yes. And then last I wanted to mention, have one of my guests, previous guests, Joan Perry. She wrote a book called The Heroine’s Path, where she talks about, I’m paraphrasing her book, and I’m butchering, I hope I don’t, but she talks about that she, know, the men, the hero’s path is going to the adventure, right? And she talks about this idea of
Liz Ortenburger (57:45) Yes.
Federico Ramallo (58:10) the heroine’s path is different where she talks about building self-confidence first because women need that self-confidence before being able to go out in the world. And the feminist movement and the modern lifestyle kind of says women should go out equal as men. And she talks about there’s this nuance that they need to build this self-confidence first.
Liz Ortenburger (58:35) That is an, I’ve not heard that before and that is a very interesting, I’d say it’s very true, right? And we see this in the way children take risks, right? Boys are like, get me up there, strap me into that thing, I will fly across that zip line. And girls are like.
Federico Ramallo (58:44) Right.
Liz Ortenburger (58:52) Well, okay, what are the safety ramifications of the, you know, a little more, a little bit more cautious in a way that they will observe first so that they can do it right, right? And so that, love that, that dynamic of that you’re building that confidence certainly makes sense in what I see with youth.
Federico Ramallo (59:13) truly appreciate this.
to be here with us today. Any final remarks before we wrap it up?
Liz Ortenburger (59:15) Absolutely.
One of my mentors said this to me long ago, if you’re not in a space in your job where you’re elevating young people and you don’t have children, figure out how to give back and invest. And I think you and I have touched on that. Certainly if you’re a man, figure out how to give back and invest. And this doesn’t mean writing a million dollar check to Boys and Girls Club. This can mean having one child in your life who could really just benefit. And there’s so many boys thirsty for this.
Just get involved with a local agency and volunteer. Go fishing. Do what you love with a child who would not ever be exposed to that. know, once a month, once a week. The lift is small, but my goodness, the change for that child is so incredibly massive.
Federico Ramallo (1:00:07) Yes, I agree. I the impact we can have on young kids, it’s amazing. I do karate coaching on the local school, train my kid and other kids. ⁓ I can see how they, we go to competitions and things like that, and I can see how the kids struggle. You know, they have their fears. And once they go through, you know, they are able to, you know,
Liz Ortenburger (1:00:17) That’s awesome.
Federico Ramallo (1:00:31) beat the fear, Go through the competition, is, know, they’re going to get, you know, it’s a committee, so it’s a competition, so the rules are safer, but basically they’re going to get beat up, So, you know, so it is frightening, right? So I understand, right? But then whether they win or they lose, being able to give them, you know, their confidence back just by getting into a ring.
Liz Ortenburger (1:00:43) Yeah.
Yeah.
Federico Ramallo (1:00:56) That’s a big win, right? And we had situations where the kids didn’t want to go, right? They just froze and they couldn’t get in, So, but building that confidence, right? And I’ve seen the kids, how they evolve and it’s amazing the impact we can have with those type of activities. So, yeah, and I agree. that has happened to be my experience, but at the end of the day, any activity that you can do with
Liz Ortenburger (1:01:07) Yeah.
Federico Ramallo (1:01:24) with a kid to coach them and build them that self-worth and self-confidence, it has a significant impact.
Liz Ortenburger (1:01:31) Absolutely. Thank you so much, Federico This has been great.
Federico Ramallo (1:01:35) Thank you Liz.