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.