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Impact of a Batterer in the Lives of Children and Teens
Description
This training provides an understanding of domestic violence by overviewing how the batterer as a parent uses coercive control and tactics to create harm, impacting each family member’s emotional and physical safety. In addition, these parents deprive their children of empathy and consistency while undermining the survivor’s parenting role. Awareness of the complexity of domestic violence occurs when professionals understand coercive control, trauma reactivity, and the impact of toxic stress in the lives of children and teens. This training explores tips to ally with youth and parent survivors discovering practical strategies of communicating, reframing their traumatic experiences of domestic violence in how trauma is a body experience. The resources and handouts shared will enhance work with survivor-centered, resiliency-focused support of children, teens, and protective parents.
Speaker
Sonia Ferencik, LISW-S, RA, works to increase awareness of how lived experiences of exposure to a batterer as a parent impacts the lives of children, teens, and their parents. Sonia’s approach is individual, survivor-focused, intertwined with understanding the complexities of trauma responses and how batterers manipulate relationships with their children, intimate partners, and helpers. Sonia’s work centers on creating trauma-informed programming by enhancing advocates intervention skills, responses, and supporting helpers with secondary traumatic exposure.
She possesses over 30 years of working in domestic violence shelters, community-based group work, and advocacy. She is an Advanced Certified Trauma Practitioner from Starr Commonwealth, a Registered Advocate with Senior Standing. She works at Ohio Domestic Violence Network as the Youth Advocacy & Trauma-Informed Services Coordinator. She is the creator of ODVN’s Youth Journal Play, Move, Imagine: I Matter! I Belong! She is the co-author of ODVN’s Trauma-Informed Approaches: Promising Practices and Protocols for Ohio’s Domestic Violence Programs and the author of Ohio Children’s Trust Fund’s Breaking the Cycle Manual. Sonia has worked and lived in both Columbus and Cleveland and is from rural Ohio.