Impact of a Batterer in the Lives of Children and Teens

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.