When Systems Become Weapons: Social Entrapment in Family Violence Responses
Tracks
Ballroom 2: In-Person Only
| Wednesday, November 25, 2026 |
| 10:35 AM - 11:05 AM |
Overview
Stephanie Butcher, Ausi, Nos Paramas
Three Key Learnings
1. Explain how legal and institutional processes can be used as extensions of coercive control after separation.
2. Show how social entrapment helps make sense of victim-survivor constraint, institutional misreading, and unsafe outcomes.
3. Identify practical reform principles that strengthen accountability, trauma-informed practice, and child safety.
Speaker
Ms Stephanie Butcher
Founder
ausi, nos paramas
When Systems Become Weapons: Social Entrapment in Family Violence Responses
Presentation Overview
When systems are treated as neutral, we can miss the ways they are manipulated as extensions of coercive control. This presentation examines how legal, service and institutional systems may be used to continue abuse after separation, trapping victim-survivors and children inside processes that appear lawful while reproducing fear, surveillance, exhaustion and unsafe outcomes.
Drawing on lived experience advocacy and survivor-led systems analysis, this session explores how systems abuse operates across family law, child protection, policing and related institutional responses. It considers how perpetrators may use process itself as a weapon through forced unsafe contact, procedural pressure, repeated relitigation, credibility reversal, and the reframing of protective action as hostility or non-cooperation.
The presentation also applies the concept of social entrapment to institutional decision-making. Harm cannot be understood only through a perpetrator’s conduct in isolation, but through the interaction between coercive control, constrained protective options, and systems that fail to recognise context. Where institutions respond without a trauma-informed understanding of abuse, they may unintentionally deepen risk, compound isolation, and legitimise ongoing control.
This session offers a lived experience perspective on what accountability should look like in practice, including safer decision-making, better interpretation of resistance and protective behaviour, and reform approaches that centre child and survivor safety rather than procedural appearance.
Key learnings:
Understand how systems abuse functions as a continuation of coercive control after separation.
Recognise how social entrapment is intensified when institutions misread trauma, resistance and protective action.
Identify practical principles for trauma-informed, safety-oriented institutional reform.
Drawing on lived experience advocacy and survivor-led systems analysis, this session explores how systems abuse operates across family law, child protection, policing and related institutional responses. It considers how perpetrators may use process itself as a weapon through forced unsafe contact, procedural pressure, repeated relitigation, credibility reversal, and the reframing of protective action as hostility or non-cooperation.
The presentation also applies the concept of social entrapment to institutional decision-making. Harm cannot be understood only through a perpetrator’s conduct in isolation, but through the interaction between coercive control, constrained protective options, and systems that fail to recognise context. Where institutions respond without a trauma-informed understanding of abuse, they may unintentionally deepen risk, compound isolation, and legitimise ongoing control.
This session offers a lived experience perspective on what accountability should look like in practice, including safer decision-making, better interpretation of resistance and protective behaviour, and reform approaches that centre child and survivor safety rather than procedural appearance.
Key learnings:
Understand how systems abuse functions as a continuation of coercive control after separation.
Recognise how social entrapment is intensified when institutions misread trauma, resistance and protective action.
Identify practical principles for trauma-informed, safety-oriented institutional reform.
Biography
Stephanie Butcher is an Australian writer, lived experience advocate and systems accountability researcher, and founder of Ancestral Echoes Collective. Her work through ausi, nos paramas examines systems abuse, post-separation coercive control, and the institutional conditions that can entrap victim-survivors and children after separation. Drawing on lived experience, structured inquiry, and survivor-led systems analysis, she explores how legal and service systems can reproduce harm while appearing neutral. Stephanie’s advocacy focuses on accountability, implementation gaps, and child-centred reform across family law and related institutional responses.
