One woman is killed every 11 days and one man every 26 days by an intimate partner. These numbers (averaged, across 2024-2025) do not include deaths of children or domestic and family violence related suicides. We have a long way to go.  In this presentation I draw on my research and experience providing expert domestic and family violence reports,  and evidence at many coronial inquests and criminal trials over the past few years. In these investigations there are challenges about the value of risk assessment tools, the merits of law reform, and the role of mental health and drug and alcohol interventions. What, then, keeps people safe from fatality and what makes those safety mechanisms ultimately fail? I conclude that a coercive control lens, and the application of a social entrapment framework must be front of mind across all our services.