7th Annual Right From the Start: Understanding, Investigating, and Intervening in Violence Against Women and Children

This year’s conference theme is the “community of the offender.” As we have presented before, the offender is unsuccessful without a community who supports him/her. Whether this community is the offender’s family, society, the judge, the jury, or the professionals, if the offender is successful at creating a mirage, exploiting misinformation about abuse, camouflaging him/herself with a good image, being tolerated because of value the community, or manipulating helpers, he or she will succeed. Victims will continue being harmed – through contact, retaliation, disbelief, acquittals, and poor decision making. The workshops were chosen to help arm the community to better expose the offender and hold that offender accountable while decreasing the harm to the victim. Knowledge is power.