You are safe here
That isn't just empty reassurance. It's a promise.
What you share with Ronni will not be used against you. Your experiences will not be minimized, reframed, or explained away. What you are living through has a name, and Ronni knows it. You will not have to convince her that what you are experiencing is real before you are taken seriously. That's what safe means here.
You're not crazy. You're not imagining it. And you are definitely not alone.
You survived an environment where the truth was intentionally twisted to make you doubt your own perception. That wasn’t an accident. Making you distrust your own mind is a strategic part of how the abuser keeps you trapped.
And leaving doesn't end it. Domestic violence often escalates when the abuser loses power and control, and especially when children are involved, the legal system becomes a devastatingly effective tool of control. Because he understands that nothing in the world is more important to you than your children's health and safety.
If you have watched a custody evaluator miss what was happening entirely. If you have been told your fear is disproportionate, your documentation is excessive, or your protective responses are evidence of alienation. If you have sat in a courtroom and felt like the only person in the room who understood the actual danger — you were not being paranoid. You are clearly seeing the pattern of harm. The system is not designed to recognize it.
Coercive control is a pattern of behavior that has been extensively studied and named across decades of research. Post-separation abuse is real, researched, and predictable. The tactics used to weaponize family court — false allegations, burying you in paperwork, litigation as financial exhaustion — are in the literature. What has been done to you has been done to others. It has been defined. And there is a body of evidence that describes it with precision.
That precision is what BPH brings to your case.
Here's what's possible.
Most people think custody cases are won or lost in courtrooms. They are not.
They are won or lost in the months and years before trial, in the quality of the evidence, the precision of the documentation, the credibility of the expert, and the degree to which the full pattern of abuse is visible to the people making decisions about your children's lives.
BPH works at that level. Before, during, and after.
What BPH Does
BPH offers four categories of service. Not every client needs all four. Ronni will help you understand which apply to your case.
Bateman Public Health provides four categories of service for protective parents in abuse-involved custody cases: expert witness testimony and litigation consulting; strategic clarity; custody evaluation rebuttal; and danger assessment.
Expert Witness Testimony & Litigation Consulting
If your case is heading toward trial, BPH can serve as an expert witness, providing testimony on domestic violence dynamics, coercive control, and child safety that is built to meet the standards for admissibility. That testimony shows where those patterns are present in your specific case, and educates the judge on the documented effects of abuse and coercive control on children's health and development. BPH also works directly with your legal team to help them understand what they're seeing, develop a case strategy grounded in the research, and prepare for depositions and cross-examination. Beyond your case, BPH trains the legal and court professionals who shape these decisions. See training for professionals →
If something about how your case is being handled doesn't sit right, that's worth a conversation.
Strategic Clarity
You are not powerless in this, even when the system makes you feel like you are. BPH helps you understand what you're actually navigating and where you have room to move, so the process stops happening to you. This is clarity, applied to your situation by someone who has been where you are.
What you share with BPH is protected by advocate confidentiality. If you're carrying information you don't know what to do with, that's worth a conversation.
Custody Evaluation Rebuttal
Custody evaluations are not neutral documents. When an evaluation has missed or minimized the abuse, or when its methodology cannot withstand scrutiny, BPH provides a detailed rebuttal analysis that identifies the gaps, names what was missed, and gives your attorney what they need to challenge findings that don't hold up.
Not every flawed evaluation needs a full rebuttal. BPH will tell you honestly what yours needs, and what it doesn't.
Danger Assessment
Understanding the level and type of risk in your specific situation changes how you approach your case. BPH administers the Danger Assessment, a validated instrument developed at Johns Hopkins with decades of peer-reviewed research behind it. Because the danger you face is inseparable from your children's safety, BPH translates those findings into a clear picture of the risk to your family and how to address it.
This is a conversation worth having.
Ronni came to this work through it, not around it.
That’s not a detail — it’s the foundation of everything BPH does and why it does it differently.
Ronni holds a Master of Public Health from Utah State University. She is a Certified Danger Assessor through Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing and a Credentialed Domestic Violence Advocate through the Utah Domestic Violence Coalition. She has provided sworn expert witness testimony and submitted expert reports in child custody proceedings.
She serves on the Domestic Violence Fatality Review Committee of the Utah Commission on Criminal and Juvenile Justice. She initiated and championed the Utah legislation that established evidence of abuse as a required consideration in custody and parent-time decisions under the best interests of the child standard. That legislation is now Utah Code.
Questions you might be asking
Is it abuse if he never physically hurt me?
Yes, it can be. Abuse is not only physical. Some people live for years with a partner who never raises a hand but controls the money, tracks where they go, cuts them off from family and friends, or keeps them afraid in their own home. That pattern has a name: coercive control. It is the ongoing use of fear, control, and intimidation to dominate another person, and a growing number of courts now recognize it as a serious and damaging form of abuse. If you have found yourself shrinking your own life to keep the peace, or feeling watched in your own home, those are not small things, and you are not overreacting by taking them seriously. You do not need a bruise to be telling the truth about what is happening to you.
I’m afraid that if I bring up his abuse in court, it will be used against me. Is that real?
This fear is real, and it is one of the most common reasons protective parents stay silent. You may have heard that a parent who raises concerns about abuse can be cast as the difficult one, while the parent causing harm presents as calm and reasonable. That dynamic is documented, and it is exactly the problem that careful, well-supported analysis is meant to correct. A court that does not understand coercive control can misread it. A court given a clear, evidence-based framework for what it is seeing is far better equipped to weigh it accurately. What BPH offers is the analysis that helps a court understand the pattern, so that telling the truth about your situation, alongside the guidance of your own attorney, has the best chance of being understood instead of being a risk you carry alone.
He’s never hurt the children. Are they still at risk?
Often, yes. Children do not have to be hit, or even to witness a specific incident, to be harmed by living in a home shaped by abuse. The research on children’s exposure to domestic violence is clear that growing up around fear and control affects their safety and development, whether or not they are ever the direct target. There is also a pattern worth understanding: the end of a relationship does not always end the danger, and for some families the period around separation is when risk to everyone in the family, including the children, needs the most careful attention. None of this means the worst will happen. It means your instinct that something is wrong deserves to be taken seriously and assessed properly, not waved off because the children have no visible injuries. Understanding how dangerous a situation actually is, including a formal danger assessment of the risk the abusive parent poses, is part of how that gets answered.
You found this page. The next step is just a conversation.
No commitment. No pressure. The first conversation is free.
Choose a time that works, and tell Ronni what's going on. She reviews every inquiry herself, and what you share stays confidential.
Start the conversation →The system wasn't built for you. We are.
