If you are afraid of a partner, ex-partner, or family member, plan for safety with a trained domestic-violence advocate before you confront, disclose, change your routines, or leave, because those are the moments when the risk of serious harm is highest.

How to do it

1. 1Contact an advocate from a device and at a time the other person cannot monitor: a phone at work, a friend's phone, a library computer. In the US the National Domestic Violence Hotline is 1-800-799-7233 (thehotline.org, which also offers chat); hotpeachpages.net lists agencies in most countries. In immediate danger, call emergency services.
2. 2Ask the advocate to go through a structured risk assessment with you. Campbell's Danger Assessment is the best-known instrument; it asks about factors such as escalating violence, strangulation, access to weapons, threats to kill, stalking, extreme jealousy and control, and recent or planned separation.
3. 3Build the plan with them around your actual life: what you would do during an incident, where you could go, who can be told, how children and pets fit in, what documents and money you would need, and how your devices and accounts might be watched. A plan is personal; a generic checklist found online is not a substitute.
4. 4Take your own sense of danger seriously. Research finds that victims' own risk assessments are informative, and also that many women who were later killed or nearly killed had underestimated their risk; an outside assessment guards against both errors.
5. 5Let the advocate help you think through timing. Staying for now, leaving later, and leaving with support in place are all legitimate safety strategies; you know things about the situation that nobody else does.
6. 6Revisit the plan whenever something changes: a separation, a court date, a pregnancy, a new job, a threat, a new weapon in the house.

When to use it

• •You are afraid of how a partner or family member will react to being challenged, refused, or left.
• •You are thinking about separating, disclosing abuse, seeking a protective order, or telling the person you know what they are doing.
• •Control has been increasing: monitoring, isolation from friends and family, control of money, threats, or any physical violence, especially strangulation.
• •You are a friend, relative, or professional about to advise someone in this situation to "just leave" or to "stand up to them".

Counters

Evidence and how strong it is

The case for planning before acting rests on strong observational evidence about when serious harm occurs. Campbell et al. (2003), an eleven-city case-control study of intimate-partner femicide, found that risk rose sharply when a woman separated from a partner after living together, especially where the partner was highly controlling, and identified further markers including access to firearms, prior threats with a weapon, and non-fatal strangulation. Those findings underlie the Danger Assessment, which was validated as a predictor of severe and lethal re-assault (Campbell, Webster & Glass 2009). Stark (2007) adds the argument that the pattern of control, rather than the frequency of physical incidents, is what best characterizes dangerous relationships, and that attempts to reclaim autonomy are met with escalation. Evidence that safety planning itself reduces harm is more limited: it is universally recommended and consistent with the risk data, and randomized trials of an interactive safety decision aid (Glass et al. 2017) found improvements in outcomes such as decisional conflict and use of helpful safety behaviors, but no trial has shown a reduction in homicide, which is too rare to study that way. Evidence strength: strong observational evidence for the risk pattern; clinical consensus with modest trial support for the intervention.

1. Campbell, J. C., Webster, D., Koziol-McLain, J., Block, C., Campbell, D., Curry, M. A., et al. (2003). Risk factors for femicide in abusive relationships: Results from a multisite case control study. American Journal of Public Health, 93(7), 1089-1097
   The finding that separation from a controlling partner, firearm access, prior weapon threats, and strangulation are major risk factors for intimate-partner femicide.
2. Campbell, J. C., Webster, D. W., & Glass, N. (2009). The Danger Assessment: Validation of a lethality risk assessment instrument for intimate partner femicide. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 24(4), 653-674
   Validation of the Danger Assessment and its weighted scoring as a predictor of lethal and near-lethal violence.
3. Stark, E. (2007). Coercive Control: How Men Entrap Women in Personal Life. Oxford University Press
   The argument that a pattern of control, more than discrete violent incidents, defines dangerous relationships and that bids for autonomy are met with escalation.
4. Glass, N. E., Perrin, N. A., Hanson, G. C., Bloom, T. L., Messing, J. T., Clough, A. S., et al. (2017). The longitudinal impact of an internet safety decision aid for abused women. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 52(5), 606-615
   Randomized-trial evidence that an individualized safety decision aid improved decision-related outcomes and safety behaviors; it does not show a reduction in lethal violence.