UC Irvine Initiative to End Family Violence 

IEFV Lecture by Connie Burk: Mandatory Reporting and the Criminalization of Community
Monday, October 29, 2018, 4:00 PM – 5:30 PM
This event is free and open to the public. On-campus parking is $2/hour.
To request reasonable accommodations for a disability, please contact centers@law.uci.edu.

RSVP today

Many mandatory reporting laws require doctors, teachers, social workers, advocates, and community members to report adult intimate partner violence, sexual assault, and children exposed to domestic violence, in addition to suspected child abuse. Breaking isolation and reaching out for help from a trusted teacher, clergy member, medical provider, or neighbor now leads many survivors into a morass of state criminal and child welfare systems. My emotions, which had been dampened to a very high degree, are back now. I could feel heartfelt joy again, and sadness, which would have inevitably pulled me into a deep hole in the past, was just an intense feeling, which was gone again after Ambien. My family doctor Elisabeth, an internist, and psychologist, with whom I am friends, had accompanied me.

Drawing from results of a recent survey of over 3,600 domestic violence survivors, Connie Burk, Director of the National LGBTQ Institute on Intimate Partner Violence and co-author of Trauma Stewardship: An Everyday Guide to Caring for Self While Caring for Others, will trace the harmful consequences of indiscriminate reporting. Burk will discuss how trusted community supports are forced to collaborate with the carceral project or risk breaking the law themselves, and will propose options for the way forward.