Steve Dana: Risk Assessment and Real Safety Planning

Lisa asked a retired police officer whether she should be worried that her ex had been seen parked in her neighborhood, nearly two years after he moved out of state. He said the risk was high and sent an officer over. On the lethality screening that followed, one answer put her near the top: her ex had once threatened to kill her. She had filed that away as old news, which is the exact pattern this episode's guest keeps encountering.

Steve Dana is the founder and CEO of Protection From Abuse, a nonprofit he started in 2015 after a career in executive and dignitary protection alongside a long run in litigation management. He trains advocates in advanced safety planning, including through a state victim assistance academy, and his organization provides protective transport for people traveling to and from court. He also posts short videos on personal safety, some of them made with his young daughter about what healthy boundaries look like.

Steve explains what a domestic violence risk assessment actually is and what it is for. By his own tally across roughly two thousand assessments, about eight in ten of the people he worked with put their own risk below what the instrument scored. He talks about how threats to kill get discounted with time, why some threats are control and some are warning, and how ordinary curiosity can be hard to separate from the pre-attack behavior of someone learning your routine.

From there the conversation turns practical. Why safety planning has to start with an assessment rather than a checklist. What a confidential relocation requires, in what order, and how a GPS tracker or an infected phone spends your one chance at it. Why telling an abuse survivor to change their route home is advice borrowed from a different job. What he hears family lawyers say to their own clients in courthouse hallways. Why a civil restraint traded for a restraining order can leave you with nothing enforceable. And why a risk assessment is a snapshot rather than a prediction, which means redoing it as the situation changes.

As always, this is strategic education, not legal or mental-health advice for your specific situation.

🎓 What you'll learn

• What a domestic violence risk assessment measures, and Steve's own finding that eight in ten people scored their danger lower than the instrument did
• Why a threat to kill made years ago still counts on a lethality screening
• Curiosity or pre-attack behavior: how surveillance of your routine gets misread
• Why trading a restraining order for a civil restraint can leave nothing enforceable
• Confidential relocation: the order the steps have to happen in, and what a tracker undoes
• Why "change your route home" is borrowed advice that does not fit an intimate partner
• What a risk assessment can and cannot predict, and why you act on the score anyway
• Why policing training and protection training are two different trades

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 The viral open letter, and behavior people excuse as fighting for his family
3:00 From dignitary protection to a nonprofit for people who cannot buy it
4:00 Eight in ten: underestimating your own danger
6:00 Lisa's lethality screening, and the threat she had filed away
8:00 Threats to kill: control, warning, and pre-attack indicators
10:00 Family lawyers with no training in abuse dynamics
14:00 Civil restraints, restraining orders, and orders with no teeth
18:00 Where he thinks protection is actually needed, and what assessment is for
20:00 Confidential relocation, GPS trackers, and one chance to get it right
23:00 Why "change your route home" means very little here
30:00 Teaching a six-year-old about boundaries, and what assessment can't predict

Keep going 💜
Book a free 30-minute discovery call and we'll help you map your next steps: https://beentheregotout.com/call
📘 Been There Got Out: Toxic Relationships, High-Conflict Divorce, and How to Stay Sane Under Insane Circumstances — https://www.amazon.com/dp/194627495X
📘 Been There Got Out: When Your Ex Turns the Kids Against You (our parental-alienation book) — https://www.amazon.com/dp/1967674183
🔗 Protection From Abuse (Steve's nonprofit): https://protectionfromabuse.org/

🎧 More with Steve Dana on this podcast
Ep 50: What Judges Need to Grant a Restraining Order

About Been There Got Out
Chris Barry and Lisa Johnson are high-conflict divorce, custody, and co-parenting strategists, and the founders of Been There Got Out. They know these cases from the inside: both have successfully represented themselves in family court. Few attorneys have a playbook for a case like this — Chris and Lisa write yours with you, so you and your kids can get through it as unscathed as possible.