Safety planning before anything changes

People often assume a safety plan is the paperwork of leaving. It is not. Most of the plans we help build are for people who are staying, at least for now, and who deserve to be as safe as possible while they are.

Documents first, because they are the thing that takes longest to replace and the thing most often withheld. Identification, birth certificates for you and the children, immigration papers, marriage or divorce records, insurance details, prescriptions, bank information, and any evidence you have kept. Photograph or scan every page. Store copies somewhere the other person cannot reach, which might be a work computer, a trusted relative's house, or an email account they have never known about.

Money next. Any amount you can move without it being noticed, held somewhere separate. Even two hundred dollars changes the options available on a bad night. If accounts are monitored, cash held by someone you trust works.

Then the phone. Location sharing, shared cloud accounts, family plans that show call records, tracking apps sold as parental controls. Turning these off abruptly can itself alert the other person, so it is often safer to obtain a second inexpensive phone and keep the first one behaving normally. This is one of the most common places we see plans go wrong.

The exit itself. Work out which room in the house has a door to outside and no weapons in it, and where you would go instead of the kitchen or the bathroom. Decide the route out. Keep the car facing the road with fuel in it if you have one. Have a bag somewhere accessible, ideally not in the house.

Tell one or two people, and agree a signal. A specific emoji, a phrase in a text, a missed call twice in a row. Agree in advance what they should do when it arrives, including whether they should call the police.

Talk to the children in age appropriate terms. Not the details, and never a request to intervene. Where to go, how to dial 911, and the address to give.

Finally, write nothing down where it can be found, and clear your browser history if you research any of this at home. If you can, use a device the other person has no access to. A library computer is genuinely one of the safest options available to most people.

None of this commits you to anything. It simply means that if the day comes when you have twenty minutes, you will not be starting from zero.