For decades, the domestic violence movement has run on a familiar script: the abuser is bad, the survivor should leave, and the system’s job is to punish after the fact. It’s a script that’s shaped everything from police response to funding priorities to the questions we, as a culture, instinctively ask when we hear about abuse. Why didn’t she just leave?
Liz Ortenburger has spent the last ten years challenging that script from the inside. As CEO of SafeNest — Nevada’s largest domestic and sexual violence nonprofit, serving Clark County since 1977 — she’s built a career around a much harder, much more useful question: does she feel safer? Not whether an arrest was made. Not whether a case was prosecuted. Whether the person actually experiencing abuse is measurably, meaningfully safer than she was before.
We sat down with Liz for this episode, and what started as a conversation about SafeNest’s work turned into something much bigger — a real look at what thirty-plus years of well-intentioned policy has and hasn’t accomplished, and what a system built around prevention, instead of just response, could actually look like.
The pattern before the record
One thing we keep running into on this show is how often domestic violence sits just beneath the surface of a case — not as the headline, but as a footnote a family member mentions almost in passing. Often there’s no report. No hotline call. No prior charge. As far as any official system is concerned, nothing ever happened, right up until it did.
Liz’s answer to why that pattern exists starts somewhere most people don’t expect: not with the survivor, but with the abuser. “Hurt people hurt people,” she told us. In her decade at SafeNest, she’s found that true sociopathy — abuse with no trauma underneath it — is genuinely rare. Far more often, abusive behavior is a learned pattern, passed down through households where conflict, control, or violence were simply how things were done. Liz cited a striking statistic: in generational studies, 76% of kids who grow up in households with regular abuse repeat that cycle as adults, either as victims, abusers, or both — without some form of intervention.
That reframe is why SafeNest made a decision that’s still controversial in this field: they work directly with abusers, not just survivors. Not to excuse behavior, but because, as Liz put it, if you invest in stopping one abuser, you may be preventing two or three future survivors from ever being created — since the average abuser has three to five victims across a lifetime.
Hope, not just intervention
Some of the most compelling parts of our conversation centered on SafeNest’s work with kids — specifically, a concept Liz calls “hope planning.” Through a partnership with the Alliance for Hope International’s Camp HOPE program, SafeNest works with children at high risk of repeating cycles of abuse, giving them what Liz describes as a “metaphorical backpack” of tools to draw on when things get hard at home.
The core of it is deceptively simple: connecting kids to relatable role models — not celebrities, but everyday people who grew up in similarly difficult circumstances and built something better — and helping them build and track a “hope plan” for their own future. SafeNest treats hope as something measurable, scoring it the same way they’d track any other outcome, because the data shows something meaningful: raising a person’s hope score correlates with abusers who stop abusing, survivors who become safer regardless of whether they stay in a relationship, and kids who don’t repeat the cycle.
The math doesn’t work — and Liz knows it
Some of the hardest numbers in our conversation had to do with resources. SafeNest uses an 11-point lethality assessment tool called DALE to determine who’s at the highest risk of being killed by their abuser. In 2024 alone, SafeNest had to turn away 4,300 people who needed shelter and simply didn’t have the bed space to house them.
Liz was candid about why: nationally, spending on the criminal legal system’s response to domestic violence outpaces spending on direct survivor services by roughly ten to one — and abuser intervention programs are barely funded at all, largely paid for out of pocket by the abusers themselves. Meanwhile, thirty years after the Violence Against Women Act’s original passage, we still don’t have strong evidence that any of this — mandatory arrest, no-drop prosecution, or batterer intervention as currently structured — meaningfully reduces domestic violence homicides.
That’s not a call to defund any of it. It’s a case for asking harder questions about what’s actually working, and being honest when the answer is “we don’t fully know.”
What listeners can actually do
Liz was clear that this isn’t just a policy conversation — it’s one where individual people have real leverage:
- If a friend confides in you, resist the urge to say “you have to leave him.” Survivors are already being told what to do; what helps is “I love you, I’m here for you, and if you ever need me, just say the word.”
- If you’re a man in a position of respect, don’t let negative talk about a partner slide in your circles. Liz’s framing: what we don’t correct, we condone.
- Support your local domestic violence agency — not just with donations, but with time, volunteering, or simply a note letting them know their work is seen.
- Pay attention to your local judiciary and DA races. These are the offices that decide, case by case, how seriously domestic violence gets taken in your community — and most people never think to ask.
If you or someone you know needs help
National Domestic Violence Hotline — 1-800-799-SAFE (7233) | Text START to 88788 | Live chat at thehotline.org — available 24/7 in more than 200 languages
StrongHearts Native Helpline (for American Indian and Alaska Native survivors) — 1-844-762-8483
SafeNest (Nevada) — 702-646-4981 | safenest.org
You don’t have to be in crisis to reach out to a local agency, and you don’t have to be in Nevada to call SafeNest’s line for guidance.
Listen to the full conversation with Liz Ortenburger on this episode of Vanished Voices, available on Apple Podcast, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube and all major platforms. For episode notes, related resources, and more, visit vanishedvoicespodcast.com.
Vanished Voices is a true crime podcast dedicated to the cases that don’t get the attention they deserve — unsolved cases of people of color, LGBTQ+ victims, MMIW cases, and stories that still need tips to be solved. New episodes drop every Thursday. Subscribe and follow us anywhere you listen to podcasts.
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References
Alliance for HOPE International. (n.d.). Camp HOPE America: About us. Retrieved August 2026, from Camp HOPE America: About Us
Camp HOPE America. (2025). 2024 national impact evaluation. Alliance for HOPE International. Camp HOPE America 2024 National Impact Evaluation
Goodmark, L. (2011). A troubled marriage: Domestic violence and the legal system. New York University Press.
National Domestic Violence Hotline. (n.d.). Home. Retrieved August 2026, from Domestic Violence Hotline
National Network to End Domestic Violence. (n.d.). Home. Retrieved August 2026, from NNEDV
Ortenburger, L. (2026). Personal interview with Vanished Voices podcast. Vanished Voices.
Pence, E., & Paymar, M. (1993). Education groups for men who batter: The Duluth model. Springer Publishing Company.
SafeNest. (n.d.). Mission & history. Retrieved August 2026, from Learn More About SafeNest and Our Mission
StrongHearts Native Helpline. (n.d.). Home. Retrieved August 2026, from StrongHearts Native Helpline
Thurman v. City of Torrington, 595 F. Supp. 1521 (D. Conn. 1984).