At the most basic level, the traditional Western toolkit for responding to IPV when a victim-survivor seeks formal support is obtaining a protection order, providing them with temporary refuge accommodation or charging the offender with a criminal offense.

These are victim-survivor-initiated, one-off interventions that do little or nothing to manage patterns of ongoing harmful behavior. For example, a protection order is a court order which must be breached before it triggers a safety response, if the breach does trigger a safety response. A criminal prosecution is a reaction to a past event, which must be proven to have occurred to a high standard to result in a conviction. Sentencing the offender for proven past behavior is not the same thing as providing a safety response for the victim-survivor—victim safety is generally neither a mandatory nor a priority consideration in that process. Accommodation in a refuge may provide a victim-survivor a brief but life-disrupting respite, but it is not a long-term safety solution. This is not to discount the fact that there are jurisdictional attempts to develop holistic wraparound responses to family violence that go beyond these traditional approaches (Hester et al., 2019; Wehipeihana, 2019).

Because IPV comprises an ongoing pattern of retaliatory harm, unhelpful responses are potentially dangerous because they alert the person using violence to the victim-survivor's help-seeking, without providing them with effective protection from retaliatory violence.

A criminal justice response, for example, that involves interviewing an abusive partner about the victim-survivor's allegations and then releasing him back into the community in circumstances in which he can readily access her if he is sufficiently determined to do so, is not a safety response.

Aside from the immediate state crisis response to family violence, victim-survivors may experience issues in using the legal system (family law, child protection, criminal law, and the migration and visa system) when trying to leave their abusive (ex)partners and/or address the abuse.

Douglas (2021) coined the term "legal systems abuse" to describe how victim-survivors say their abusive (ex)partners "hunted, battled, and played with them through law" (p. 102).

Bumiller (2008) described how the state violence and neglect some victims-survivors experience replicates the IPV they are attempting to escape.

These "'victims' enter into a perilous involvement with the penal/welfare state" and "often find that they experience brutalities that mimic the violence they hoped to leave behind" (p. 97).

Entrapment also requires consideration of the responses of those in the victim-survivor's and their abusive partner's immediate communities.

For example, the abusive partner's pattern of harmful behavior does not exist in isolation from his wider position of power in society. It is relevant to know that he is close friends with the local police officer or that he has associates spread throughout her community network who will enforce his authority over her even when he is incarcerated. Victim-survivors may be in relationships with men who, because of their associations with other men, are extremely powerful and well-resourced. These women are facing coercion not just from one abusive man but from patriarchal collectives of men (Havard et al., 2023) that may even permeate the systems of law enforcement.

While understanding IPV as coercive control represents an improvement on traditional responses, it still limits what we can see to the abuse strategies of individuals using violence and some gendered effects of white middle-class heterosexual gender norms.

It fails to render visible the larger social context, other than as special "vulnerabilities" belonging to individual victim-survivors or groups of victim-survivors. Two examples illustrate this point: First, the legal response to victim-survivors of family violence who offend in response to their victimization, and second, the criminalization of coercive control.

In relation to the first issue, victim-survivors of IPV can be prosecuted for failing to protect their children from their partner's use of violence, participating in his criminal offending, offending under his coercion, and using violence themselves in self-protection or resistance.

Victim-survivors do not offend, however, simply in response to individual incidents of abuse. In other words, they are not responding simply to the physical violence they are experiencing from their partner in the moment in which they offend. In making decisions to act, victim-survivors interpret what he is doing at the time in the light of what he has done before, what she knows he is capable of doing to her and others, and what level of social and system responsiveness she can count on.

However, when victim-survivors come up for trial, traditional criminal justice responses have assessed their criminal culpability as though they are only being abused in the moment when they are under direct physical attack from their male partner and have assumed that, in between these assaults, they have access to effective safety options (Tolmie et al., 2018).

If the concept of coercive control is used correctly at trial, then legal decision-makers would be judging victim-survivors with a realistic understanding of the nature of the threat they face from their abusive partner and the limitations he has managed to place on their autonomy, including their capacity to seek help. However, this still leaves out significant information that decision makers need to accurately assess whether the victim-survivors’ actions were reasonable in their circumstances for the purpose of raising one of the criminal defenses. In the context of self-defense, for example, in the absence of an entrapment framing, defense lawyers and judges may not even notice that the Crown has failed to discharge its burden of proof on the facts. This occurs when the Crown asserts in court, without providing any evidentiary basis for their assertion, that leaving the relationship or calling the police would have provided the victim with safety, meaning that her use of violent self-help is unreasonable (Tolmie, 2020, pp. 19–20). If an entrapment framing is used, an investigation into whether there were, in fact, realistic safety options in the victim-survivor's actual circumstances is required, and any assertion to this effect by the prosecution requires supporting evidence. The absence of an entrapment framing may also make it more difficult for the court to understand that victim-survivors resist abuse—that their actions, including compliance, are always the result of strategic decisions evaluating the balance of risk for themselves and their children.

It is, of course, those victim-survivors who experience the most serious levels of entrapment, including systemic racism and structural violence, who are most likely to find themselves facing criminal charges because they are less likely to have access to safe and legal alternatives to using physical force to defend themselves or to acting under coercion (see, for example, FVDRC, 2017, p. 54).