Melissa Petrangelo Scaia, M.P.A.

Melissa began as a youth advocate working with children who lived with domestic violence.  She has been an advocate for children and adult victims of domestic violence since 1999.  During her tenure running a local domestic violence program, it became a five-program agency with national recognition.  She is the former director of the internationally recognized "Duluth Model".  
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Melissa trains professionals globally, nationally, and statewide in Minnesota.  She has served as an expert witness in both criminal and civil cases of domestic violence / coercive control.

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Biography

Melissa (Petrangelo) Scaia has worked to address gender-based violence for nearly 25 years locally in Minnesota, nationally, and globally.  She works internationally as part of the Global Alliance for Women’s Safety and Equality (GAWSE).  As part of GAWSE, she currently works for UN Women to provide training and technical assistance globally and for Domestic Abuse Project locally in Minnesota as the co-coordinator of the Minneapolis Coordinated Community Response (CCR) to domestic violence and a facilitator of a men's intervention program group.  She provides training and technical assistance on working with offenders of domestic violence and criminalized survivors through Domestic Violence Turning Points.  In her current work, she brings a wealth of experience as the former Director of International Training at Global Rights for Women, co-founder of Pathways to Family Peace, and former executive director of Domestic Abuse Intervention Programs (DAIP), also known as “the Duluth Model.”  Before working in Duluth, she was the executive director of Advocates for Family Peace (AFFP) for 17 years, a local domestic violence advocacy program where she advocated for victims of domestic violence.  She has led and organized three Coordinated Community Responses (CCRs) to address domestic violence in Minnesota.  She has been a consulting trainer for many national training organizations on domestic violence, coercive control and child abuse, including the Center for Court Innovation (CCI), the Battered Women’s Justice Project (BWJP), and the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges (NCJFCJ). As a qualified expert in the state of Minnesota, she testifies as an expert witness on domestic violence in court cases in Minnesota and Wisconsin.  She wrote her master's thesis on the effects of domestic violence on children and wrote her doctoral dissertation proposal to address supervised visitation, children, and domestic violence. She has contributed to numerous publications related to domestic violence offender programming, supervised visitation, women’s use of violence, and domestic violence.  She co-wrote a curriculum and DVD for working with men who batter as fathers entitled Addressing Fatherhood with Men Who Batter.  She also co-authored a curriculum and DVD with Ellen Pence, Ph.D., and Laura Connelly for working with women who have used violence in intimate relationships entitled Turning Points:  A Nonviolence Curriculum for Women.  Recently, she authored Safe Consultations with Survivors of Violence Against Women and Girls, a guide with UN Women on how to conduct focus groups and interviews with survivors.  She has been selected for numerous roundtable advisory discussion groups for the Office on Violence Against Women (OVW) through the National Judicial Institute on Domestic Violence.  She serves on the steering committee and as the chair of a committee for the National Partner Abuse Intervention Network, where she was also recently given the COMPASS award for her work, research and innovation related to her work on women’s use of violence in nonviolence programs in the US.  She has also served on a National Advisory Committee Member for Law & Order: SVU actress Mariska Hargitay’s Joyful Heart Foundation for survivor-based healing.  She has conducted assessments and research on topics related to domestic violence:  1) women’s use of violence; 2) using videoconference software to conduct men’s batter intervention programming (BIP); 3) Minneapolis police response to domestic violence; and 4) a needs assessment on North Dakota’s response to domestic violence.  She has been invited to several United Nations Expert Meetings related to domestic violence and has worked with numerous UN Women regional offices and local women’s organizations globally.  Hamline University awarded her the Lifetime Achievement Award for Women in Public Service in 2022.  Outside of work, she is married, a mother of two, a Minnesota State High School League (MSHSL) volleyball referee, and has a passion for photography.