Children′s Perspectives on Domestic Violence

Audrey Mullender, Gill Hague, Umme F Imam, Liz Kelly, Ellen Malos, Linda Regan

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781446233146
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Interpersonal Relations in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

`The research methodology and the problems encountered when studying a subject such as domestic violence, coupled with the ethical problems of researching with children, are discussed at length in the book. This gives a good insight into the intricacies of conducting such a research study. The research looked not only at children who were known to have direct contact with domestic violence, but also what children in general thought and felt about domestic violence. The presentation of the findings, both in tabular and narrative form, was well presented? -

Accident and Emergency Nursing Journal

`This book offers accessible and interesting reading. It is well written as one would expect from these authors.... There are a lot of pointers for the way forward in terms of both policy and practice. This is likely to become a seminal text? - Research Policy and Planning

?This is a useful and challenging read for all of us who seek to work effectively and ethically in this complex area of practice? - Professional Social Work

`Just looking at the authors of this book tells the reader that they are about to embark on a pioneering piece of academic research... a comprehensive and authoritative piece of work? - Domestic Abuse Quarterly

`A vital tool for all those working with children? - ChildRight

?Written in a lucid style and is easy to read… it is essential reading for all students in social work undergraduate courses and also in post-qualifying courses on child welfare and protection. In addition professionals who are directly working in the area of child protection, schools and criminal justice settings would find this book informative and useful in understanding what children and young people want, and need, in relation to living in domestic violence situations? - Child and Family Social Work

?This book is powerfully written and is essential reading for professional working with and supporting abused women and their children. Its groundbreaking focus on children?s experiences adds much to our understanding of the complexities of domestic violence? - Journal of Family Studies

?A treasure-chest of rich, diverse and powerful extracts from children and young people… in particular the material presented on different coping strategies used by children who have experienced domestic violence is an important contribution to an area about which very little is known? - Adoption and Fostering Journal

How do children who live with domestic violence cope? How do they make sense of their experiences? Do they receive the right sort of help from formal and informal sources?

Drawing on the newest research designed to hear the voices of children and young people, this important book examines children?s experiences and perspectives on living with domestic violence. The authors explore:

- the effect of domestic violence on children

- what children say would help them most in coping with domestic violence

- the advice children would offer other children who find themselves in similar circumstances, their mothers and the helping professions.

This accessible book written for students, their teachers, researchers and all those working with children - across social work, health, child psychology and psychiatry, the law and education - will provide a vital insight into children?s own perspectives on domestic violence.

1	Children in Their Own Issue: A Shift of Approach

INTRODUCTION

No precise figures are available as to how many children in the UK live with domestic violence.¹ We do know, however, that there are many and that they are everywhere because this can be extrapolated from studies of the number of women who experience abuse. Mooney (1994), for example, had self-reports from approaching one in three women, across all social and ethnic groupings, that they had experienced violence worse than being pushed, grabbed or shaken at some point in their adult lives. Since her study was designed to take a representative sample of the general population of women, we may assume that many of those interviewed had children living with them at the time the domestic violence occurred. Certainly, the British Crime Survey in 1996 found that half the women who reported experiencing domestic violence in the previous year were living with children under 16, and that having children in the household was associated with an increased risk of assault (Mirrlees-Black, 1999).

There is now a widespread recognition that children living in households where their mothers are abused by partners or ex-partners experience considerable distress (Jaffe et al., 1990) and frequently display adverse reactions (Wolfe et al., 1986). Yet, though some practitioners and policy makers now go as far as regarding this as a form of indirect abuse, mainstream services are still failing to give the most appropriate help (McGee, 2000; Mullender and Morley, 1994; Peled et al., 1995). This book will suggest that part of the problem is that the children and young people themselves – those who live with domestic violence going on around them – are not being listened to and that their own understandings of their situation are overlooked, as are the ways in which they attempt to deal with it. There is a wider issue, too, about educating the public, at all ages and beginning in schools, about domestic violence and what can be done about it.

Professionals and policy makers in a range of public and voluntary sector agencies do now recognize that they should be responding to children who live with violence but are often confused as to what to do (Abrahams, 1994; McWilliams and McKiernan, 1993). There is a tendency to encompass domestic violence as just another child protection issue (Humphreys, 2000a; Parkinson and Humphreys, 1998), without acknowledging the complex interactions between women’s safety and children’s well-being (Kelly, 1994b). Although there is a clear overlap between direct child abuse and domestic violence (see summaries in Morley and Mullender, 1994, and in Hester et al., 2000), focusing too narrowly on safeguarding children without a raised awareness of the potential for partnership with the non-abusing parent and for tackling the perpetrator’s behaviour can lead to dangerously ineffectual responses both for women and children. Women are left in fear of their lives, opportunities are missed to keep children safe, and dangerous men are avoided (Farmer and Owen, 1995, pp. 223–6; Hester and Pearson, 1998; Humphreys, 2000a). Women’s services, especially Women’s Aid, with its 30-year history of working with children accompanying their mothers into refuges, have developed a more integrated approach (Ball, 1990; Debbonaire, 1994; Hague et al., 1996). However, it is not always accorded the respect it deserves by those responsible for policy and practice in the statutory sector so that, once again, the safety of women and children is not maximized.

When the academic and professional debate first started in this field, children were conceptualized in conference titles and training events as ‘passive victims’ or ‘silent witnesses’. The present authors’ earlier work (Hague et al., 1996; Kelly, 1994a; Mullender et al., 1998) showed, on the contrary, that children who live with domestic violence have their own coping strategies and their own perspectives on what happens to them. Each child reacts as an individual. There is no one pattern of responses and no syndrome to sum up the impact of their experiences (Morley and Mullender, 1994). This realization led to a conviction that research in this field must involve children directly, as well as those who care for and work with them. It also means that, as users of services, children require interventions tailored to their levels of understanding, their age and stage of development, their particular viewpoint, and their specific circumstances. There are dangers in adults making assumptions about children’s needs, rather than basing policy and practice on evidence from child-centred research.

The earlier work by the present authors further suggested that, over time, most children are able to talk about their experiences and that their views could inform a more coherent interagency response. Very little research to date has been designed with the intention of hearing the voices of children and young people about domestic violence, either in general terms or concerning how those who have lived with it cope with and make sense of their experiences. The present team (Hague et al., 1996; Kelly, 1994a; Mullender et al., 1998) had already revealed the potential for this within previous carefully designed and sensitive studies. There is an urgent need to know more about children’s experiences as they perceive them, the impact these have, how children make sense of them, the responses they receive from various agencies, and whether there is any fit between what children feel they need and what they get. Readiness to incorporate messages from research on this topic is indicated by the rash of publishing on domestic violence, for example in relation to social work (Mullender, 1996; Pryke and Thomas, 1998; Thomas and Lebacq, 2000) and health (Bewley et al., 1997; Mezey, 1997; SNAP, 1997; BMA, 1998), and by levels of activity in reviewing policy and practice (e.g. Mullender and Humphreys, 1998; Humphreys and Mullender, 2000).

The primary objectives of the major research study reported in this book were, in the first phase, to learn about children’s general understandings and perceptions of domestic violence and, in the second phase, more specifically, to learn from children who have lived with domestic violence what they consider would be the most helpful forms of response. This latter point includes building on children’s agency in the situation and not treating them as passive victims. In order to meet these aims, a multi-methodological, multi-stage approach was employed which will be outlined in detail in the next chapter. Particular care was taken to include ethnically diverse voices and to consider the gender implications of girls’ and boys’ responses about men’s and women’s behaviour.

The remainder of this chapter will explore why it seemed important – and potentially possible – to conduct such research, and what knowledge we were building on, including from our own earlier work.

CHILDHOOD STUDIES

Academic interest in childhood and in ‘the child’ has gone under the generic title of the ‘sociology of childhood’ (perhaps misleadingly, since sociology does not have the longest tradition here and is only one of many disciplines involved) or ‘childhood studies’ (James et al., 1998). Broadly, it may be seen as part of a challenge to researchers’ accounts of ‘the other’ (including from standpoint and postmodern approaches), in this case of perceptions of children and of concepts of childhood constructed by adult observers. We now understand that adult representations and interpretations of children’s lives might say more about the observer than the observed and, to avoid this, it has come to be seen as essential to convey children’s own accounts at first hand – to include their voices. France et al. (2000) see this also as a feature of ‘grounded theory’ (Glaser and Strauss, 1967); that is, as theory emerging from the data so that, rather than preconceptualizing children’s lives, we are able to build our understandings on hearing from children and young people themselves about what the issues are for them and how they make sense of what they are experiencing. In fact, the implications go wider than grounded theory, having relevance for every research methodology and method, both within quantitative (Hill, 1997a; Scott, 2000) and qualitative (Hill, 1997a; Mauthner, 1997) traditions, with an increasingly participatory role for children themselves, right through to acting as their own researchers (Alderson, 2000).

Such a paradigm shift has not been easy to make. Adults have been accustomed to regarding children as growing up into the adult world – being educated and socialized so as to be assimilated into (adult) society – which carries the connotation that children qua children are incomplete, that they are becoming rather than being (Qvortrup, 1994). They are somehow seen as not yet competent, not integrated into adult concerns and understandings, purely because of their stage of biological and social development. Developmental psychology, always one of the strongest influences on child care policy and practice, for example, is grounded in this kind of deficit model of childhood (Butler and Williamson, 1994) and all the earliest work on children and domestic violence falls within this tradition, as does most of the related research that continues in North America. Children are thereby marginalized as a source of information about their own lives, and too readily ignored in the design and delivery of policy and practice responses.

But other approaches are possible. Childhood is now understood as socially constructed (Archard, 1993; Ariès, 1979; Jenks, 1982) since children are regarded in different ways by adults according to historical, social and cultural context and are expected to behave accordingly. For example, children are still expected to remain innocent yet, nowadays, to learn to protect themselves from abuse (being taught in school about stranger danger, less often about the potential dangers at home). Childhood is also a context in which part of everyone’s life is lived, in whatever era or cultural group they are born. All the big issues of contemporary existence and of social science – the role of the State, shifting morality, the state of welfare, the (de)construction of the family – can be looked at from and in relation to the perspective of childhood; all these matters impinge on children and children have their own attitudes towards them. Children who live with violence, for instance, form views about why it occurs, whose fault it is, and whether anyone from outside should intervene.

Children search for their own meanings and understandings in what happens to them and they act accordingly. Thus childhood is not simply socially constructed within a culturally relative context or biologically determined through processes of child development; children also have agency within it: ‘childhood is a negotiated process where children are active in constructing their own social worlds, and reflecting upon and understanding its meaning and significance to their own personal lives’ (France et al., 2000, p. 151). This may seem an odd claim to make in introducing a study about a phenomenon – domestic violence – where both the children and their non-abusing parent are held under the power and control of the perpetrator (Pence and Paymar, 1996), sometimes virtually to the point of being imprisoned in their own home. The findings from the study reported here will show, however, the many ways in which children do form their own views and take their own actions in order to survive in such an adverse situation. Chapter 5 will explore in some detail the coping strategies they adopt. This raises new issues for parents and professionals about explaining to children what is happening when their mothers are being abused and involving them in decisions about what will happen in their lives as a result. It connects with some quite deep-seated questions as to whether children are ontologically different from adults and whether or not adults have a ‘“natural” right to exert power over children’ (Qvortrup, 1994, p. 3). We are used to seeing adults as the more important social actors and as acting in the best interests of children, nowhere more so than in child care policy and practice. Some of the conclusions of this book will challenge whether adults always make the right assumptions about children and their needs in situations where there is violence, and will call for a radical rethink.

CHILDREN’S RIGHTS

Rights for children have received both philosophical (Archard, 1993) and more policy-focused attention in the literature (Franklin, 1995). After many years of the children’s rights movement in various countries of the world, children do now have limited individual rights. These are enshrined most notably in the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, ratified in the UK in 1991. In particular, children have the right, under Article 12 of the Convention, to express their views in all matters affecting them. Children also have a right to have their wishes and feelings taken into account by local authorities and courts who are making decisions about them under the Children Act 1989.

When it comes to domestic violence, however, questions have begun to be posed as to whether the current enunciation of children’s rights is sufficiently sophisticated to encompass the complexities of living with abuse (Kelly and Mullender, 2000). In relation to the UN Convention, there is no doubt that children require protection by the state from all forms of abuse, exploitation and neglect (Articles 19 and 34) and to have their survival and development ensured (Article 6) by policy and practice responses that operate in their best interests (Article 3). How this is best achieved can, however, become a vexed question where there is one abusing and one non-abusing parent and the Convention offers no clarification in these circumstances. It encompasses, for example, both parents providing guidance (Article 5), maintaining contact (Article 9), being protected from interference with privacy, family and home (Article 16) and sharing primary responsibility for bringing up children (Article 18), all without acknowledging that there is a difference in every one of these regards between a parent who is posing a threat and one who is seeking to protect. An abusive parent may well not have the child’s interests at heart and may be using parental guidance to instil ideas of male dominance, for example, or seeking post-separation contact so as to regain the opportunity to abuse and intimidate (Hester and Radford, 1996; Women’s Aid Federation of England, 1997; Radford et al., 1999). Exposure to the perpetrator may be damaging or dangerous for the child as well as the woman. In other words, issues of parental contact, care and guidance are not equal or neutral where the situation involves violence and abuse. Similarly, an abusive man kidnapping his child does not in any way equate with an abused woman fleeing with the child to safety, yet Article 11 (the state’s obligation to try to prevent and remedy the kidnapping or retention abroad by a parent or third party) makes no apparent distinction between abduction and protection. The child’s mother could be accused of kidnapping the child and preventing her or him from having contact with the other parent if the situation is not seen in gendered terms or analysed in relation to the power, control and abuse that drive its dynamics. The UN Convention does not recognize that two parents may not have a shared view of good parenting and that, in many contexts, they are not ‘equal’ either in the home or before the law. Its apparent neutrality in encompassing both parents is therefore actually working to reinforce and collude with their inherent inequality. As a consequence, we would argue that children’s rights cannot be fully pursued unless women’s rights are also taken on board in any situation where both are being threatened. Indeed, we would go further and argue that the UN’s consideration of children’s rights should be meshed in with its work on women’s rights, notably through the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) (an optional protocol which has not to date been signed by the UK).

This dilemma concerning an abusing and a non-abusing parent also occurs under the Children Act 1989 if the state, in the shape of social workers, does not distinguish between the culpability of the two. A common manifestation of this is an accusation against an abused woman of ‘failure to protect’ her children, even when she is in fear of her own life and typically without offering her any help to preserve her own safety so that she can better care for her children (see Humphreys, 2000a, for a fuller discussion). Often, this is a thinly veiled attempt to persuade the woman to leave her abuser, with little understanding that she may be in intensified danger if she does so (Wilson and Daly, 1992). A third of women killed by male partners and ex-partners are already living apart (Edwards, 1989) from men who appear to work on the premise ‘If I can’t have you, no one will’. Overall, then, the debate about children’s rights needs to be gendered and to take on board the risks of abuse both of children and their mothers.

RESEARCHING WITH CHILDREN

The direct corollary of the theoretical and legal developments outlined above, in recognizing the social agency and voice of children, is that research should focus centrally upon them, accepting that their ‘social relationships and cultures are worthy of study in their own right’ (James and Prout, 1997, p. 4). Is researching children different from researching adults? This may depend on whether we regard children as uniquely vulnerable and in need of protection (Morrow and Richards, 1996), which would tend to place them in a passive and ultimately silenced position. France et al. (2000) argue that grounding research in the views and experiences of those being researched, in this case children, is the same practice as with adults but that, within this, it is necessary to respect difference. The key issues, they argue – teasing out the practical issues which flow from adopting a different ontological position – may be the age difference between the researched and the researcher, together with the way the latter is perceived, the need to develop methods most likely to help children and young people express themselves, and the particular dynamics of consent and confidentiality. The latter were of even greater concern to the present authors, given the sensitivity of the topic we were exploring (that of abuse), and will be dealt with at some length in the next chapter.

What has to change if we are serious about researching with children rather than conducting research about children? Research with children – and the theory and resultant policy and practice it generates – will only be rounded and useful if it is based upon:

• taking children seriously
• seeking to understand children as people in their own right
• acknowledging children as social actors in the social contexts of their own lives
• acknowledging children as playing a role in society as a whole
• conceptualizing children as having their own life arenas, their own concept and use of time, and their own activities, which are not … merely colonized by adult society for its own purposes and interests.

(Based on Qvortrup et al., 1994)

According to Mayall (1996), placing children at the centre of our research requires three methodological shifts. It means ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• About the authors
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1 Children in Their Own Issue: a Shift of Approach
• Chapter 2 Researching with Children on a Sensitive Topic
• Chapter 3 What Children Know and Understand about Domestic Violence
• Chapter 4 Children’s Experiences of Living with Domestic Violence
• Chapter 5 Children’s Coping Strategies
• Chapter 6 Barriers of Racism, Ethnicity and Culture
• Chapter 7 The Influence of Domestic Violence on Relationships between Children and Their Mothers
• Chapter 8 Life with a Violent Father
• Chapter 9 Listening to the Children: The Way Ahead
• Appendix Children’s Advice to Other Children about Coping with Domestic Violence
• Bibliography
• Index