Violently Reactive Women and Their Relationship With an Abusive Mother (original) (raw)

"Beyond ‘witnessing’: Children’s Experiences of Coercive Control in Domestic Violence and Abuse"

Children’s experiences and voices are underrepresented in academic literature and professional practice around domestic violence and abuse. The project ‘Understanding Agency and Resistance Strategies’ addresses this ab-sence, through direct engagement with children. We present an analysis from interviews with 21 children in the Unit-ed Kingdom (12 girls and 9 boys, aged 8-18 years), about their experiences of domestic violence and abuse, and their responses to this violence. These interviews were analysed using interpretive interactionism. Three themes from this analysis are presented: a) ‘Children’s experiences of abusive control’, which explores children’s awareness of controlling behaviour by the adult perpetrator, their experience of that control, and its impact on them; b) ‘Cons-traint’, which explores how children experience the constraint associated with coercive control in situations of do-mestic violence, and c) ‘Children as agents’ which explores children’s strategies for managing controlling behaviour in their home and in family relationships. The paper argues that, in situations where violence and abuse occurs be-tween adult intimate partners, children are significantly impacted, and can be reasonably described as victims of abusive control. Recognising children as direct victims of domestic violence and abuse would produce significant changes in the way professionals respond to them, by 1) recognising children’s experience of the impact of domestic violence and abuse; 2) recognising children’s agency, undermining the perception of them as passive ‘witnesses’ or ‘collateral damage’ in adult abusive encounters; and 3) strengthening professional responses to them as direct victims, not as passive witnesses to violence. The full text of this article appears here: http://jiv.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/12/10/0886260515618946.abstract If you cannot access this, and would like a copy of the paper, please send me a message, or email me jane.callaghan@northampton.ac.uk and I'd be happy to send it to you.