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 absence, through direct engagement with children. We present an analysis from interviews with 21 children in the United 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) ‘Constraint’, which explores how children experience the constraint associated with coercive control in situations of domestic 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 between 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 Management of Disclosure in Children’s Accounts of Domestic Violence: Practices of Telling and Not Telling

Children and young people who experience domestic violence are often represented as passive witnesses, too vulnerable to tell the stories of their own lives. This article reports on findings from a 2 year European research project (Understanding Agency and Resistance Strategies, UNARS) with children and young people in Greece, Italy, Spain and the UK, who had experienced domestic violence. It explores children and young people’s understandings of their own capacity to reflect on and disclose their experiences Extracts from individual interviews with 107 children and young people (age 8–18) were analysed. Three themes are presented, that illustrate children and young people’s strategies for managing disclosure: (1) “Being silenced or choosing silence?”, explores children and young people’s practices of self-silencing; (2) “Managing disclosures: Finding ways to tell” outlines how children and young people value self-expression, and the strategies they use to disclose safely; and in (3) “Speaking with many voices” considers how children and young people’s accounts of their experiences are constituted relationally, and are often polyvocal. The article concludes that children and young people can be articulate, strategic and reflexive communicators, and that good support for families struggling with domestic violence must enable space for children and young people’s voice to be heard. This is possible only in an integrated framework able to encompass multiple layers and perspectives, rather than privileging the adult point of view. Practitioners who work with families affected by domestic violence need to recognize that children and young people are able to reflect on and speak about their experiences. This requires that attention is paid to the complexity of children and young people’s communication practices, and the relational context of those communications