Children’s experiences of domestic violence: A teaching and training challenge

In this chapter we explore the complexities of training and teaching students and practitioners about children’s experiences of domestic violence. The research conducted on children’s experiences has tended to focus on these negative outcomes, representing these children as damaged and vulnerable (Callaghan and Alexander, 2015; Øverlien, 2013). Such research outlines that children have elevated lifelong risk of mental health difficulties (Bogat et al., 2006; Lamers-Winkelman et al., 2012; Stover, 2005); interpersonal difficulties (Baldry, 2003; Holmes, 2013; Renner and Slack, 2006); educational difficulties and educational drop out (Byrne and Taylor, 2007), and physical health problems (Bair-Merritt et al., 2006). Despite this research representation of children as vulnerable and damaged, services for children who experience domestic violence are often underdeveloped and underfunded (Statham, 2004; Willis et al., 2010), typically additional to adult domestic abuse services, for instance as part of the services offered in shelters

Is the mainstream construction of mood disorders resistant to systemic thinking?

IntroductionIn this study we explore how the diagnostic category of mood disorders is constructed in two handbooks of Psychopathology as an example of the mainstream construction of psychopathology. Despite the increasing criticism and lack of evidence, the debunked chemical imbalance theory of the etiology of depression still dominates the professional and pop/folk understanding and interventions.MethodsWe analysed the breadth of the inference field and the type of etiopathogenetic contents of the explanations of mood disorders using the “1to3” Coding System.ResultsOur findings show that the dominant explanations draw almost exclusively onto monadic explanations, followed by limited dyadic ones. Intrapersonal etiopathogenetic contents prevailed, and biomedical explanations were dominant in both textbooks.DiscussionWe critically discuss the underpinnings of these results and address the clinical implications of these biased representations, as well as potential alternative approaches to psychopathology

Children’s experiences of domestic violence and abuse: siblings’ accounts of relational coping

This article explores how young people see their relationships, particularly their sibling relationships, in families affected by domestic violence, and how relationality emerges in their accounts as a resource to build an agentic sense of self. The ‘voice’ of children is largely absent from domestic violence literature, which typically portrays them as passive, damaged and relationally incompetent. Children’s own understandings of their relational worlds are often overlooked, and consequently existing models of children’s social interactions give inadequate accounts of their meaning-making-in-context. Drawn from a larger study of children’s experiences of domestic violence and abuse, this paper uses two case studies of sibling relationships to explore young people’s use of relational resources, for coping with violence in the home. The paper explores how relationality and coping intertwine in young people’s accounts, and disrupts the taken for granted assumption that children’s ‘premature caring’ or ‘parentification’ is (only) pathological in children’s responses to domestic violence. This has implications for understanding young people’s experiences in the present, and supporting their capacity for relationship building in the future

Paving the way for systemic phenomenological psychiatry - the forgotten heritage of Wolfgang Blankenburg

Phenomenological psychopathology focuses on the first-person experience of mental disorders. Although it is in principle descriptive, it also entails an explanatory dimension: single psychological symptoms are conceived as genetically arising from a holistic structure of personal experience, i.e., the patient's being-in-the-world – and of its dynamic unfolding over time. Yet both classical and current phenomenological approaches tend to identify the essential disorder or “trouble générateur” (Minkowski) of mental illness within the individual, thereby neglecting the relevance of the social context not only for the emergence of symptoms but also for their treatment. The work of Wolfgang Blankenburg on schizophrenia represents a noteworthy approach to overcome this individualistic tendency. He introduced the concept of “loss of common sense” as the structural core of schizophrenic experience and being-in-the-world and he considered the social and most importantly familial context for the emergence of schizophrenic experience. By accounting not only for personal experience but also for interactional structures of families and social milieus in which experience is embedded, Blankenburg thereby offered ways to combine phenomenological and systemic explanations of mental disorders. Beside his most renowned work on “the loss of common sense,” in this paper we also present his family studies of young persons with schizophrenia, which have so far received little if no attention. We thus discuss the different ways in which Blankenburg expanded the phenomenological approach into a more systemic and social direction. We then link Blankenburg's work with current systemic explanatory models of schizophrenia and explore the clinical and scientific implications of this link. Finally, we call for further research on the synergy effects between the two

Part of the Family:Children’s Experiences with Their Companion Animals in the Context of Domestic Violence and Abuse

Purpose: Children who experience Domestic Violence and Abuse (DVA) draw on a range of strategies to manage the complex dynamics of family life. This article explored children’s experiences of their relationships with pets and other animals, considering how children understood these relationships.Methods: This qualitative study is based on semi-structured interviews and visual methods-based research with 22 children (aged 9–17), drawn from a larger study on how children cope with DVA. The data were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis.Findings: Five themes are discussed: Part of the family explores how children positioned animals as relational beings who occupied an important place in their lives; caring for animals considers the reciprocal caring relationship children described; listening and support details how children interacted with animals to allow themselves to feel more heard and supported; in the theme control and abuse, we consider children’s experiences of perpetrators’ use of companion animals as part of a pattern of abuse and control; and in disruption, uncertainty and loss, we discuss how children feel and relate to their animals when leaving situations of domestic abuse.Conclusions: The implications of our analysis are considered in relation to providing support for children impacted by domestic abuse, and the importance of ensuring companion animals are provided for in housing policy and planning for domestic abuse survivors

A critical analysis of Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services policy in England

Policy in Child and Adolescent Mental Health (CAMH) in England has undergone radical changes in the last 15 years, with far reaching implications for funding models, access to services and service delivery. Using corpus analysis and critical discourse analysis, we explore how childhood, mental health, and CAMHS are constituted in 15 policy documents, 9 pre-2010, and 6 post 2010. We trace how these constructions have changed over time, and consider the practice implications of these changes. We identify how children’s distress is individualised, through medicalising discourses and shifting understandings of the relationship between socioeconomic context and mental health. This is evidenced in a shift from seeing children’s mental health challenges as produced by social and economic inequities, to a view that children’s mental health must be addressed early to prevent future socio-economic burden. We consider the implications CAMHS policies for the relationship between children, families, mental health services and the state. The paper concludes by exploring how concepts of ‘parity of esteem’ and ‘stigma reduction’ may inadvertently exacerbate the individualisation of children’s mental health

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

Beyond vulnerability: working with children who have experienced domestic violence

This chapter explores children’s experiences of domestic violence. Academic research on domestic violence tends to focus on children as damaged by domestic violence, with an extensive consideration of the negative impact on children’s mental health, social, interpersonal and educational outcomes. This literature establishes children living with domestic violence as a vulnerable group, in need of significant intervention and support. This construct of vulnerability extends into professional talk about children’s lives, with mental health, social work and domestic violence support professionals describing children as vulnerable, damaged, and needy - often inevitably so. In contrast, we argue that framing children as "vulnerable" functions to undermine an understanding of their located capacity for agency, and can render children voiceless in specific contexts. Gatekeeping practices intended to protect vulnerable children have an unintended consequence of preventing them from articulating their own experience. We present examples that challenge the positioning of children who experience domestic violence as vulnerable and damaged, and that highlight young people’s capacity to articulate their experiences of violence, its impact, their coping practices, and their capacity for agency. In doing so, we challenge the notion of a single developmental trajectory for the construction of healthy or adaptive identities (Burman, 2016; James & Prout, 2015). This notion constructs a sense of normal childhood reliant on a well functioning, nuclear family and a stable family home in which to grow and develop. Such a construction implicitly others children who experience domestic violence, and this sense of them as having different and problematic childhoods entrenches the idea that they are passive witnesses, damaged by their experiences. In contrast, we argue that children who experience domestic violence find ways of managing their familial experiences using a range of paradoxical resiliencies. Such resilience’s contribute to the maintenance of a sense of agency for children, constituted within the constraints and enabling elements of family life, of home and of other material spaces. Children’s experiences of violence do not occur in a social vacuum, and nor do the resources they develop to cope with that violence: both are located within both the lived realities and social constructions of childhood, of family life, and of the spaces and places they inhabit

Masculinities and emotional expression in UK Servicemen: "Big boys don't cry"? (Forthcoming)

Dominant discourses of military servicemen position them as more prone to psychological damage than the general population, but as reluctant to seek psychological assistance, because of the military culture of ‘toughness’, a military masculinity, that values stoicism, emotional control and invulnerability and implicitly excludes ‘feminine’ characteristics like emotionality. This is seen as a barrier to military personnel seeking help, by implicitly discouraging emotional disclosure and expression. This article presents an analysis of semi-structured interviews with six male military and ex-military personnel, focused on their experience and understandings of emotion, emotional expression and ‘mental health’ in the military. The dominant construction of military masculinity certainly renders some forms of emotion inexpressible within certain contexts. However, we argue that the construct is more complex than a simple exclusion of the ‘feminine’ and the ‘emotional’. We explore how the highly masculine notions of military solidarity and 'brotherhood' create a ‘safe’ masculine space within which men could share their emotional experiences, but also highlight how this space for emotional expression is relatively constrained. We argue that these notions of solidarity and brotherhood open a space for emotional connection and expression that must be respected and worked with creatively, in therapeutic and other interventions