A study to be released later this month reveals the long-lasting impact of domestic violence on the victims' children. Susan Calnan reports
Domestic violence can have traumatic and far-reaching consequences for the victim. Very often, however, the impact of domestic violence on the victim's children is overlooked or underestimated.
A new study by researchers at Trinity College Dublin, due to be published later this month, aims to cast new light on this subject by exploring the effects of domestic violence on children of women who have been abused by their spouse or partner.
Commissioned by Mayo Women's Support Services - a refuge and support service for women living in Co Mayo who are victims of domestic violence - the study is the first of its kind in Ireland and includes direct accounts from children who have witnessed violence in the home.
"The vast majority of women who use our service usually have one or more children," explains Helen Mortimer of Mayo Women's Support Services, who is involved in co-ordinating the study. "Anyone who works in the area of domestic violence will agree that services for children of these mothers are totally lacking and that these children have repeatedly been ignored in terms of policy and research in this area."
Conducted between March and September this year by a team of researchers from the Children's Research Centre in Trinity, and now in the final stages, the study is based on interviews with 13 focus groups, including 22 children between the ages of eight and 21 years.
Results of the study, which also contains a comprehensive literature review of services in other countries, are also based on interviews with mothers, health board social workers and managers, members of the gardaí, public health nurses, youth workers and workers from the refuge centre itself.
It is hoped that this study, called Developing an Integrated Service for Children who have Experienced Domestic Violence, will provide the basis for a proposal to establish a new children's initiative to be piloted by Mayo Women's Support Services.
"One of the overall findings of this study is that children who have witnessed domestic violence in the home are all negatively affected in some way by the experience and that the impact is much deeper than people actually realise," says Dr Helen Buckley, senior lecturer at the School of Social Work and Social Policy in Trinity and a senior research fellow at the Children's Research Centre who was one of the three researchers who conducted the study.
"That's not to say that the mothers of these children are indifferent to the suffering that domestic violence causes their children, or that they don't try to protect them, it's just that these women usually have so much to deal with that they aren't able to fully meet the needs of their children during such a traumatic time."
Preliminary findings of the study indicate that the effects of domestic violence on children are wide ranging and that services need to be tailored to each individual child's needs. Although all of the children interviewed expressed a great need to be able to talk to someone about what was going on at home, most of them said they kept the information from their friends or teachers.
While some children perceived school-time as an escape from their domestic life, the majority felt that teachers were either not aware or did not understand the effects of domestic violence. Older children, in particular, had negative experiences at school and most left school early.
The emotional effects of domestic violence on children appear to be long-lasting and in some cases extreme. Children in the study recounted how they frequently feared for their mother's safety, as well as the welfare of their siblings. Some talked of having "lost their childhood" and of "always feeling different to everybody else".
A number of mothers interviewed as part of the study related certain behavioural problems among their children. Teenagers, in particular, tended to "act out" certain behaviours, drinking alcohol, getting into trouble with the law or at school, or being physically aggressive at home. Mothers also recounted how they felt extremely stigmatised by the experience and how this stigma was often extended to their own children, who were sometimes bullied or mocked because of their domestic situation.
Child and adolescent psychiatry services were considered inadequate and many children had to wait over a year to access such services. The lack of a consistent response by gardaí also came across in the study, which showed that gardaí were not always fully aware of or did not have the specific training to understand the impact that domestic violence could have on children.
"Child protection services in Ireland deal with children who are directly abused by a parent, but they haven't tended to uniformly respond to children who have witnessed domestic violence between their parents, largely because the effects of this type of abuse are not always clearly visible," Dr Buckley says.
"Which is why we feel, based on the findings of this study, that the brokering of such a service needs to come from an independent body or team whose specific job it would be to respond to the effects of domestic violence on children."
Although it has yet to be decided if and how such a service will be set up, Mayo Women's Support Services is optimistic that the study will help to create an awareness of the effects of domestic violence on children and of the need for an intergrated, inter-agency service to target the specific needs of such children.
"We always work from the premise that if a child witnesses domestic violence - even if they are not directly a victim of this violence - then they are themselves being abused," says Mortimer. "Seeing their mother being physically or emotionally abused by their father is horrendous for any child and the effects of this experience can be long-lasting and profound for all children."