Two important reports in the past week have underlined the widespread, pervasive nature of domestic violence in Ireland and its harrowing impact on children.
The 2021 annual impact report from the suport group Women’s Aid details how the charity recorded over 33,000 disclosures of domestic violence and abuse, including in excess of 5,000 of child abuse. Women reported being assaulted with hammers, guns, and hurls; being stabbed, strangled, head-butted; humiliated, isolated from family, coerced into sexual activities, raped.
The impacts, being physical, emotional, mental and financial, make domestic violence not only one of our great human rights failings, but a public health and welfare crisis. Abuse of children, in the context of domestic violence, was reported 5,383 times to the charity’s helpline – the majority of it emotional abuse but also physical and sexual.
A vast body of research on the impact of domestic violence on children, however, strongly suggests they do not have to be directly abused to be enormously, negatively affected by witnessing, hearing, and being aware of violence against their mother. Dr Stephanie Holt, head of the school of social work at Trinity College Dublin, has said children “feel” the violence in many ways beyond what adults often comprehend. Women’s Aid again voiced its concern that abusers were using access to children, post separation, to continue tormenting mothers.
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On the same day that Women’s Aid published its report, the 2021 report from the Council of Europe’s Grevio (group of experts on action against violence against women and domestic violence) was released. It includes a focus on children’s safety in domestic violence situations, post-separation.
Underlining the importance of Articles 26, 31 and 45 of the Istanbul Convention, which Ireland ratified in 2019, Grevio says “evidence of violence” must be “explicitly taken into account by family courts”. These articles set out that children who witness domestic violence must be recognised as victims, that family courts should not issue contact orders without taking into account violence against the non-abusive parent, and that parental rights may be withdrawn from an abusive parent if in the best interests of the child.
The majority of signatory states, it warns, are failing to properly implement these articles – “a situation which puts the safety of the victims of domestic violence at considerable continued risk”. Publication of both a Family Court Bill, to radically overhaul the family law system, and a Third National Domestic Sexual and Gender Based Violence Strategy, are among the central projects overseen by Minister for Justice Helen McEntee. Both are eagerly awaited. They must put the safety of women and children at their centre.