Based on ethnographic fieldwork and thematic analysis, this article explores how violence is lived after violent events have taken place, and how it shapes women’s everyday lives post-separation. First, the analysis shows how violence is negotiated in the context of a women’s refuge, shaping women’s perceptions of themselves and their experiences. Second, it explores how the potential of violence taking place can influence women’s everyday lives, and third, how past acts of violence can become part of the present atmosphere of everyday life. This raises questions about the meaning of time in analyses of violence.

This paper investigates how children experience and practice parental relationships after moving to a women’s refuge. Most research has explored the moving and separation process from women’s perspectives, but this paper focus on children’s perspectives. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with children at a refuge, the analysis shows how children’s parental relationships – despite the violence – remain important under difficult family circumstances, and how children practice intimate social bonds while being embedded within complex family relationships. This brings attention to the wider contexts of children’s relationships and how these affect children’s experiences and practices of intimate social bonds.

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This article explores the family relationships of mothers and children living at a women’s refuge because of intimate partner violence. Theoretically, the article contributes to the sociological literature analysing family relationships in terms of ‘doing’ and ‘displaying’ rather than ‘being’ a family. Empirically, it is based on ethnographic fieldwork and semi-structured interviews with children living at a refuge in Denmark. The article shows that family display at the refuge is conducted by both mothers and children and sometimes in conflicting ways, not least when it comes to the question of how to define the position of the father (who has committed the violence) in the family’s future life. This highlights how display – as an evaluative practice – can be done in different ways in order to protect or reject family relationships, both internally and when addressing external audiences. Furthermore, the article analyses family relationships in a semi-public setting (the refuge) where powerful audiences are active interpreters of the family display enacted, and participants in decisions concerning the families’ futures.

Following the introduction of the influential ‘doing’ family perspective, an active understanding of parents has taken centre stage in sociological thinking on how families are constructed. However, this has not extended to children, and their roles as co-constructors of families have not received the same amount of attention. This article examines the practices children use to construct themselves as child of someone in relation to a parent. By locating children’s practices within the ‘doing’ family perspective, the article identifies three levels of childhood in families – being child, doing child and reflecting child. The article shows how the three levels must be understood in relation to discourses on what it means to be a ‘good’ child of someone, as these moral questions influence what children come to do. The article draws on interviews with 39 children (aged 5–17 years) from two studies that explored children’s family relationships in challenging family circumstances.