Domestic Violence, Children's Agency and Mother–Child Relationships: Towards a More Advanced Model

Abstract

Although domestic violence research increasingly recognises children's agency, this awareness has not extended to our understanding of children's relationships with their abused mothers. Findings suggesting that some children actively support their mother, and encourage her to leave the perpetrator, have been consistently under-discussed. This article argues that the model of parent–child relationships used by most domestic violence research sees children as passive and contributes to mother-blaming discourses. Analysing key quantitative and qualitative research, I suggest that a more sophisticated model of parent–child relationships is needed to understand how children's agency affects them, their mothers and the domestic violence situation

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

“…The most frequent relationships considered in DV literature on children are either future romantic relationships (Black et al, 2010;Ehrensaft et al, 2003;Siegel, 2013;Sims, Dodd, & Tejeda, 2008), or relationships between children and their mothers (Dollberg, Feldman, Tyano, & Keren, 2013;Flach et al, 2011b;Katz, 2015;McManus, Belton, Barnard, Cotmore, & Taylor, 2013;Swanston, Bowyer, & Vetere, 2014). Children's lived experiences of relationships are largely overlooked, as they are seen as passive recipients of other people's relational actions, rather than as actively involved in relationships themselves.…”

“…Sibling relationships are often 5 only explored in DV literature with regards to sibling violence (Khan & Rogers, 2015;Pinel-Jacquemin, Cheron, Favart, Dayan, & Scelles, 2012;Sims et al, 2008), which is often understood as emotional and behavioural 'spillover' from the parental to the sibling subsystem (Pike et al, 2005) or the older sibling to the younger one (Piotrowski et al, 2014b). Children who experience domestic violence are known to take on strong caring relationships in the family, and these caring relationships with other family members are typically problematised as 'parentification' in domestic violence literature (Goldblatt, 2003;Holt, Buckley, & Whelan, 2008;Katz, 2015;Mullender et al, 2003). Children's caring is typically described as a premature The complexity of children's relational worlds, and their meaning making within those relational worlds, is neglected in the literature on children's experiences of domestic violence, and young people's understanding of their relationships is barely considered.…”

“…Martinez-Torteya et al 2009;Gewirtz & Edleson 2007;Howell 2011) . Much of this literature is focused primarily on mother-child relationships (Katz, 2015), arguing that mothers' own coping mediates children's capacity to be resilient Similarly, despite the well-established relevance of sibling relationships for both individual and family experience and development (Buist, Deković, & Prinzie, 2013;Feinberg, Solmeyer, & McHale, 2012;Pike, Coldwell, & Dunn, 2005), few studies explore sibling relationships in the context of DV (Piotrowski, Tailor, & Cormier, 2014a;Piotrowski, 2011), particularly using a qualitative approach (Waddell, Pepler, & Moore, 2001). This is particularly surprising if we consider that most families experiencing DV have more than one child and that sibling relations can play a crucial role as either risk factors and protective factors in each other's unique developmental trajectories, wellbeing and adjustment (Gass, Jenkins, & Dunn, 2007;Pike et al, 2005).…”

Negotiating agency in cases of intimate partner violence in Vietnam

“…While witnessing IPV may have differing effects on children according to their developmental stage, children do not remain passive in the face of violence, regardless of age (McGee, 2000, p. 110;Mullender et al, 2002, p. 239). Moreover, children's actions may influence the responses of those around them, especially their mothers (Katz, 2015). This is not to downplay the potentially damaging impact of IPV on children but rather to build a more comprehensive picture of children's experiences and responses to generate more effective policy responses.…”

“…1 Indeed, children have been largely overlooked as important mediators of IPV as much of the existing research portrays children as passive witnesses or victims of IPV, rather than social actors who are capable of developing their own responses and coping strategies (Katz, 2015;Overlien & Hyden, 2009). This paper draws on qualitative longitudinal data collected with two cohorts of children (aged 9-10 and 16-17 in 2011) and their mothers in Vietnam, to make two distinct contributions to understandings of women's agency in the context of IPV.…”