Impact of Battering on Children

Training
I went to Alleghany County (North Carolina) earlier this week to co-present the workshop, "The Effects of Domestic Violence on Children." Both days the audience included people from law enforcement, abuser treatment, early childhood intervention, the school system, mental health, and crisis centers. I have to say that I prefer the title of the workshop to use the terms "impact of battering" or "child witnesses to battering" than to use the term "domestic violence."
That's a piece of wisdom I got from attending several workshops by author and trainer Lundy Bancroft.

Training Techniques
One of the techniques that I use in training is to periodically poll the audience on their opinions related to domestic violence. This audience was similar to others in terms of how they answered the opinion polls. Since the workshop focused on children, one of the poll statements was: I understand how an adult victim can stay with an abusive partner when she has children.

Participant Opinions
The audience was asked to respond using a Likert scale. The responses covered the entire scale with most people leaning towards saying they could understand why an adult victim would stay with an abuser when she also had children. I did the poll towards the end of the training. When I asked if the participants would have answered differently at the beginning of class, they said yes.

When an Adult Victim Leaves an Abuser
Most people believe that the lives of children improve and become violence-free when adult victims leave abusers. When a non-offending parent leaves an abusive partner, that does not suddenly make the abuser non-violent. Children continue to witness violence and are sometimes the victims of direct violence when their non-abusive parent leaves. What we have to keep in mind is how often abusers maintain contact with children through visitation, custody exchanges, and full or partial custody. These are all opportunities for an abuser to continue to abuse the children and the non-offending parent. As advocates and allies we have to continue to safety plan with adult and child survivors after they leave to help them stay safe and begin healing from the abuse.

Accountability for Abusers
We also have to continue to find ways to hold abusers accountable for their violence. Leaving an abuser is not accountability and does not necessarily stop the violence for the family. Most abusers are going to get involved in a new relationship and take the same behaviors and patterns with them to the new relationship - patterns of violence, abuse, entitlement, and possessiveness - just to name a very few. Keep in mind that this abuser may also get involved with a new partner who has children from a prior relationship or may start a new family.

Some Solutions
1. Consider domestic violence when making custody decisions, even if children were never direct victims of child abuse
2. Require abusers to attend abuser treatment and parenting classes
3. If visitation is warranted, only allow supervised visitation when domestic violence is substantiated
4. Only advance to un-supervised visitation when there is evidence of changed behavior