Home is where the hurt is: Children exposed to domestic violence face psychological woes

CrossCurrents

by Avril Roberts

A group of pre-schoolers enters a playroom scattered with toys. One child heads straight for the police car, picks it up and runs it along the floor, announcing, “The police car is coming to the house to stop the daddy from hitting the mommy.”

This scenario illustrates young children’s acute awareness of violence in the home. But while the effects of child abuse are well documented, how about children exposed to domestic violence? With Statistics Canada estimating that between 1999 and 2004 258,000 Canadian children were exposed to an assault on their mother, it’s an issue that can’t be ignored.

“These children can suffer the same aftermath in terms of emotional and behavioural problems as being abused directly,” says Dr. Peter Jaffe, academic director at the Centre for Research on Violence Against Women and Children at the University of Western Ontario in London. They may exhibit anxiety, depression, agitation, aggression, defiance or learning difficulties. Research also shows that children exposed to domestic violence are themselves at risk for abuse and for becoming a perpetrator or victim later in life.

Jaffe says it’s not just what children actually witness that is harmful: “The term ‘exposure’ takes into account the variety of ways in which children may be exposed to domestic violence,” he says. “What they see, what they hear from their bedroom at night, what they experience in the aftermath of violence when they walk into the kitchen after school.”

B.C. is leading the way in helping these children with its integrated Children Who Witness Abuse (CWWA) programs created and coordinated by the B.C./Yukon Society of Transition Houses (BCYSTH). Launched in 1993 out of the realization that the needs of children who were coming into transition shelters with their abused mothers weren’t being addressed, the programs offer support and information for mothers, and group and individual counselling for children and youth aged 3–18. The programs promote healing by helping children with the emotional, behavioural and social impact of exposure to their mothers’ abuse. Groups are organized by age or specific experience and run from 10 to 12 weeks.

“Through groups, children break their isolation. They hear other children’s experiences and offer support to each other in their own ways,” says Shahnaz Rahman, co-ordinator of Children’s Services for the BCYSTH. While the CWWA program emphasizes group support, individual counselling is provided when a child’s trauma is severe or if a child is not ready to participate in a group. Topics like safety planning are discussed and very young children learn how to call 911. Specific concerns are also addressed in group and individual counselling: In her former position as a CSWWA counsellor, Rahman conducted sessions on grief and loss, separation and boundaries, when she facilitated a group where separation from the dad was a pressing issue.

To counteract the negative role modeling of abusive fathers, the groups often have male and female co-facilitators. That’s also the case at the Child Development Institute in Toronto, which offers Here to Help, an early intervention program for children exposed to woman abuse: “We do that strategically so children have an opportunity to see healthy male-female relationships and sharing of power,” says Angélique Jenney, director of Family Violence Services.

Here to Help and the CWWA programs target children living in a relatively stable environment – away from the abuser. “Children’s safety can be compromised if counselling is done while they are still living with the abuser,” Rahman explains. “It becomes another secret for them to keep. They may also be learning new skills like assertive­ness or expressing feelings, which may not be safe to do with the abuser at home.” Most children in the CWWA programs live with their mothers in transition shelters, but programs also run through other community agencies that service women.

Here to Help, for children aged 4–16, combines psycho-education with age-appropriate play therapy. The work with kids aged 4–6 uses puppets, art and toys. “Children’s play represents their internal model of the world,” says Ramona Alaggia, associate professor in the Faculty of Social Work at the University of Toronto. “Their representation of what they think is going on is expressed that way.”

Jenney agrees: “It is much easier for young kids to manage their emotional involvement at that level. Through play, children can integrate difficult life experiences into internal representations and understandings of the world around them, which helps them cope and leads to positive outcomes.”

Children aged 7–9 have more verbal skills, but according to Jenney, they may have a distorted cognitive understanding of why the violence is happening. A child may accept the father’s excuses without knowing the whole story. With this age group, counselling includes examining situations and exploring possibilities.

At all age levels, renewed contact with the abusing parent is a constant concern. “Most children in our program have access to their father at some point,” says Jenney. “A lot of men unfortunately use this opportunity to continue to be abusive to their partners.” A common tactic is sending coded messages, promises or objects to the mother via the child.

Given the far-reaching tentacles of domestic violence – involvement with shelters, police, child protection agencies, family and criminal courts, schools – the ideal intervention and support program would occur within the context of coordinated or integrated services.

B.C.’s CWWA network provides just that sort of centrally coordinated community-based structure. The network is coordinated provincially by the BCYSTH, and individual programs are funded either solely or jointly by the B.C. Ministry of Community Services or the Ministry of Children and Family Development.

Coordinated services have many merits: They provide capacity for developing and promoting best practices and quality control; they facilitate learning and cross-training among disciplines; and they create synergies for dealing more effectively with government agencies and advocating for program funding.

For example, the realization that children with trauma were being misdiagnosed as having attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) prompted the BCYSTH to work more closely with the B.C. Children’s Hospital to improve understanding of the overlap between ADHD and post traumatic stress disorder and build partnerships between mental health workers and CWWA counsellors. A handbook for teachers has also been developed as part of the Violence Is Preventable project, which operates in 28 elementary and secondary schools in B.C. to ensure that students affected by domestic violence receive support.

Domestic violence treatment services elsewhere are not as cohesive. Ontario has 63 Early Intervention Programs for Child Witnesses of Woman Abuse. Created in 2000, the programs are fund­ed by the Ministry of Community and Social Services but are not centrally coordinated for the province. Here to Help is offered through six community agencies in Toronto – the Child Development Institute, Jewish Family and Child Service, Le Centre medico-social communautaire, Native Child and Family Services of Toronto, Yorktown Child and Family Centre and the YWCA.

Child welfare agencies, for their part, have made strides toward community collaboration, due partly to changes in child welfare legislation. In 2000, following several high-profile coroner’s inquests into domestic violence–related deaths, Ontario strengthened the section of the Child and Family Services Act about emotional harm to a child. Living with domestic violence is now identified as a form of emotional or psychological abuse. The change saw a 400 per cent increase in reporting of domestic violence cases to Ontario’s children’s aid societies (CAS) between 2000 and 2003.

Meanwhile, workers in women’s shelters found themselves caught between retaining the trust and confidentiality of their women clients and reporting their clients to CAS. Children’s aid societies were forced to take a closer look at their practices to determine the best approaches for child protection workers dealing with domestic violence cases.

In 2004, the Toronto CAS implemented a collaboration agreement for the Children’s Aid Societies and Violence Against Women (VAW) Agencies of Toronto. “It outlines eight intersection points where we meet, where we work together and it outlines how we should be working together and the steps we should take,” says Lisa Tomlinson, supervisor of the domestic violence team at the Children’s Aid Society of Toronto, which handles almost 5,000 domestic violence cases a year.

Similar CAS/VAW protocols have been implemented by all children’s aid societies across Ontario to enhance their relationship with agencies serving women exposed to domestic abuse, thereby improving services to children and mothers.

Ontario CAS recently introduced a differential response for all calls coming into their screening departments so they can assess immediately if a family needs a CAS investigation or if other community agencies can provide a better response. “We want to ensure everybody is safe – the woman and the child,” says Tomlinson. This fall, the Ontario Association of Children’s Aid Societies plans to launch a Best Practices document and a new training program about domestic violence for child protection workers.

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