Jane Drumm and Katy Reeves: any help is better than none.
Feature
My eyes stay awake
by Denis Welch
The effect on children exposed to domestic violence.
Dad had been drinking. He threw Mum on the floor and got a big knife from the kitchen. He strangled her. He said, ‘I’m going to kill your mother tonight.’ I said ‘No, Dad, don’t hurt Mum’, but he wouldn’t stop. Mum was saying to me, ‘Help me’, but I didn’t know what to do.”
Those are the words of a 10-year-old Auckland girl. And there are more children like her, many of them considerably younger. Here’s what some of them say:
“My dad hit my mum. Dad pushed Mum onto the fridge. Dad is naughty for
hitting Mum ’cause it makes Mum say, ‘No, no.’” – three-year-old boy
“All blood came out of her face. She needed a towel. I cry lots of times.” – four-year-old girl
“My eyes stay awake [at night]. My dad might kill my mum in the night. He hit her bad before. There was lots of blood.” – four-year-old boy
Everything said here by these kids was recorded by people who work for a “child crisis team” run by Preventing Violence in the Home, an Auckland organisation whose name says it all. The agency was formed to help women who are subjected to domestic violence, and that’s still its main aim, but those involved in it grew more and more concerned about the effect on children of violence between their parents. Out of this concern came the child crisis team – social workers who, in the words of Jane Drumm, are “focused as much as possible on giving those kids the tools to cope with what they have to cope with, and also deal with future incidents and be safe – as safe as a child can be”.
It was Drumm, executive director of Preventing Violence in the Home, who together with colleague Rachel Williamson surveyed the child crisis team’s work over a period of five months and found that nearly half the children spoken to (27 out of 62) had witnessed their father’s or stepfather’s violent abuse of their mother. Another 17 had heard the abuse going on, though they might not have been in the room. Even more shocking, in a way, was the discovery that “virtually always in these cases, the children possessed an exhaustive knowledge of the violence and could recount specific details, unless very young”.
In other words, they don’t miss a thing. It all goes in through the eyes and ears of these “silent observers of deeply vicious acts, which are perpetrated by the exact people who are meant to love and care for them”.
The damaging psychological effects, especially in chronic situations, can be lifelong. It may start with bedwetting in younger children and escalate to self-mutilation and suicidal tendencies in older ones. One 14-year-old carved F---OFF in her arm after an incident in her home.
What also comes through strikingly is the number of children who try to physically intervene to stop the violence: more than two-thirds of those surveyed, mostly the older ones. When that fails, as it’s bound to, guilt often follows. “I want to get in between but I am too scared,” said a seven-year-old girl who saw her mother abused. “I am mean not helping her.”
In the face of such issues, the child crisis team’s approach – three visits in quick succession to the child concerned, and one more follow-up visit a month or six weeks later – seems like scratching the surface at best. How do you help a three-year-old cope with Dad kicking Mum? What advice can you give to kids in such situations, knowing full well that the situations won’t go away overnight or even overyear?
Don’t think Drumm hasn’t agonised over that. But any help, she reasons, is better than none.
“This agency has developed to look at gaps in services. We don’t want to replicate services. A brief and prompt visit to children can help introduce them to all other services that may be operational in the community. One of the things [we] do is link the family into all sorts of other things that may be able to provide long-term therapeutic services. It’s like an open door to a lot of those things.”
If a domestic situation seems critical, CYF or the police will be called in (not always successfully – the survey notes that all three referrals made to CYF were not followed up by that department). Otherwise, a wide variety of other agencies can be called upon, such as psychologists, counselling services, parenting programmes, the advocates employed by Preventing Violence in the Home itself.
Drumm takes heart from an evaluation of the survey by Auckland University’s Injury Prevention Research Centre, which confirmed that the child crisis team’s interventions had had a positive impact on children’s health and well-being. But how can we be sure those improvements will last?
“We can’t. We can’t … How long-term it is I don’t know, but the reality of the work we’re doing is that for a lot of these children it’s not going to be happy-ever-after for quite a while.
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