“Witness” to violence? Agency and resistance in children’s accounts of domestic abuse

The review of academic literature on children in situations of domestic abuse clearly highlights their positioning as passive victims of adult violence. This literature positions children as damaged by violence, focusing very heavily on the pathological consequences of growing up with violence. While we acknowledge the negative impact that domestic abuse has on children’s lives, we believe that this dominant professional explanation tells only a partial story, and one that can have a negative and unintended consequence for work with children and families. In particular, we argue these accounts constrain the articulation of more agentic and resistant subjectivities in children living with domestic violence. In this paper we explore how young people themselves talk about their experiences and how they cope in situations of domestic abuse, articulating how they are able to find strategies of resistance, how they are able to be resilient, and how they actively cope with difficult family circumstances. The UNARS project involves individual interviews with 20 young people in 4 different European countries. Here we focus on interviews with participants in the UK, who have grown up with interpersonal violence. These interviews were analysed using Denzin’s (2008) Interpretive Interactionism. We explore the complex ways these young people have found to ‘cope’ with domestic abuse, finding both relational and personal strategies to manage domestic abuse, engaging in creative and intelligent tactics to maintain positive self-identities within a difficult and often painful family context. Findings from interviews will help inform training and therapeutic intervention programmes aimed at enhancing children’s capacity for resilience. Here we consider the potential impact of UNARS research on the health and social care provisions of the European regions we are working in.