Children who experience domestic violence: emotional competence and paradoxical resilience

Academic and professional literature on domestic violence tends to represent children and young people as relatively passive, describing them as ‘exposed’ to violence, as ‘witnesses’, ‘impacted’ by the violence they see (e.g. Øverlien 2013; Mullender et al. 2003). Resilience research in this area tends to rest on a fairly mainstream account of resilience as ‘health despite adversity’ (Masten, 1999). This model relies on a sense of the restoration of ‘normative’ childhood, which, we argue, discounts the complex ways that children are able to resist oppressive and alienating practices of violence in family contexts. In contrast we propose that children who live in conflict laden environments find complex ways of coping and managing themselves and their relationships. Using the example of emotional competence, we highlight the highly contextualised nature of children’s capacity to cope. We highlight particularly how detached observers might pathologise children’s actions and interactions, without understanding sufficiently their function in the context in which children live. In particular, children who experience domestic violence and abuse describe ways of adjusting to and resisting domestic violence that involve an intertwining of ‘damage’ and ‘coping’ – a kind of paradoxical resilience. We outline what this paradoxical resilience might entail, and consider the implications of this construct for understanding the lives and experiences of children who live with violence.