Children’s Descriptions of Participation Processes in Interventions for Children Exposed to Intimate Partner Violence

In recent years, interventions have been developed to meet the needs of children exposed to intimate partner violence (IPV). This study explores and analyses processes of participation during counselling as described by 29 children who had received community-based intervention for children exposed to IPV. The results of the analysis show how participation processes in the different phases of the intervention are related to three prerequisites for children actually receiving the intervention offered, namely (1) the child getting in contact with the unit, (2) the child starting the intervention process, and, because the intervention is directed at their experiences of IPV, and (3) the child actually talking about the violence. The implications of these results are used to discuss children’s willingness and reluctance to talk about IPV during interventions in which talking about their experiences is thought to be of therapeutic value.     

Children Exposed to Intimate Partner Violence Describe Their Experiences: A Typology-Based Qualitative Analysis

Although much is known about the impact of intimate partner violence on children, few empirical studies have linked children’s experiences to typologies. This qualitative study, based on interviews with children 8–12 years of age living at women’s shelters in Sweden, explores how children describe the nature of the violence they have been exposed to with the aim of identifying patterns in the children’s experiences. The typologies developed by Johnson and colleagues and by Holtzworth-Munroe and colleagues are used as an analytical framework for analysis. Three main types of children’s experiences of intimate partner violence were identified: “Obedience-Demanding Violence,” “Chronic and Mean Violence,” and “Parenthood-Embedded Violence.” These the types can improve our understanding of the complex variety of children’s experiences of parental IPV by acknowledging how from children’s perspectives, experiences of IPV are closely connected to the perpetrator being their parent. The study provides examples of three different strategies that have implications for the factors that social workers may want to address when making judgments about custody, place of residence, and contact.