Children and Interparental Violence

The Impact of Exposure

B. B. Robbie Rossman, Honore M. Hughes, Mindy S. Rosenberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780876309582
• eBook ISBN: 9781134872695
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The past decade has seen a burgeoning of research and conceptualization on the implications of parental violence exposure on children's development and well-being. Meanwhile, seemingly daily accounts of violent tragedies committed by our youth brings to our attention the urgency of conveying this information. With these ideas in mind, Children and Interparental Violence focuses on childrens exposure to violence between their caretakers and the subsequent effects on child development.
To this end, the authors review current theories, research, and treatment strategies of the 1990s, paying specific attention to families' ethnic backgrounds, parents' sexual orientation, and forensic and legal issues, all factors affecting the nature and severity of impact.
Prevention and intervention models (including great detail on risk and protective factors), techniques, and programs are discussed, as well as research evaluating their usefulness. Keeping in mind the goal of integrating practice and policy with current violence and developmental research and theory, numerous case examples take the reader from the lab and classroom into the session room and courtroom.

1
CHAPTER

Exposure to Interparental Violence

What does it mean to say that children are “exposed” to interparental violence? Exposure is a broad term, and exposure to interparental violence is more easily defined anecdotally than scientifically. In everyday life children and youth may be exposed to physically aggressive behaviors between their parents or caregivers in a number of ways. For example, they may be exposed through being physically present in the room where the aggression is taking place, thereby receiving through all of their senses information about this conflict: the sight of pushing and hitting; the sound of yelling or crying; the smell of blood or gunpowder; the feel of being shoved against a wall when trying to intervene; and the taste of fear. Other forms of exposure may involve fewer of their senses, such as hearing terrified screams or someone being pushed against a wall or door, or seeing the resulting injuries such as a mother’s black eye or damage to property such as a hole in the wall, or sensing the tension or dread in the spousal relationship.

For many years it was assumed that children were not affected by these occurrences. This assumption now has been challenged by almost 20 years of research suggesting that children are not oblivious to interparental violence. Some initial issues have to do with how this research came about, how frequently children experience these events, and how exposure is defined and related to emotional abuse within the context of a battering parental relationship.

History of Research of Children Exposed to Interparental Violence

Violence toward women and children within families has been noted for centuries in the records of different civilizations (Dobash & Dobash, 1979). However, interest in and research on family violence is, in large part, quite recent, being spurred by concerns about child abuse (Helfer & Kempe, 1968). Further impetus came from examining violence in the entire family in the 1975 and 1985 National Family Violence Surveys (Straus & Gelles, 1990). Findings from these surveys suggested that a substantial portion, about one-third, of U.S. couples experience one or more physical assaults on a partner during a marriage. This and other research was aided by the development of the Conflict Tactics Scales (CTS; Straus, 1979,1990), which provided a standard tool for researchers to assess partner violence. (Other scales have also been developed [e.g., Domestic Conflict Inventory, Margolin, Burman, John, & O’Brien, 1990; O’Leary–Porter Scale, Porter, & O’Leary, 1980]). The CTS hs recently been revised (Straus, Hamby, Boney-McCoy, & Sugarman, 1996) and expanded to include an updated parent-to-child aggression version (Straus, Hamby, Finkelhor, Moore, & Runyan, 1998) used in the 1995 Gallup Survey (Gallup Organization, 1995). Additional momentum for family violence research was provided by the First National Conference for Family Violence Researchers held in 1981 at the University of New Hampshire, which have continued every 3 years thereafter.

Initially concerns were mainly about abused wives (e.g., Pizzey, 1974). Soon it became clear that children were also at risk and were more likely to be physically abused in wife abusive homes (Carlson, 1984). Recent data from the 1985 National Family Violence Survey showed that the probability of child abuse by a violent husband increased from 5% with one marital violence event to over 90% with 50 or more marital violence acts (Ross, 1996). Marital violence was viewed as problematic, in part, because of its apparent exacerbation of child abuse.

Early studies by Rosenbaum and O’Leary (1981), Hughes and Barad (1983), and Hershorn and Rosenbaum (1985) raised yet another possibility, namely, that children’s problem behaviors also might be enhanced by just witnessing the abuse of their mother. This and other work (e.g., Elbow, 1982) helped to raise the red flag that has generated 20 years of research of children exposed to interparental violence. The purpose of much of the work in the 1980s was to further document initial findings and to extend investigations to other domains of child functioning. Major facilitators and disseminators of this research have included the multiple books edited by Ammerman and Hersen (e.g., Ammerman & Hersen, 1999) and the seminal work by Jaffe, Wolfe, and Wilson, Children of Battered Women (1990), which has served as the “textbook” in this area for the last decade. In the current volume we hope to continue this tradition, highlighting the research of the 1990s.

Incidence and Prevalence

An initial question must be about incidence: “How many children are exposed to interparental violence?” Incidence refers to the number of incidents of exposure during 1 year, whereas prevalence refers to the extent of the problem as a whole. Initial incidence estimates suggest that between 2.3 and 10 million children witness parental violence each year in the United States (Carlson, 1984; Straus, 1991). In addition, national surveys by Straus and Gelles and their colleagues have indicated that approximately one in six couples report some incident of physical violence in a year, and one-third of married women report at least one incident of physical violence during their marriage (Straus & Gelles, 1986), a figure that is thought to be an underestimate (Straus, 1993). Thus, a conservative incidence estimate is that 15% of children are exposed to aggression between their parents. It is not possible to make a prevalence estimate. However, if 33% of women experience some marital violence during their lives, it is reasonable to believe that lifetime prevalence rates for children would be high.

Estimates provided by these national surveys have strengths and weaknesses. These national community surveys have the advantage of querying the frequency of the specific conflict tactics of interest that have occurred between partners during the prior year through use of the CTS (Straus, 1979). For example, physically aggressive conflict tactics are clearly defined as those that involve pushing or shoving or more severe forms of interpersonal aggression such as beating up. A further advantage is that the surveys are by phone such that some segments of the population (e.g., higher socioeconomic status [SES] families) are represented. These families might not be as likely to come to the attention of domestic violence agencies or child protective services and thus be underrepresented. However, phone surveys also have the disadvantage of missing other segments of the population, such as those who would not agree to participate by phone or do not have telephones. In addition, these national surveys have the disadvantage of being based on the report of each of the spouses about themselves and their partners, rather than on reports made by a third party and investigated by a fourth. On the other hand, socially less acceptable behaviors such as intrafamilial violence are thought less likely to be reported (e.g., Bird, Gould, & Staghezza, 1992), meaning that even these subjective reports are likely to be underestimates of incidence. Nonetheless, these phone surveys are a critical source of information about violence between intimate partners in the United States. And phone survey results do not differ greatly from those done using private, in-person interviews. The National Alcohol Survey showed that 21% of the over 1,500 couples interviewed had experienced one act of spousal violence during the past year (Schafer, Caetano, & Clark, 1998).

National child abuse statistics also provide information about incidence of exposure. For example, as will be discussed, this exposure is thought to be psychologically abusive and therefore would be partially reflected in the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect (NCAAN) survey under the emotional abuse category. In the 1994 NCAAN survey for the 48 reporting states there were an estimated 2.9 million children reported as victims of alleged child abuse and neglect. Approximately one million of these were substantiated/indicated and about 5% of these, or 47,097, fell into the emotional maltreatment category (NCAAN, 1996). However, a disadvantage of these survey data is that the proportion of cases in which maltreatment was linked to spouse abuse is not known. Nor do we know, more generally, the number of situations in which reports of other types of abuse were taking place in the context of parental violence or where parental violence occurred without child abuse. However, a possible advantage of these figures is that they are typically not based on self-report.

Two other types of survey data are particularly relevant for children’s welfare. For example, medical record bases suggest that nearly 50% of abusive husbands batter their pregnant wives, resulting in four times the risk of low birth weight infants and a higher than expected level of birth defects (Chiles, 1988; U.S. Senate Hearings, 1990). In addition, Fantuzzo, Boruch, Beriana, Atkins, and Marcus (1997) surveyed police reports of domestic violence calls from five major U.S. cities. This database was gathered as part of the Spouse Assault Replication Program of the National Institute of Justice. Cases were included if there was verification of misdemeanor or felony physical assault of a female victim in a spouselike relationship and if the man had no outstanding arrest warrants at the time of the assault. Within this group of over 2,000 cases, several results were striking. These households were more than twice as likely to have children as census data would predict. Furthermore, these households had a significantly higher proportion of children younger than 5 years and of children living in poverty. This raises the question of whether younger children may be at even greater risk of exposure. This may be possible since the childrearing years for young families have been noted as particularly stressful. A survey of young couples showed that up to 40% reported the occurrence of some partner physical aggression (Magdol, Moffitt, Caspi, Newman, Fagan, & Silva, 1997).

Of course, there are both strengths and weakness in medical and police reports as well as community survey and abuse reports. All seem likely to underestimate true incidence (Bird et al., 1992). Whatever the actual numbers, they are large enough to constitute a serious physical and mental health problem for children in this country.

Definitional Issues

Most researchers define children’s exposure status based on the fact that the mother has been battered by her partner. Although many researchers have not asked the children specifically about what they have witnessed, women who have been beaten report that 90% of the time the children are either in the same room or the next room during the violence (e.g., Hughes, 1988; Rosenberg & Rossman, 1990). However, many parents do not realize that their children are aware of parental conflicts (O’Brien, John, Margolin, & Erel, 1994).

To investigate this more specifically, Rosenberg (1984,1987a) used questionnaires and structured interviews with battered women and their children to determine the types and frequency of verbal and physical aggression witnessed by children in maritally violent and nonviolent families. She found that despite a parent’s intention to shield children from the violence, nearly all such verbal and physical incidents were directly observed or heard or both by children of battered women in contrast to comparison group children. In addition, if children were exposed to verbal aggression in their families, they were significantly more likely to be exposed to physical aggression as well. Thus, the vast majority of the children are clearly aware of the physical violence as well as the verbal aggression that occurs. One study examining their awareness showed that children’s and mothers’ reports of the occurrence of physical aggression by mothers’ partners were highly related (r[99] = .54, p < .001; Dominguez, 1995).

Researchers in this area have long been aware of controversy over whether spousal violence is “mutual combat” or one partner or the other engages in more physical violence (Feldman & Ridley, 1995). Some researchers indicate discrepancies between men and women in self-reported physical aggression with men obtaining significantly higher aggression scores (Rosenberg, 1984). However, when the self-reported physical aggression rates are similar for men and women, more often the woman is using physically aggressive tactics in self-defense, feeling in danger, and she is more often the victim of the most severe aggression of being beaten up and is more often physically injured and needing medical treatment (Carlos, Neidig, & O’Leary, 1994; Morse, 1995). Therefore, the current authors use the term spouse abuse or violence or interparental violence, but they acknowledge that woman battering remains the primary concern.

A further topic of current concern regarding definitions of violence has to do with how much interparental verbal and physical conflict make a difference for child adjustment and whether there are contexts in which conflict is not destructive. Jouriles, McDonald, and Norwood (1999) make the point that domestic violence is not as atypical as once believed. They cite studies of premarital partners (O’Leary, Barling, Arias, Rosenbaum, Malone, & Tyree, 1989) and of young married couples (Magdol et al., 1997) suggesting that for around 40% some partner physical aggression has occurred. They speculate that perhaps this typically lower-level (e.g., pushing as opposed to being beaten up) and less frequent aggression is less destructive for children since that large a percentage (i.e., 40%) of children typically do not show clinically elevated levels of problem behaviors. These authors refer to this phenomenon as “ordinary” or “common” violence, which may occur during certain stages of a couple’s relationship. Unfortunately, as they note, researchers have not generally discriminated between children exposed to “ordinary” versus more severe interparental physical aggression. There...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Chapter 1: Exposure to Interparental Violence
• Chapter 2: Impact of Exposure to Interparental Abuse
• Chapter 3: Individual Differences in Response to Exposure: Risk and Resilience
• Chapter 4: Theoretical Explanations of Impact: Accounting for Change
• Chapter 5: Exposure to Interparental Violence in Diverse Family Contexts: Impact on Children
• Chapter 6: Treatment and Prevention of the Impact of Exposure
• Chapter 7: Children and Youth Exposed to Interparental Violence and the Courts
• Chapter 8: Needs and New Directions
• Index