Study engages children who were exposed to intimate partner violence to speak about their abused parent

This qualitative study asked children to describe their parent who had been abused by an intimate partner.  The children and the abused parent were recruited through two different treatment programs, in Sweden, offering services to children and parents impacted by intimate partner violence.  Each child was invited to participate in this study.  A total of seventeen children participated in the study, which included ten girls and seven boys between the ages of 4.5 and 12.3 years.  Thirteen lived with the parent who had experienced abuse, three lived in alternating care between both parents and one lived in foster care.  Semi-structured interviews were conducted which lasted an average of 36 minutes. Thematic data analysis was done in keeping with Braun & Clarke (2006), who described their method as looking at participants’ understanding of their experiences in context. 

Findings from the interviews resulted in three main themes.  The main themes illustrated how the parent was described by the child: Coherent accounts of the parent, deficient accounts of the parent, and parent as trauma trigger.  In the coherent accounts (theme 1), an integrated working model of the parent was evident in the child’s responses.  This demonstrated the children’s capacities to reflect on aspects of that parent.  In the deficient accounts (theme 2), there was less coherence in the description of the parent, which was at times “flat or shattered” (p. 5). The final main theme (theme 3), parent as trauma trigger, “illustrate(d) how children can become overwhelmed by being asked about the parent and show(ed) how trauma reminders can block a child’s access to inner representations of the abused parent and the capacity to reflect and mentalize” (p. 175).  Further, the children who provided responses that fit into this theme were described as responding to questions about their abused parent with reactions such as heightened arousal, loss of concentration, dissociative states, or disorganization. This theme in particular suggested that, similar to the abusive parent, the abused parents may also trigger a trauma response in children. It is also noted that this study demonstrated that children could be valuable partners as participants in research aiming at better understanding their experiences.