Domestic violence shatters the safety and refuge of home, making it a fearful place for any child who witnesses it.
Children who see and hear violence experience it with their entire being—their senses, their emotions, their thoughts, their bodies. Seeing violence up close between the people you love and depend on has a long-lasting impact on emotional and brain development and on attachment and future relationships.
Domestic violence or intimate partner violence (IPV) is an all too prevalent social problem in the United States. Researchers report that up to 25% of children are exposed to IPV during childhood, and that many experience it for the first time as infants or toddlers (Jones Harden, Martoccio & Berlin, et al, 2021). Children under the age of six are at higher risk of exposure than older children (Carpenter & Stacks, 2009).
Solomon, a formerly incarcerated man I interviewed for my book, Before Their Crimes: What We’re Misunderstanding about Childhood Trauma, Youth Crime, and the Path to Healing, told me that his earliest memories were of his parents fighting. “It was very frightening. I was three or four. They’re yelling, throwing things…One time when I was a little older, it got so bad that I called the police…and my father got arrested. The physical abuse of my mother stopped, but the psychological and verbal abuse never did.”
Our capacity to regulate emotions and to manage stress develops out of repeatedly finding comfort and safety in the relationship with a parent or caregiver. In situations of domestic violence, the adults are either delivering the violence or receiving it, leaving children essentially alone with overwhelming stress, sometimes again and again. Solomon’s experience jarred his stress response system, and the emotional aloneness he felt created a deep longing for care and understanding. That longing led him to other kids who were running from their own painful experiences and had found relief and expression by engaging in criminal activities.
Children exposed to domestic violence may suffer severe physical and mental impacts; they are at increased risk for major mental health problems, including PTSD, anxiety, depression, substance abuse, and declines in educational performance (Doroudchi & Zarenezhad, et al, 2023). The underlying cause of these problems is often the impact of the IPV exposure on the development of the stress response system, emotion regulation, and the brain itself. Increased levels of cortisol can also affect cognitive development and memory.
Some infants and young children become symptomatic or show their difficulties immediately, in altered patterns of sleep or eating, night terrors, bedwetting, or other behavioral problems. For others, however, distress goes underground, and kids appear on the outside to be managing the tasks of childhood.
Misty, another of my interviewees, offers an example. She lived with her single mother and watched as she was beaten by two successive partners. She told me about one of them, “He constantly hit my mother. He would black her eyes. Once, he held a shotgun to her face and said, ‘If you don’t stop crying, I’ll blow your head off.’ I was standing right there.”
At age seven, she was present with her cousins when her aunt’s boyfriend shot her fatally during an argument. None of the adults in her childhood ever spoke with Misty about what she had seen or how she was managing.
Despite these terrifying experiences, Misty remained a good student, active in sports and school clubs. She started college. It was only when she began to have romantic relationships with men that her difficulties and confusion emerged in life choices. The men she was drawn to were gang members (as her stepfather had been) who engaged in crime, sometimes behaving cruelly toward her. She engaged in embezzlement and theft, thinking it would cement one relationship. At the time, her victims were not truly real to her, just as her own childhood vulnerability had been ignored by the violent adults in her childhood home.
Not every child who experiences domestic violence develops mental health or behavior problems. And even among those who do, research on recovery from the negative effects of domestic violence suggests that problematic outcomes may not be permanent (Carpenter & Stacks, 2009).
Traumatic events that happen early in life may not be remembered in a conscious, articulatable way, but the body remembers. Young children who witness domestic violence cannot avoid being deeply affected, but with the guidance and support of other caring adults in their lives and professionals, they can recover and heal from these events.
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