Violence in the Home Takes Toll on Kids
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Witnessing the abuse of a parent is a form of child abuse, says social work researcher Linda Bledsoe.
Witnessing domestic violence can have a devastating effect on children.
That conclusion comes from Linda Bledsoe, an assistant research professor in U of L's Kent School of Social Work, after a year-long study of children in the Louisville Metro area who have been exposed to domestic violence.
During her study, she found that roughly half of all phone calls to the police reporting domestic violence come from households with at least one child.
"We're talking about 17,000 children in the Louisville area alone, and that's assuming there's only one child in the household," she says.
Bledsoe, a social psychologist who has conducted some $1.6 million of research on domestic violence and related issues, wanted to gauge the permanent damage suffered by children who live in households where domestic violence takes place.
She began her study armed with some sobering statistics.
For example, one of every three women will be abused at some point and every four days there is a domestic violence-related murder in Kentucky.
"Our goal was to assess the damage that this sort of violence causes to kids and find out how it goes on to affect them throughout their lives."
Metro United Way provided funding for the study through a venture grant. The results were presented to the Louisville Metro Domestic Violence Prevention and Coordinating Council.
Bledsoe and fellow researcher Bibhuti Sar, an associate professor of social work at Kent School, reviewed the charts of children receiving services from the Center for Women and Families and the Home of the Innocents. To protect the privacy of the children involved, they designed interviews that could be conducted by the primary caregivers for the two social-service agencies instead of interviewing the children themselves.
The average age of children in the study was 10. Nearly half were living with one parent at a shelter, and nearly half had been exposed to physical abuse. Others had suffered or witnessed sexual abuse, emotional abuse or neglect, physical neglect or some combination of all of these.
"In one case a father had put a gun to the head of the child's mother in front of the child," Bledsoe says.
"In another, the mother had been severely beaten in front of the child, while in yet another case a child reported knowing of abuse between her parents since she was 3 years old."
Surprisingly, the study showed a high degree of resiliency among the children. Nearly two-thirds were performing at or above average in school, although the remaining third were lagging behind at least one grade level.
But signs of scarring were all too evident. Bledsoe consistently found high levels of anxiety and depression, post-traumatic stress and behavior problems.
"We found that when kids are exposed to domestic violence, they tend to have lower self-esteem and are more vulnerable to peer pressure. They have more problems in school, more trouble with substance abuse and are at a higher risk of depression and suicide.
And those are just the psychological effects."
Very young children also can experience physical problems, such as delayed development of their basic motor skills including walking and writing. As adults, they can be more prone to heart disease, cancer and more.
Bledsoe's study offers some recommendations for battling these problems.
She says more research is needed on how domestic violence affects children and whether early intervention can lessen the damage. Also, caregivers need to develop intervention strategies that take into account the child's unique experiences and characteristics.
"Children may only be listening through the bedroom wall when one of their parents hits the other, but it still can be a heavy burden for them to carry."
