Ruth Clare

How to help child victims of family violence

(From grand round speech I gave at the Melbourne Royal Children’s Hospital in 2017…)

Today I am going to be talking with you about some of my experiences of family violence. I talk about these things because there is still prejudice, stigma and judgement attached to domestic violence and I want to do my part to speak out against it.

I speak about things that are not often spoken about because I want to stop the silencing that comes from shame. I speak because I want children to see grown-ups talking about these things so they might know that it is okay for them to speak about them too. I speak so that anyone has had an experience like mine might know that they are not alone.

If my talk becomes too overwhelming for you, look after yourself. Take a break. Grab a glass of water. Remind yourself that you are not trapped in this moment. You have power and choice. This talk is being recorded so you don’t have to watch it all in one go. You can dip in and out, and watch it at your own pace if that is what works best for you. Put your own oxygen mask on first.

A childhood experience of family violence
During my childhood I lived in Queensland with my older sister, younger brother, Mum, and Dad. I remember a lot of things from that time – splashing around in a blue tarp pool on the cooch grass in our backyard, walking in barefeet on road so hot the tar stuck to my feet.

But my first fully formed memory, when I was the age I was in this photograph, three years old, was of dad. For the crime of being too scared to admit I had peeled a label off a box of tic tacs and stuck it to a wall, he gripped me by the arm and used my body as a drum to beat home his words.

When I wriggled free and ran away, he chased me, dragging me out of hiding places to hit me more.  I finally made it to my bedroom and had thrown myself under my bed when I felt his hands grip around my ankles again. My mother finally appeared and said for him to stop before he killed me.

This was my first memory, and among the most vivid I have, but it is not my only memory of Dad’s violence. My childhood was spent walking along a razor edge of expectations that were impossible to meet. There was no room for mistakes. No allowance for the fact that I was small and learning.

Leaving a bike in the yard. Tripping and hurting myself. Running through the house. Sometimes it was just a few slaps. Other times he would lose control.

Family violence is complicated
I hated my dad for the way he treated me. But though I wanted to punish him, tried to will myself into feeling only rage so I could hurt him the way he had hurt me, I loved Dad too. Not just loved him. Twisted myself in knots for him. Kept trying to make myself good, better, best, to prove to him that I was worth loving back.

He wasn’t always violent. When he was in a good mood, he could light up a room. He could be funny, smart, warm – and he gave the best hugs. Loving him the way I did made it hurt all the more when he lashed out. What I didn’t understand until I was an adult was that he had undiagnosed PTSD as a result of his experience in the Vietnam War. But as a child, knowing that might not have helped much.

At the time, it felt like the only thing I could do was to become more and more perfect, never make any mistakes.

People pleasing, perfectionism and the feeling of not enoughness
I grew very good at watching myself, people pleasing and putting on a mask so that no one would guess what was going on at home. At school this worked out well. I got a lot of A’s on my report card. I became captain of my primary school. But though I tried just as hard to please at home, the rules kept changing, so I could never win. What set dad off one day would make him laugh the next.

I decided that the problem must be deeper than my behaviour. I decided there must be something wrong with me that meant I wasn’t worth treating well.

I thought my Dad hurt me because he hated me.

That he didn’t love me because I was unloveable.

Domestic violence is a common experience
I share this story with you because being though it is my story, growing up in a home with violence is the story of so many other children. Children too small to stand before you today. Children too young to know how to put their experience in words. Children too scared to speak out.

According to the Alannah and Madeline Foundation, 1 in 4 children in Australia have experienced family violence. Their figures show that there are over one million Australian children currently living with violence in the home.

In a recent study, Brain Injury Australia identified that nearly 1 in every 3 victims of family violence are children and, of those, 1 in every 4 sustain a brain injury.

An Australian crime report on filicide shows that one child per fortnight is killed by a parent.

These are shocking figures: a crisis by anyone’s estimate. But if we were to listen to the current narrative, this is not the story most people picture when they hear the words domestic violence.

The way we currently depict domestic violence is wrong
In report after report, the image being painted of family violence is a man hitting a woman. If children appear in the picture, it is of them receiving harm as witnesses to the violence.

On the Our Watch website, a key player representing the interests of “Women and their children,” they state:

“An Australia free of violence against women and their children is an Australia where women are not only safe, but respected, valued and treated as equals in private and public life.”

I absolutely agree that women need to be valued and respected. But what about children

According to The United Nation’s Convention on the Rights of the Child, all children are born with the same fundamental freedoms and inherent rights as adults, though their vulnerability also entitles them to special protection.

Children have THE RIGHT to be protected from all kinds of abuse and violence. They have THE RIGHT to protection against all forms of neglect, cruelty and exploitation. They have THE RIGHT to affection, love and understanding.
According to the Convention, these are not lofty ideals, these are basic rights.

Unfortunately, we all know it is not always possible to shelter children against violence and abuse, especially if that abuse is perpetrated by the very parents who are meant to be acting as guardians and protectors. It IS possible however, for us all to defend a child’s RIGHT to have the violence committed against them taken as seriously as the adults around them.

We need to stop overlooking children in domestic violence
In the Facts and Figures part of the Our Watch website, there is no statistical information on the number of children who are victims of violence from their parents. The only fact they have related to children is that “More than two-thirds of mothers who had children in their care when they experienced violence from their previous partner said their children had seen or heard the violence.”

Seen or heard. As if this is the only way children are being harmed in the home.

On Our Watch they also state they are: “busting the myths that excuse, minimise and condone violent behaviour.”

I want to bust some myths too.

It is not just women who are being hurt. It is also children. Male and female children. If Australia’s children were dying or being harmed in these numbers from a disease, people would be screaming for a cure, yet the issue of child abuse is rarely discussed. Why is this?

We need to amplify children’s voices
In The Body Keeps the Score, Dr Bessel van der Kolk says:  “Trauma almost invariably involves not being seen, not being mirrored and not being taken into account.”

I cannot think of a single time during my childhood when I felt my views were heard, considered or taken seriously. It never occurred to me that they would be. 

When you are a child your experience is constrained within the world your parents show you. You rely upon them to be your teachers and guides. If they teach you that you are worth nothing, that your pain and sadness deserves no recognition, that is the lesson you learn. If they fill you with their anger before you have had time to make your own sense of the world, it becomes fused into your understanding of how the world works and the world becomes a dangerous place.

When the world can’t be trusted, it doesn’t occur to you that there might be adults out there who could help, and that there are avenues of support beyond the four walls of your home.

I didn’t know that I had a basic human right to be listened to and to have my opinion taken seriously when decisions were being made about my life. No grown up ever told me that. How would I know?

Many of us come into contact with children who are victims of family violence. But if we don’t have a degree in social work or psychology, we might feel like we aren’t qualified to talk to them. We might feel, because there is nothing you can do to change their situation, it is best to leave well alone. We rightly worry about causing more trauma. But not being treated as a person worthy of inclusion, not being given a voice, is its own kind of trauma. Doing nothing, saying nothing, can feel like rejection and abandonment to a child. When you feel worthless and people overlook you and treat you as if you are worth less your bias about how people see you is confirmed.

Calling the police on my dad
A few months after dad left our family I woke in the middle of the night to hear my mum crying out for help. I was out of bed and down the hall before I even felt my feet touch the ground. In the darkness I nearly ran into my little brother David who had been standing in fear in the hallway not knowing what to do.

When mum called out again I ran to the brightly lit kitchen, struggling to understand what I was seeing. Dad had Mum pinned to the ground. He was kneeling on top of her, with the weight of one knee pressed across her thighs, his hand on her shoulder. It didn’t make any kind of sense. I hadn’t seen Dad since he had left us. And in all the time he lived with us, despite hitting my brother and sister and me a hundred times, he had never hit Mum.

I didn’t know what to do so I ran over and hit his shoulder, shoving to try and unbalance him as I yelled. “Get off her!” He picked me up and threw me across the room.

I took my brother and ran next door to a neighbor. I told her Dad was trying to kill Mum and asked if we could call the police. When I saw the blue and red lights I raced back home to let them in. At this stage I didn’t know if Mum was dead or alive, but after I called her she emerged from the bedroom relatively intact.

The police asked if she wanted to press charges, but she shook her head. When they asked if we wanted to stay at a shelter in case Dad came back I convinced Mum it was probably a good idea.

No questions, no support
In the police car on the way to the refuge I kept expecting the officers to ask about what had happened. Instead they asked what grades we were in and the name of our budgie.

It felt like they were showing us what we were expected to do. Act normal. Put it all behind us. Not dwell.

Apart from the neighbour I had awakened earlier, the police were the only other people who knew something of the violence going on at home. They didn’t ask us if we were alright. They didn’t say it must have been hard to go through what we had just experienced. They didn’t offer to put us in contact with any support services. They didn’t ask us if our Dad had ever hit us.

What they did was drop us off at the shelter that would be our home for the weekend and that was the last we saw of them.

Asking for help is hard
During the whole of my childhood it had never occurred to me to reach out to anyone for help with what was going on at home. The way the police responded to our situation seemed to confirm that, apart from a place to escape to during a period of peak violence, there was no help on offer.

I also wondered why, the one time Dad beat Mum up, it was an incident worthy of staying at a women’s shelter. But no help came the countless times he hit us kids.

The third adult I told about the violence at home was a teacher. I had taken a box of fundraising chocolates to the shelter and over the course of the weekend, I had eaten the entire box. I didn’t have the $37.50 I now owed. I decided the best way to get out of paying might be to tell her a lie, wrapped up in the truth of my experience over the weekend.

I pulled my teacher aside after English class. “Sorry to tell you this, but my father tried to kill my mother on the weekend and we had to stay in a women’s shelter.”

She let out a gasp.

“Yeah it was pretty bad… and the worst thing, while I was there someone stole the box of chocolates I’m meant to sell. I’m not going to be able to give you any money for them.”

She stared at me a few seconds too long then her eyes darted to the window.

“It’s alright, Ruth.” Her voice was small and her eyes didn’t meet mine.

Now don’t get me wrong. The main reason I spoke to my teacher was to get out of paying for the chocolates. But I was also testing to see what would happen. I had always thought of school as my safe place. The adults there mostly seemed responsible and reasonable. If they thought what had happened to me was a big deal, then maybe it was.

Doing nothing is doing something
But my teacher did nothing. She didn’t ask if I was okay. She didn’t pull me aside after lessons to see how everything at home was going. She didn’t ask if I wanted to see a counselor. This was the third grown up outside of my family I had told that my Dad had tried to kill my Mum. Not one of them asked how I was. Not one of them asked if Dad had ever hit me.

I understand that the whole topic of domestic violence makes many people uncomfortable. Speaking about something that has always been taboo feels like a shaky proposition full of potential ways you can make mistakes and say the wrong thing. I also understand that children aren’t always the easiest people to speak to, and that they don’t always respond in ways you expect.

But there does seem to be an assumption that if children need help, they will ask for it. That if something is on their mind, they are going to be able to speak about it.

Children need to be told that speaking out is okay
This is simply not true. Children rely on adults to help them know what is okay and what is not. And they tend to generalise. If they have been brought up in a home where secrecy is the norm and talking about what is going on at home is not okay, they think that is THE WAY IT IS.

There is a growing body of evidence that suggests that different types of violence occur simultaneously in the same family, and that the presence of one form of violence is often a strong predictor of the other. The very presence of domestic violence increases the likelihood of child maltreatment in the family.

Investigations into children in violent families who had been labeled as experiencing “emotional abuse” i.e. abuse from having witnessed ongoing verbal or physical abuse, also found that the term “emotional abuse” was often applied to cases where there were actual incidents of child physical abuse. Other studies have shown that mothers did not want to report physical assaults to their children for fear the child would be removed from their care.

This is a difficult situation. No doubt. But adults outside of the family unit need to ask children if they are being hurt. If they don’t, it will confirm to children that this is something they aren’t meant to talk about.

As a child, when adults don’t speak about the elephant in the room, it feels like something is going on that is too awful to look at.

And because children, restricted by their development, think everything is about them, they, like me, will often think the awful thing is them.

There are no easy solutions to family violence
Another part of the complexity of family violence is that children have a primal desire to stay with their family, even if their home from the outside looks unsafe.

Kids also don’t want to be dobbers, especially if police have been at their house and they fear that “dobbing” on their parent might mean they get sent to jail. They also need to know that talking about one parent isn’t going to get them taken away from the other parent.

Family violence is a convoluted situation with no easy solution. But it is our duty to take care of the most vulnerable members of our society. And children living in violent homes are about as vulnerable as it gets.

Ask children questions. Listen to the answers they give. If a child tells you they are being hurt and they don’t want to spend time with a parent,  don’t assume it is some line being fed to them by a disgruntled ex. Assume they are telling the truth and they need your help.

I spent a lot of time during my childhood waiting for the moment when someone would finally see me. They never had, and as far as I was concerned, the way the grown ups I told my story responded, showed me they never would.

These adults who knew my secret, and pretended they didn’t, showed me what was going on at home wasn’t something I was meant to talk about: my problems were my problems and it was up to me to figure out how to deal with them.

By looking away, unwilling to bear witness to my pain, they left me feeling exposed. The story they didn’t want to hear now felt unspeakable; and by association I felt unspeakable too.

Unspeakable also meaning:

Repellent

Repulsive

Sickening

Contemptible

The quick way they had turned from my story, drove it deeper into hiding, and all of the unspeakable things I was not meant to share seeped into me, soaking my tissues, my organs, my bones until I could not tell where my stories ended and I began. I was repellent, repulsive, sickening, contemptible. That was what my Dad had tried to show me with his beatings. That was what the people who didn’t want to know anything about it confirmed.

The United Nation’s Convention on the Rights of the Child says this: Children who have been neglected or abused should receive special help to restore their self-respect.

Don’t delude yourself about children’s capacity for resilience
Few abused children receive the help they need to restore their self respect. In fact, when people talk about children in traumatic situations, often the first word that gets bandied about is resilience. As if it is somehow easier for kids – whose bodies are still growing, whose neural networks are still forming, whose entire concept of the world is being created – to spring back from abuse.

People cling to the idea that kids adapt. And they are right. They do. They “adapt” by swallowing their feelings, thinking they don’t matter or disassociating and shutting down. They “adapt” by developing a shield of anger that prevents anyone from getting close and hurting them again. They adapt by turning to addiction or developing auto-immune disorders or other serious ongoing health problems as well as drastically shortened life spans as their bodies try to process the pain of their adverse childhood experiences.

Children need to be heard
Children are just people. They are no different to you, except they are more naïve, more vulnerable and less able to fend for themselves.  Like you, they expected their parents to help and protect them. That they have been treated brutally instead is as much a shock to them as it would be to you.

When we have been through something traumatic, most of us would like someone to take the time to try to understand our experiences, and give us a safe place to vent our anger, frustration and confusion and sadness. It is not fair that doing this might mean we are ripped away from the people we love.

If someone had listened to me when I was a child, it would have allowed me to feel like I was entitled to have feelings of my own, and that it wasn’t only what was going on in the lives of the grown ups around me that mattered.

I think it would have made a difference to the way I understood the world if someone had told me that the way your parents treat you is not a representation of how much you are worth. And that just because your parent hits you doesn’t mean you deserve to be hit.

But then I would also have been wary. My whole life I had been let down by the adults who were meant to help me. As a child, even as an adult, trust is not something that comes easily to me. If I had opened up to someone and they dismissed what I was saying, or tried to make light of what I was going through, it would have confirmed my opinion that I didn’t count.

I would also have been cautious because I would have wanted to protect my mum, the way I always had.

When Dad left her, Mum was beyond terrified at being left as the sole adult-in-charge. I did what I could to not be a burden to her, but she didn’t cope. By the time I was thirteen, she was mostly blind drunk or unconscious. I was scared that if somebody found out how bad her drinking was, us kids might have been sent into care. Which to my mind would have been ridiculous. By that age, I had done more looking after than I had ever received. I had “adapted” to my home environment.

Besides if we refer to the United Nation’s Convention on the Rights of the Child, “Children have the right to have their views heard, considered and taken seriously in a way that is appropriate given age and ability, especially when decisions are being made that affect them.”

If I had been asked, I would never have chosen to leave my Mum.

After I moved away from my family and went to university, I was determined my life would be normal.

I tried to do same thing my Dad had been advised to do after he returned home from the Vietnam War: to go about my life as if nothing had happened. Like him, I tried to keep the door on my experiences locked.

Trauma needs to be addressed
Much as I wanted to contain it, my past had a way of springing back to life when I least expected it – sudden tsunamis of rage, crushing bouts of shame, aches of sadness so deep it felt my body would crack in two. All of the things I hadn’t dealt with had gone nowhere, and my body wouldn’t let me forget it.

I spent my twenties working part-time, devoting many of the other hours in my week to reading self-help books and going to counseling, trying everything I could to find a way to leave the past in the past. I spent a lot of time crying, not seeing people because I couldn’t bear to have them look at me.

My therapist, Mary, changed my life.  For the first time I experienced what it was like to be in a genuinely nurturing relationship with someone parent-like. Somebody who held the space for me, made me feel safe enough that I didn’t always have to be strong. Week after week, month after month, year after year, she listened to my story. Finally I was not alone. Finally I had been heard.

So after all of that hard work, I thought, “Brilliant. The past is dealt with. Time to move on.” And I did move on. I made my own family. I married a kind and gentle man. I had first one child, and then another. Both are the loves of my life.

Though I found parenting pretty full-on, I thought I was doing okay at it. Then, when my youngest child was two, he went through a phase where every tiny frustration made him lash out, mostly at me.

If he fell down, was unable to remove the lid off a bottle, or I didn’t understand what he was trying to say, he would often slap me across my face.

The familiarity of that sting triggered old neuronal pathways that derailed my adult self. All knowledge that my son was exhibiting normal two-year-old behaviour was forgotten as I tumbled backwards inside my skin, free falling to the bottom of a long dark well. Looking up through the eyes of my younger self, my son was not my son, he was my father. I was doing nothing wrong and I had been hit. My hand itched to slap back.

Luckily I understood that though I felt violated, as the parent I was the one with the real power. I would not let myself abuse it. Still, my voice was more a roar than a calm instruction as I told him, “No! It is not okay to hit. Be gentle with your hands!”

Childhood family violence gets triggered by your own children
When trauma is embedded into your experiences of childhood, your own children can trigger you. Their behavior can evoke a surge of cortisol and adrenaline that makes your heart pound and your hands shake. In moments when you are uncertain about what to do, you don’t have experiences of kind parental support to draw on. You instead have to fight against the inappropriate parental role-models that scream in your head.

You know you need to calm down. But you can’t just leave the house and go for a walk. You have to keep looking after your child.

You manage to make it through the moment, though your body is still buzzing. Then, a short while later, another event happens, releasing another flood of chemicals that wash through your body and compound its already agitated state. You can feel how wound up you are getting, but what are you meant to do? You are home alone with your child. Because of the kind of family you grew up in, you have no family to support you.

Family violence needs to be addressed when people are young
Studies show that many adult perpetrators and victims of domestic violence have experienced some form of family violence in the past. This means that for many, many people, family violence begins in childhood. Not as an adult in relationship with another adult.

If we are serious about trying to address this issue, we cannot let the fact the subject makes us feel uncomfortable prevent us from looking away from the number of children who are currently victims.

If we want to do something to help level the disadvantage of living in home with violence, abuse and neglect, we need to help children when they are still young.

If we want to put our awareness that violent childhoods can increase the risk of violent behaviour in adulthood to use, we need to take actions to help children before they are adults. Before it is too late.

We need to listen to children tell their difficult stories and help them to feel that they are not worthless. That all is not hopeless and lost.

Simple techniques to help trauma recovery
There are simple techniques that anyone can learn to help reduce their stress in healthy ways. The EFT tapping technique. Breathing exercises. Meditation. Mindfulness. Nervous system support practices. Exercise. Connection with others. We can teach these techniques to kids to help to learn how to feel calm after a lifetime of feeling like they are in a warzone.

We might not be able to offer a quick fix to the circumstances a child is born into, but we can show them that they are not alone and support them in finding new ways to respond to their experience. We can teach them that there are things they can do to look after themselves, because they deserve to be looked after and treated with kindness. We can take them seriously and show they are being heard.

Luckily for me, the time when I had to endure the constant threat of attack is long gone. But it is not gone for many kids. All over Australia children are nursing broken bones, broken hearts and broken promises because the people they rely on for love and care instead made them feel like they were worth nothing. It is for those children that I speak today.

I wrote my book, ENEMY, because I wanted people who have not had an experience like mine to understand what it feels like. I wrote it because I am tired of child abuse being a topic that is taboo. But mostly I wrote it because I want other people who have had childhoods similar to me to know they are not alone and that is okay for them to talk about all they have been through.

Don’t make assumptions that you know what domestic violence looks like.

Ask the questions. Listen to the answers.

Thank you

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Ruth Clare is an award-winning author, TEDx and motivational keynote speaker, professional actor, qualified scientist and authenticity, resilience and change expert who learned by necessity, first to survive, then to thrive. Ruth weaves research and hard-won lessons with powerful, relatable stories from her lived experience overcoming adversity, to help others find the courage to own the stories that are holding them back so they can rewrite their lives. With a rare knack for distilling the neuroscience and psychology of human behaviour into simple ideas and practical strategies, Ruth shows people how to embrace uncertainty, stay hopeful when times are tough and harness their potential for growth and change. Ruth’s TEDx talk, The Pain of Hiding Your True Self, has had over half a million views.