NCJ Number
181735
Journal
Violence Against Women Volume: 6 Issue: 3 Dated: March 2000 Pages: 247-271
Date Published
March 2000
Length
25 pages
Annotation
Previous studies have examined the effects of domestic violence on women's parenting solely through questionnaire data; the current study, consistent with feminist theory, examines women's narratives about parenting in domestic violence situations through a semistructured interview.
Abstract
This study was part of a larger study of the effects of domestic violence on parenting and children's adjustment. For the larger study, 120 women and their children (ages 7 to 12 years) were recruited. Although 104 of the women reported that they had been physically abused by a partner during their child's lifetime, only 95 provided responses to the open-ended questions used in this study. All questionnaires, including the interview questions for this study, were read aloud to the participants. Women were offered the option to complete the questionnaires themselves or to have the interviewers record their responses. The majority of the women reported that they did believe their partner's violence toward them affected their parenting. The women identified not only negative influences of the violence on their parenting but also positive effects on their parenting. Their responses do not suggest that the violence is a positive influence in itself, but rather that the women became motivated to mobilize their resources to respond to the violence on behalf of their children. Women's descriptions of their responses to the violence, such as providing increased empathy and caring or explicit guidance to their children about the importance of not repeating the violence, suggest methods of working to prevent or buffer the impact of the spousal violence on their children. 37 references