NCJ Number
180766
Date Published
1999
Length
17 pages
Annotation
The experience of the Duluth Family Visitation Center established as part of the Duluth Domestic Assault Intervention Project (DAIP) in Minnesota demonstrates the issues involved in efforts to undo the harm to children resulting from spouse abuse.
Abstract
Duluth's visitation center opened in 1989 to provide a safe place for children to be exchanged for visitation to reduce the opportunities for violence, especially during the volatile period when a battered woman leaves her abuser. The center reflected the DAIP staff's recognition that children are both victims of and objects in struggles of power and control that do not end when their parents separate. Courts or child protective services usually refer families to the center, which is located at the YWCA in a central location. Four part-time workers and two coordinators staff the center. The center's successes include the many ways it promotes safety, its offering of informal parenting education, its promotion of better understanding of domestic violence among other Duluth agencies, and its provision of community police training. However, the work is hampered by different agencies' contradictory framing of children's interests and battered women's rights. Other issues relate to patriarchal understandings of protection and to the direct and indirect ways the center becomes involved in the power struggles over child custody and access. The center's work has exposed the urgent need to make the court system and the agencies that work with children in violent families better able to address the reality of violence in these families. Interventions must rest on careful understandings of the dynamics of power in violent families, because the development of family forms based on equality and care rather than power and control will best serve children's interests. Note and 24 references