Lundy Bancroft’s research while affiliated with Harvard University and other places
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Moving beyond the narrow clinical perspective sometimes applied to viewing the emotional and developmental risks to battered children, The Batterer as Parent: Addressing the Impact of Domestic Violence on Family Dynamics, Second Edition offers a view that takes into account the complex ways in which a batterer’s abusive and controlling behaviors are woven into the fabric of daily life. This book is a guide for therapists, child protective workers, family and juvenile court personnel, and other human service providers in addressing the complex impact that batterers—specifically, male batterers of a domestic partner when there are children in the household—have on family functioning. In addition to providing an understanding of batterers as parents and family members, the book also supplies clearly delineated approaches to such practice issues as assessing risk to children (including perpetrating incest), parenting issues in child custody and visitation evaluation, and impact on children's therapeutic process and family functioning in child protective practice.
This article describes the work of the Battered Mothers' Testimony Project, a multiyear effort that documented human rights violations against battered women and their children in the Massachusetts family court system. This article (a) presents the Battered Mothers' Testimony Project's participatory human rights methodology as an alternative model for research and activism on violence against women and children in the United States, (b) summarizes the authors' findings and human rights analysis of how the Massachusetts family courts handled custody and visitation in specified cases involving partner and child abuse, and (c) discusses U.S. obligations under international human rights law and the value of a human rights approach to violence against women and children in the United States.
Intimate partner violence and child abuse are recognized both as public health concerns and as violations of human rights, but related government actions and inactions are rarely documented as human rights violations in the United States.
Men who abuse female partners are also highly likely to abuse the children of these women. However, family courts are reported to often ignore risks posed by abusive men in awarding child custody and visitation. Battered women involved in child custody litigation in Massachusetts (n = 39) were interviewed. A recurring pattern of potential human rights violations by the state was documented, corresponding to rights guaranteed in multiple internationally accepted human rights covenants and treaties.
The human rights framework is a powerful tool for demonstrating the need for legal, social, and political reform regarding public health concerns.
The published research on children’s exposure to domestic violence focuses largely on two aspects of their experience: the trauma of witnessing physical assaults against their mother, and the tension produced by living with a high level of conflict between their parents. As important as these factors are, they reflect only one aspect of many complex problems that typically pervade the children’s daily lives. The bulk of these difficulties have their roots in the fact that the children are living with a batterer present in their home. The parenting characteristics commonly observed in batterers have implications for the children’s emotional and physical well-being, their relationships with their mothers and siblings, and the development of their belief systems. All of these issues need to be examined in making determinations regarding custody and visitation in cases involving histories of domestic violence.
The mounting social and professional awareness of the negative effects on children of exposure to the behavior of batterers has drawn attention to the need for effective tools for assessing risk to children from batterers as parents or guardians (e.g. Williams, Boggess, & Carter, 2001). Such tools are particularly needed by child protective personnel, custody evaluators, and courts with jurisdiction over child custody and child welfare cases, but are also important to the work of many therapists, battered women's service providers, batterer intervention programs, and programs for children exposed to batterers. The model we are proposing here is particularly suited to assessment of post-separation risk to children from batterers. We commonly encounter the mistaken assumption among professionals, including judges and custody evaluators, that children are in less danger from a batterer once a couple is no longer living together, when the reality is often the opposite (Bancroft & Silverman, 2002; Langford, Isaac, & Kabat, 1999). Assessment of risk to children post-separation should be carried out with as much caution as would be called for in intervening with an intact family. While couples are still living together, a batterer's danger to children can be mediated to some extent by their mother's ability to protect them. Assessment of her ability to protect requires the examination of such elements as the level of physical dangerousness of the batterer, the mother's strengths as a parent, the ability of her community to provide the necessary legal and supportive resources, and the mother's capacity to seek and use help for herself and her children (Whitney & Davis, 1999), while also avoiding the mistake of characterizing a battered woman as "failing to protect" her children (Magen, 1999). Therefore, the use of our model in assessing risk in intact families needs to be combined with careful and compassionate assessment of the mother's protective capabilities and her willingness to work collaboratively with child protective personnel. Before describing the elements of a proper assessment, we will review the most serious physical, sexual, and psychological risks that batterers can pose to children, and describe the elements necessary for children's emotional recovery from exposure to battering behavior. Many of the errors currently made by professionals in assessing children's safety with a batterer are a product of the lack of clear delineation of what the central risks are, including the important possibility that a batterer's conduct with children may interfere with their emotional healing from traumatic experiences they have already undergone.
This article is the second of a 4-part series designed to promote readers' understanding of the impact of domestic violence in child custody and parenting time cases. It has been adapted from The Batterer as a Parent in Synergy, 6(1), p 6-8 (Newsletter of the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges, Winter 2002) and the book The Batterer as Parent by Lundy Bancroft and Jay Silverman (Sage Publications, 2002). The fi rst article in this series described how commonly-observed attitudes and behaviors of domestic violence perpetrators can affect victims and the litigation process. This article describes the parenting of men who batter the mother of their children. Subsequent articles will address: • Assessing the risk that exposure to a domestic violence perpetrator presents to children. • Domestic violence and the Michigan best interest factors. Research on children's exposure to domestic violence has tended to focus primarily on two aspects of their experience: the trauma of witnessing physical assaults against their mother, and the tension produced by living with a high level of confl ict between their parents. 1 However, these are just two elements of a much deeper problem pervading these children's daily lives, which is that they are living with a batterer. The parenting of men who batter exposes children to multiple potential sources of emotional and physical injury, most of which have not been recognized widely. This article looks at the characteristics of men who batter and identifi es ways in which these characteristics infl uence their ability to parent appropriately. Additionally, the article will address the implications of such parenting for custody and parenting time determinations.
Citations (4)
... Children's experiences of being raised in homes where their mother is exposed to IPV are shaped by the impact of IPV experience on how they are parented (Bancroft et al., 2012;Greene et al., 2020). Experience of IPV may lower mothers' confidence and patience as parents, and result in difficulties with disciplining children without using harsh practices. ...
... Multiple tools exist for assessing lethal danger in IPV situations, yet many do not include risk of lethal danger to children living in the household as a central element. 37,53 Knowledge of the range of risks posed to children exposed to IPV in the home might be useful in court determinations regarding child custody, social services assessments, and the development of a safety plan with adult victims and their children, 53,54 and in turn might prevent IPV-related firearm homicides of children. ...
... Post-separation abuse is perpetrated at the individual level but facilitated and perpetuated by factors at the family (power differentials between intimate partners, stigma), community (legal system responses) and societal level (gender and patriarchal norms). IPV, including post-separation abuse, must be understood through the assaults on the personhood, dignity, autonomy, liberty and self-worth of the human being, and not just in terms of the physical bruises it leaves (Scheper-Hughes & Bourgois, 2004;Silverman et al., 2004; Stark & Hester, 2019). Following Walker and Avant's (2019) method of concept analysis, we outline the significance of the concept, followed by identifying its uses, the defining attributes, identifying a model and contrary case, antecedents and consequences, and empirical referents. ...
... While FRGs assert that the family court unfairly disadvantages fathers over mothers, current scholarship maintains that women/mothers are more likely to be confronted with an adverse experience. For example, the family court system upholds patriarchal values of care in which mothers are held to a higher standard of parenting than fathers in which they are expected to be "friendly parents" that assists in the maintenance of a relationship between a father and their child(ren) (Jaffe et al., 2003;Rivera et al., 2012, p. 237;Slote et al., 2005;Zorza, 2007). This assumption places the onus on women to concede to both the court and men/fathers to maintain a presentation as a competent woman/mother. ...