Audrey Mullender: Children Living With Domestic Violence

“Social work has had a lot of things wrong in the past, and in a sense it's not surprising if you look at the conceptual, the theoretical heritage in social work if you look at psychoanalytic theories, if you look at behavioural theories, if you look at certainly systemic theories of family dysfunction that have been mentioned as well. If you look at what heritage we had, it's not surprising we got it horribly wrong.”

“Can we change? Can we take on that challenge? Can we have a new understanding?”

From 1996:

"The issue of children living with domestic violence (defined as men’s abuse of women in intimate relationships) is only now coming to be recognised in the UK as a matter of concern in its own right, as distinct from child abuse. Because widespread concern is so new, there is a risk of unsophisticated or colonizing responses. What is actually needed is constructive work with children and their mothers (as the non-abusing parent), in ways designed to enhance safety whilst assisting women to regain control of their lives.

In this presentation I will discuss the impact on children of the abuse of their mothers, and links between the abuse of women and abuse of children. I will give examples of child- centred responses to the aftermath of living with violence offered by some North American childcare agencies and will describe the twenty year tradition in Britain of work with children by Women’s Aid. I will argue that other agencies urgently need to learn from Women’s Aid, and should help bridge the divide in this country between women’s services and children’s services.

Audrey Mullender is Professor in Social Work at the University of Warwick. Among her many publications are Children Living with Domestic Violence: Putting Men’s Abuse of Women on the Child Care Agenda (London: Whiting & Birch, 1994, co-edited with Rebecca Morley) and Rethinking Domestic Violence: The Social Work and Probation Response (London: Routledge, 1996)."

Audrey Mullender remained Professor of Social Work at the University of Warwick until 2004, when she became Principal of Ruskin College, Oxford, a post she held until 2013. She has published twenty books, as well as various other publications in her field.