by Shenna Morris & Casey Keene of the National Resource Center on Domestic Violence
This TAQ is excerpted from the recently published chapter, “Following the Lead of Child Survivors of Domestic Violence Towards Peace, Equity, and Wholeness,” in The Future of Youth Violence Prevention: A mixtape for practice, policy, and research from Rutgers University Press, edited by Paul Boxer & Raphael Travis Jr. (December 2024), available for purchase at: http://youthviolence.rutgers.edu/
Survivors of violence are the experts in their lived experiences. They are well-positioned to offer insights about the dynamics and impacts of the abuse they experienced, as well as important reflections on key factors that either helped to mitigate or compound the harm. The movement to end domestic violence was born from adult survivors with shared experiences who worked together to identify critical pathways to healing, safety, and justice. Children exposed to domestic violence share the experience of having lived in a home with a person who used various abusive tactics to exert power and control over their primary caregiver. They come to know the ways in which a person can create and maintain a household environment of tension and fear; and they learn various protective strategies that support survival, build strength, and foster resilience. They have firsthand knowledge of how communities, institutions, and systems can alleviate, complicate, or compound trauma. The experience of domestic violence in childhood shapes a person’s understanding of the world and informs their choices going forward. This wisdom must guide our approach to addressing and preventing violence in the lives of children.
The Adult Children Exposed to Domestic Violence (ACE-DV) Leadership Forum, a project of the National Resource Center on Domestic Violence, was established in 2014 to amplify the voices and experiences of ACE-DV to enhance efforts to end domestic violence. This project, led by advocates in the movement to end gender-based violence who identify as having experienced domestic violence in childhood, strives to build a movement that includes the perspectives and priorities of children exposed to domestic violence in the provision of services, the development of policy, the direction of research, and the general approach to effectively address and prevent domestic violence. The project advances its goals through training, technical assistance, resource development, and policy advocacy to create pathways to healing and justice, and build the capacity of those who support children and families. These activities are in service to the project’s larger purpose: To Center Humanity as Healing.
The ACE-DV Leadership Forum is grounded in and guided by 6 core beliefs, carefully crafted by ACE-DV members, reflecting the shared perspectives that emerged from their common experiences. Each offers unique opportunities for best practice that is centered on the lived experiences and expertise of survivors.
1. Children exposed to domestic violence can heal and thrive.
A paradigm shift in which we amplify strengths, foster hope, and expect resilience can have a transformative effect on the well-being and potential growth of those who have experienced adversity. Experiences of trauma are complex, and result in both losses and gains, but must always be approached through their potential for healing and thriving.
Recommendations:
- Advance conversations that explicitly names the context and impact of racial oppression and centers the lived experiences of communities of color, and that promotes or reinforce survivors’ resilience as an equal part of their healing and journey;
- Explore points of post-traumatic growth with young people who experience harm, including the use of tools to measure strengths, assets, hope, and resilience (Keene, 2017);
- Amplify the cultural assets of young people who experience harm, including extended kin and social networks, faith and spirituality, hope and optimism, and familial role flexibility (Lloyd et al., 2022)
2. Each of us should be allowed and encouraged to name our own experience.
Our prevention efforts must actively promote a cultural shift that allows survivors to bring their experiences into the light without fear or shame. Survivor identity is innately valuable in all spheres, and their stories and the lessons we glean from them are important to creating the future we want to see. Survivors’ lived experiences are critical to advance social change – this is survivor-centered prevention.
Recommendations:
- Shift from framing survivor experiences in one dimensional, deficit ways (the dangerous “single story”*) to multi-layered, complex stories with depth and value for the unique nuances of and intersections in their stories (Ngozi Adichie, 2014);
- Increase knowledge and advocacy capacity to better articulate that survivors are not singularly defined by their experiences of violence, instead we must recognize the multifaceted nature of their identities and experiences, of which violence may not be the most important or meaningful to them; and
- Include survivors with lived experience in the planning of prevention programming, from inception to implementation (Vassell, 2021).
3. There is a difference between loving a person who uses violence and condoning their behavior.
People who choose to abuse are human, and our prevention efforts must recognize and embrace the full humanity of those who cause harm. Individuals may both experience and/or cause harm across their lifespans, in different relationships or contexts. Centering the humanity of those who cause harm sees them in the context of their whole lives – past and present. It is a practice that allows people to live in authentic relationships, embracing discomfort, imperfection, and humility. Embracing humanity means rejecting a culture of individualism and disconnection that is a breeding ground for violence and oppression, and nurturing connection, interdependence, and wholeness.
Recommendations:
- Find ways to support survivors in each phase of their healing and journey in navigating the relationship to those who have caused them harm;
- Promote “safer” strategies with those for whom “safety” is not possible, especially those who remain in relationship with those who cause harm (Davies, 2019);
- Acknowledge and explore the humanity of those who cause harm in conversations with survivors; and
- Reinforce narratives that hold the truths that 1) each of us may cause harm, 2) each of us is deserving of love, and 3) we are all more than the harm we have caused.
4. Violence is learned and reinforced by societal norms, yet accountability and commitment to change can create a new path.
By shifting to approaches which seek to heal and restore, opportunities arise where individuals and communities are thriving rather than simply surviving. Transformative justice approaches focus on understanding and addressing the conditions that allowed harm to occur in the first place (Chow Reeve, 2020). These conditions stem from a variety of factors at all levels of the social environment – society, community, relationship, and individual – that increase the risk of domestic violence occurring (CDC, 2021). Identifying and nurturing protective factors at each level helps to create conditions, instead, where people can thrive. Transformative justice approaches are focused on systemic-level, collective change that is the very nature of prevention work. These responses center equity and justice for those who are disproportionately impacted by violence and oppression, creating pathways for access to resources that support well-being. For example, advocating for policies that allow for a thriving wage, clean water, and quality healthcare. In the video What is Transformative Justice? from the Barnard Center for Research on Women (2020), Mia Mingus says that transformative justice, “most importantly, helps to create and cultivate the very things we know help to prevent violence. Things like resilience, safety, healing, connection, all of those things.”
Recommendations:
- Resist narratives that re-enforce negative stereotypes of those who have caused harm, and promote those which see them in the fullness of their humanity, for example, describing a person who has caused harm as a “bad person” verses focusing on the person’s behavior can re-enforce social norms of focusing on the individual instead of the various social factors that contribute to peoples’ use of violence;
- Leverage learnings from holistic and community driven frameworks in violence prevention efforts (CDC, 2022), such as looking across all levels of the Social-Ecological Model to identify and promote protective factors and opportunities for norms change (CDC, 2022);
- Explore, embrace, and infuse transformative justice values and frameworks into primary prevention efforts. For example, implementing community informed and led efforts rather than prioritizing engagement and leadership of systemic interventions.
5. Our survivor parent was faced with limited and complex choices.
Prevention strategies can focus on creating conditions where survivors have safer options. Strategies focused on enhancing the social determinants of health (SDOH) can create more equitable conditions where liberation and freedom from violence is much more possible. These include economic stability, access to quality education and health, healthy and safe neighborhoods, and social and community support (Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion).
For example, economic insecurity is often cited as the primary or most significant barrier to safety for survivors of intimate partner violence (WOW, 2012). Advocacy efforts have often shown that survivors are keenly aware of the needed economic supports that will aid them in remaining safe. Removing economic barriers creates a pathway for living free of violence. If we shift prevention efforts towards community and individual voices being the compass that guides our development of solutions to the challenges they face, we begin to foster a culture that builds trust, values innovation, and that embraces non-homogenous strategies.
Recommendations:
- Value, elevate, and celebrate survivorship and its positive impact on families, communities, organizations, and institutions;
- Center or re-center programmatic goals, directions, and priorities based on the direct input, guidance, and primary leadership of survivors most impacted, including mechanisms for ongoing accountability to survivors; and
- Invest in prevention strategies that are focused on creating or enhancing equity and access to increase options and support agency for those navigating abuse.
6. Our unique experiences bring added value to social change movements and human service sectors.
Individuals who experienced domestic violence in childhood are in your family, your neighborhood, your workplace, and your place of worship. They are in communities leading efforts to create meaningful change. Many are driven to social change work because of their personal experiences with trauma. In our organizations, social service settings, and community organizing work, it is important that we not ask survivors to separate their lived experience from their professional expertise, as they are one and the same. Liberation is only possible when each of us can live into our full humanity.
Recommendations:
- Create trauma-informed workplaces that acknowledge and respond to employee’s experiences of harm and support survivors in bringing their whole selves to their work, if they choose to do so; and
- Value the expertise and contributions of survivors in all spaces, demonstrated tangibly through the provision of, at minimum, thoughtful accommodations, and fair compensation.
Conclusion
When we refresh our beliefs and practices, we call forth the opportunity to create a just society where communities and individuals can live free from violence, grow, and thrive with all that they need and as the best versions of themselves. As survivors of childhood domestic violence, we offer a shared vision of hope and possibility for a peaceful and equitable society:
In this society, punitive responses are not the immediate response, and community does not turn away from what is occurring or pass judgement. This society is one where a family can call upon their community at first sight of changing dynamics, where both partners are embraced, and flaws are used to bring forth their collective strengths. In this society the children are certain that they are safe in their homes, will witness the modeling of respect and regard for humanity through the interactions of their parents and community members, and will know that there is always room for all the unique complexities that make them who they are.
This becomes possible when we work in service of the purpose of the Adult Children Exposed to Domestic Violence (ACE-DV) Leadership Forum: To Center Humanity as Healing.
* Author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie uses the phrase “single stories” to describe the overly simplistic and sometimes false perceptions we form about individuals, groups, or countries. She says, “The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.”
The full chapter is available in The Future of Youth Violence Prevention through Rutgers University Press at: http://youthviolence.rutgers.edu/
