Children's Needs – Parenting Capacity - Digital Education Resource ...

46 Children’s Needs – Parenting CapacityThe level remains fairly constant when children are the subject of care proceedings.Hunt et al. (1999) found that domestic violence was an issue in 51% of cases comingto court. Finally, an analysis of serious case reviews found evidence of past or presentdomestic violence in over half (53%) of the living circumstances of the children(Brandon et al. 2009).Domestic violence and the type of child abuseThere is considerable evidence that ‘adult partners who are violent toward each otherare also at increased risk of abusing their children’ (Moffitt and Caspi 1998, p.137;Farmer and Pollock 1998; Hester et al 2007). Research suggests that men’s severeinterpersonal violence seldom occurs in isolation; women’s violence to their partner,partner-child aggression, and mother-child aggression are also common (McDonaldet al. 2009). Cavanagh and colleagues’ (2007) study of 26 cases of fatal child abuseperpetrated by fathers found that in three-quarters of cases the man had also beenviolent towards his partner (the child’s mother). The risk of child abuse is shown tobe between three and nine times greater in homes where the adult partners hit eachother (Moffitt and Caspi 1998). However, there is little agreement on the rates ofoverlap between domestic violence and child physical abuse: rates fluctuate betweenstudies and range from 45% to 70% (Holt et al. 2008).Additional evidence for a link between domestic violence and physical child abusecomes from feminist research. An American study of ‘wife beating’, using a voluntarysample of 1,000 women, found ‘wife beaters abused children in 70% of familieswhere children were present’ (Bowker et al. 1988, p.162). In contrast, the NationalChildren’s Home (NCH) Action for Children (1994) study of children living withdomestic violence found only 27% of children were reported by their mother as ‘hitor abused’. The large disparity between these findings may be deceptive. The authorssuggest the figure of 27% may under-represent the prevalence of physical childabuse because mothers are reluctant to disclose the abuse or are ignorant of it. Inanother study, less than half the mothers (44%) reported that their violent partners‘didn’t touch the children’ (NCH Action for Children 1994, p.31). Evidence is alsoemerging that identifies a link between mothers who have experienced domesticviolence and mother-child maltreatment. In a sample of 1,236 families enteringthe US child welfare system, almost half (44%) of the mothers who were reportedfor alleged child maltreatment had experienced physical violence by their partner(Casanueva et al. 2009).There is also some evidence to suggest a raised incidence of co-occurrence ofdomestic violence and child sexual abuse, although rates vary due to sampling. Forexample, in a community sample of 54 mothers who had experienced domesticviolence, 4% reported the sexual abuse of their child by their ex-partners (Smithet al. 1997). Humphreys and Stanley’s (2006) analysis of case files where there wasevidence of child sexual abuse, found the presence of domestic violence in over halfthe cases. Fathers and father figures were more likely to sexually abuse their child